The people never leave their little valley because they do not believe there is anything in the outside world that could be better than their own little town. The houses are all quite similar, as are the gardens, the residents, and even their children.
The interests of the inhabitants are similar also. They are concerned with the growing and cooking of cabbages and looking at their pocket-watches when the town clock gongs to be sure they have the right time and that all is right with the world. The most respected man in the village is the keeper of the belfry. It is he who makes sure that everything stays the same. He is not just the keeper of the clock; he is the guardian of the town's security and serenity.
One day a small foreign looking man entered the village and all eyes were upon him because the people were somewhat fearful of anything or anyone from the outside. Although he had a huge mustache which concealed much of his face, it was apparent that he was wearing a huge grin. He had a hooked nose, a dark complexion, and he wore papillotes in his hair. (Papillotes are the little frilly paper shirts that are sometimes used to decorate the ends of lamb chops.)
He walked with strange dancing steps that seemed to have no particular rhythm. He seemed incapable of keeping proper time and, what is worse, he seemed not to worry at all about his deficiency. He carried with him a huge fiddle and a brass hat. Upon arriving at the town clock he seized belfry-man by the nose, clapped the brass hat on his head, and began to beat him soundly with the fiddle. What the belfry-man had done to become the recipient of such a beating is not known.
The clock on that day struck thirteen and it upset the whole order of the town. The foreigner then proceeded to sit on the belfry-man while holding the bell rope in his teeth, which caused no end of clamor, and he proceeded to play out-of-tune irish songs on his fiddle. Poe ends the story with an appeal for all good citizens to rush to the town of Vondervotteimitiss and help expel the foreigner from the belfry.
Most who have analyzed this story see little more in it than a fanciful fable. Some claim there is an outside chance that Poe was poking fun at Martin Van Buren's catering to the irish in order to win their votes. Though it may sound bizarre, I am inclined to say that, if the story were written today, I might attach great meaning to it.
The little village is amazingly similar to today's suburban communities populated by yuppies who have covenants regarding how long you can leave your garage door open, what color you can paint your house, when you can put your garbage out, and how many trees must be planted in your front yard. All of this is done in the name of 'protecting property values' but is it not also a way of insuring sameness, a way of keeping those who are not like us out, a way of protecting our system of beliefs from new ideas. Is that not why we have so many individual school districts? So that knowledge might not over-ride the local superstitions.
Even the elite in the cities have some of the qualities of these dutch villagers. Security guards in office complexes and doormen in apartment buildings are there to make sure that wrong element does not get in. Our compulsion with time is similar to theirs also. The beating of the human heart is so similar to the ticking of a clock that one might say that the clock is the heart of any city. The buses and subways run by its dictates. Businesses open and close in accord with its movement. The movie theaters begin their shows at its command and how long you can leave your car parked without plugging the meter depends upon how many times the clock has ticked.
The clock is the ultimate symbol of order and we are a very orderly society, perhaps even more orderly than Poe's little village.
On September 11, 2001 the clock struck thirteen. All of our order and our sense of security was rendered asunder by foreigners that had invaded our orderly society for reasons that we did not understand; just as the townspeople did not understand why the foreigner in their midst attacked the belfry-man. How many times have you heard, 'Nothing will ever be the same since that day'? Our sense of order was totally disrupted.
We spend more than any other nation on defense and missiles. We have the world's largest army. Just as the dutch town was considered the finest of all places in the world, we are considered the world's most advanced nation. But all of a sudden we found that life was no longer predictable and we were not as secure as we thought we were. We began to fear outsiders and be suspicious of them.
Many in our society would like us to become as isolationist as the little town Poe presents to us. Many seek to dictate what values are American values. They would exclude all religions and cultures that they deem Un-American. There are those who proclaim that America should be strictly a Christian nation, that no languages other than English should be spoken, and that all foreigners should be excluded. They seem to overlook the fact that similar restrictions would have prevented many of their own ancestors from entering the country.
We rightfully morn the loss of the innocent lives taken in the attack, but the primary concern of many Americans is not the children who must live their lives without one or both parents, the spouses who have lost the loves of their lives, the parents that have lost children, or the friends who will no longer see the smiling faces they held dear. The main concern of many Americans seems to be that the national phallic symbol has been destroyed.
Many desire to exclude foreigners, not only from our society, but from having any say-so in world affairs. As we live post-September 11th life there is a tendency to reassert our role as number one in the world's pecking order and it may very well be that our disregard for the input of the rest of the world may have been a contributing factor in what happened. If we seek to impose our own variety of order upon the rest of the world by force are we any different from the Nazis or Stalin?
Rather, I would suggest that we restore order through mutual respect for other cultures and use war only as a last resort or in self-defense. We teach our children that bullying is unacceptable but have we learned that lesson ourselves? Certain Islamic sects consider infidels as less than human and have no scruples about killing Americans or others who do not believe as they believe. Do we enhance ourselves by adopting the same philosophy and killing them? The people of Vondervotteimittiss were thrown into a complete state of chaos by the unexpected.
Let us be wiser than they were and act with good judgement. Poe's story may be in many ways more symbolic today than it was at the time in which it was written.
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POE DIRECTORY |
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