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Amazing what people write sometimes
Posted on 2007.03.13 at 10:01
So I found out through Harvard magazine that two of my friends from freshman year, Helen Hill and Paul Gailunas, who got married a couple of years after graduation, were shot in their home in New Orleans in January.
Paul survived, together with their son, Francis Pop. Helen didn't.
They had just moved back after evacuating before Katrina. When I first met them, they were incredibly earthy-crunchy, but it was so unselfconscious, so genuine, and so pure that it was a marked contrast to those who just picked up vegetarianism and all that just because it was cool or (more importantly at Harvard) noticeable. There are evangelical Christians who are absolutely for real and beyond the mainstream commercialism of religion and into a place that commercialism and religious fashion cannot touch . Paul and Helen were the same, only in a vegan food community outreach touchy-feely way. They were bona fide (to quote Oh Brother Where Art Thou?).
Paul ran a health clinic in New Orleans, Helen made independent films. Both of them were still incredibly nice - I mean really, really nice. How do you get through so much living and not get even a shred of cynicism? I always called her Saint Helen of Wigglesworth because there wasn't a negative bone in her body, it was otherworldly considering all the angst of freshman year. But another 15 years of life? In their cases, it made sense.
The announcement in Harvard magazine was bear bones, so I went on Google to find out more about what had happened and maybe get Paul's contact information. There's a lot of stuff up on various discussion boards and everyone is shocked and saddened, but there's something more: anger. Not at what happened, but about something that someone completely unconnected to the events wrote about it sometime after.
Yep, there's actually a mention of the incident in (get this) ultra-conservative National Review that was so breathtakingly mean-spirited and uppity that I had to reprint it here (John Derbyshire is writing a little road-trip report about how he went to N.O. to collect a prize (which he manages to shoehorn in) and was incredibly disappointed at how few bookstores there were. But he manages to say this, too:
"The most recent murder, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was of a young wife in the pleasant middle-class Fauborg Marigny district. The woman and her husband had a two-year-old son. Police found the husband, shot three times but still alive, clutching the infant near the front door of the house. The wife had been killed by a gunshot wound to the neck. The husband has survived.
These were educated white liberals — they had been dormitory mates at Harvard — who had returned to New Orleans after Katrina to do good works in “the community.” The husband, a doctor, ran a clinic that turned no one away. The wife... well, let the Times-Picayune tell it:
What happened to this young couple was unspeakably horrible, and there is of course no excusing such barbarism. It is hard, though, not to shake your head at the couple’s unworldly naivety. What kind of people did they think they were going to encounter when they got down and dirty with “the community”? The Times-Picayune story quoted a neighbor of the couple saying this: “They would never do it, but they should have answered the door with a gun.” Hard to disagree with that — either part of it."
Headline: OMG: robber kills naive educated white liberals in middle class neighborhood. They had it coming.
If you want to read the entire article go here.
What precisely is he trying to say here? Rhetorical question:its pretty clear what he's trying to say. But since it wasn't nice, and he was making a contemptuous and political statement about the non-political deaths of non-political people he knew nothing about personally or professionally, why did he feel compelled to write this at all?
It's terribly unfortunate that he didn't enjoy his stay in New Orleans. But it's revolting that his scribblings end up part of the epitaph for Helen Hill's murder.
Paul survived, together with their son, Francis Pop. Helen didn't.
They had just moved back after evacuating before Katrina. When I first met them, they were incredibly earthy-crunchy, but it was so unselfconscious, so genuine, and so pure that it was a marked contrast to those who just picked up vegetarianism and all that just because it was cool or (more importantly at Harvard) noticeable. There are evangelical Christians who are absolutely for real and beyond the mainstream commercialism of religion and into a place that commercialism and religious fashion cannot touch . Paul and Helen were the same, only in a vegan food community outreach touchy-feely way. They were bona fide (to quote Oh Brother Where Art Thou?).
Paul ran a health clinic in New Orleans, Helen made independent films. Both of them were still incredibly nice - I mean really, really nice. How do you get through so much living and not get even a shred of cynicism? I always called her Saint Helen of Wigglesworth because there wasn't a negative bone in her body, it was otherworldly considering all the angst of freshman year. But another 15 years of life? In their cases, it made sense.
The announcement in Harvard magazine was bear bones, so I went on Google to find out more about what had happened and maybe get Paul's contact information. There's a lot of stuff up on various discussion boards and everyone is shocked and saddened, but there's something more: anger. Not at what happened, but about something that someone completely unconnected to the events wrote about it sometime after.
Yep, there's actually a mention of the incident in (get this) ultra-conservative National Review that was so breathtakingly mean-spirited and uppity that I had to reprint it here (John Derbyshire is writing a little road-trip report about how he went to N.O. to collect a prize (which he manages to shoehorn in) and was incredibly disappointed at how few bookstores there were. But he manages to say this, too:
"The most recent murder, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was of a young wife in the pleasant middle-class Fauborg Marigny district. The woman and her husband had a two-year-old son. Police found the husband, shot three times but still alive, clutching the infant near the front door of the house. The wife had been killed by a gunshot wound to the neck. The husband has survived.
These were educated white liberals — they had been dormitory mates at Harvard — who had returned to New Orleans after Katrina to do good works in “the community.” The husband, a doctor, ran a clinic that turned no one away. The wife... well, let the Times-Picayune tell it:
The couple also ran a feed-the-homeless enterprise named Food Not Bombs. You get the picture. These were not Republican voters.Hill wore thrift store garb and made experimental films, a craft she sought to share with other women, holding “film-making bees” in which they made rudimentary films... Gailiunas [i.e. the husband] sang songs about love and leftist politics in a solo act called Ukelele Against the Machine...
What happened to this young couple was unspeakably horrible, and there is of course no excusing such barbarism. It is hard, though, not to shake your head at the couple’s unworldly naivety. What kind of people did they think they were going to encounter when they got down and dirty with “the community”? The Times-Picayune story quoted a neighbor of the couple saying this: “They would never do it, but they should have answered the door with a gun.” Hard to disagree with that — either part of it."
Headline: OMG: robber kills naive educated white liberals in middle class neighborhood. They had it coming.
If you want to read the entire article go here.
What precisely is he trying to say here? Rhetorical question:its pretty clear what he's trying to say. But since it wasn't nice, and he was making a contemptuous and political statement about the non-political deaths of non-political people he knew nothing about personally or professionally, why did he feel compelled to write this at all?
It's terribly unfortunate that he didn't enjoy his stay in New Orleans. But it's revolting that his scribblings end up part of the epitaph for Helen Hill's murder.
