'Zine Banal Nightmare

That last LPJ story was TRUE!!!!!

A little bit of Google-sleuthing has revealed that two kids did in fact die when their boat went over Niagara Falls in June 1913.

Niagara Falls, NY Two Youths Drown, June 1913

NIAGARA RAPIDS WHIRL TWO BOYS TO THEIR DEATHS.

LADS ARE AT MERCY OF RUSHING WATERS WHEN ROPE, ATTACHED TO SCOW, BREAKS NEAR FALLS.

YOUNGSTERS SHAKE HANDS WHEN FATE IS REALIZED.

FRANTIC CROWDS, HELPLESS ON BANK, WEEP AND PRAY AS BODIES DISAPPEAR IN WHIRLPOOL.

Niagara Falls, N.Y., June 22. — DONALD ROSCOE, 10 years old, and HUBERT MOORE, 9 years old, both of this city, went to their death in a small boat late this afternoon in the Whirlpool Rapids, while hundreds of men watched helpless from the shore.

The boys were playing in a flat bottom scow, half a mile above the rapids, when the rope holding the boat broke and they were carried out into the stream and down the river.

Up to the time the boat reached midstream it made little progress. After it passed the bridges the current carried it rapidly toward the rapids.

The bridgemen did not see the boat until it was close at hand. Then they called fire headquarters and two companies of firemen were sent to save the lads if possible. Hundreds swarmed to the river banks in a vain effort at rescue.

The boys, realizing their fate, stood up as the boat neared the edge of the roaring whirlpool and shook hands in farewell. A second later they were engulfed by a freak wave in the rapids. The boat shot out of sight. One of the boys was seen for a moment struggling in the rushing waters and then disappeared.

Never at any time was there a chance to save the boys. The firemen could do nothing. There were scores of passengers in the cars along the Gorge route and they watched the hopeless struggle of the boys. The hundreds who had gathered at the waters edge could offer no aid. Men became hysterical in their powerlessness and women passengers on the cars wept and prayed in distress at the plight of the lads, who were standing in the boat calling for help.

As the boat neared Swift drift, the first breaking of the river from the calm upper reaches to the rapids, it began to rock. The boys sat down to keep from tumbling into the stream.

Then, caught in Swift drift, the boat went racing under the cantilever bridge. Whatever hope the boys had of rescue was lost. Yes, they knew the fight was now all their own, as no one could help them.

As they passed under the bridge they ceased their cries for help. The two mates turned toward each other and calmly shook hands, then with the boat in the tumbling waters thew themselves on the seats of the scow and clung with all their strength.

The craft held to its course until it encountered a huge wave which crested at a height of forty feet. It seemed to dive into the very middle of the wave and when it came again to view it was bottom up. A second or two later, a little head was seen bobbing on a wave below for a moment and then was seen no more.

The bodies of the boys are in the whirlpool and may never be recovered. There was a quantity of driftwood whirling there this afternoon and the bodies may be beaten to a pulp, as were those of Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge Stanton of Toronto and Burrell Heacock of Cleveland, the victims of the ice bridge tragedy of Feb. 4, 1912, which were battered by cakes of ice.

The point where the boat broke loose is about a half mile from the beginning of the rapids. If drifted down in about twelve minutes, passing under the lower steel arch bridge at 4:55 o’clock.

The ROSCOE boy’s mother is very ill and was not told of the tragedy. The boys were member of well-known families of Niagara Falls. They had been chums for several years. Just before dark tonight watchers on the bank saw the bodies in the rapids, but could not reach them.

“Two Children Carried Over Niagara Falls.” Le Petit Journal, July 6, 1913.

Rough translation of the article from the next page:

“In an alarming scene, two children, ages nine and ten, died horribly when they disappeared, these past few days, over Niagara Falls.  The two imprudent youngsters were in a boat moored along the bank a few hundred meters upstream of the rapids which precede the falls.  Suddenly, the mooring rope broke and the boat floated towards the rapids.  A crowd of tourists watched the accident helplessly, unable to come to assistance of the two children.  Within the space of a few minutes, the boat, tossed like a wisp of straw, came to the falls and disappeared into the abyss.”

Not to impugn the journalistic integrity of the staff of Le Petit Journal, but the incident is absent from this Wikipedia list of objects that have gone over Niagara Falls, and their lack of specifics (names, a date beyond “these past few days”) arouses my skeptical inclinations.  Then again, it is Wikipedia, after all.  All I’m saying is, SOMEONE needs to get their story straight.

[EDIT: This is apparently a true story.]

“The Germans Burn Their Dead in the Blast Furnaces.” Le Petit Journal, April 16, 1916.

This might be a reference to one of the more bizarre propaganda stories of the First World War - Kadaververwertungsanstalt, “Corpse-Rendering Factories”.  Fats being scarce in the Central Powers due to a British naval blockade, it was rumored the Germans were operating factories behind the front lines to burn their war dead down for the fat to make candles, nitroglycerine, etc.  The source was a German newspaper story, wherein the Allies (perhaps deliberately) mistranslated the German word Kadaver - which refers to non-human corpses in all cases except medical dissection.

The accusations were false, though they naturally enjoyed some popularity in the Allied countries.  Nevertheless, the Nazi regime which was to take power in Germany several years later would turn a similar idea against its civillian population.

“Human Sacrifice in Louisiana.” Le Petit Journal, April 21, 1912.

“[The Kaiser asks] Is it my turn?…” Le Petit Journal, January 23, 1916.

“Winter Tragedy: The End of the Tramp.” Le Petit Journal, January 25, 1914.

Did Anne Frank go to hell?

After we finished the last pages of The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school, Mrs. Kelly informed the class that Anne and her sister died of typhus in a prison camp, thanks to Adolf Hitler. I was horrified, not just because of the prison camp but because everything I’d be taught as a girl told me that because Anne was Jewish, because she had not accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior, she and the rest of her family were burning in hell. I remember staring at the black-and-white picture of Anne on the cover of my paperback, privately begging God to let her out of the lake of fire. For weeks, I prayed diligently for her departed soul, even though I’d heard that only Catholics did such a thing. I was a pretty intense kid, actually…

In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represents thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony at the hands of an angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it is terrible news.

An old girlfriend of mine once related a story of an Ani Difranco concert she went to.  Ani told an anecdote about going to a music festival or something when she overheard a curious Christian act singing a song entitled “Did Anne Frank Find Jesus Before She Died?”  The anecdote led into a little improv ditty, something along the lines of “Did Jesus Find Buddha Before He Died?”

Anyway. 

It’s cute to see the little theological dances in the comments section by all the well-meaning Christians attempting to avoid the very obvious answer, which is to say, “Yes, Anne Frank, being a Jew, would be in Hell in accordance with biblical doctrine.”  And not only would Anne Frank be in Hell, but a majority of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust (excluding only perhaps ethnic Jewish converts to Christianity) would be in Hell, suffering for an eternity alongside those that tormented them in life.  The Bible contains many contradictions, but it is pretty clear on this point.

Of course, this conclusion is abhorrent even to those who accept the first principle (I personally think that this is great news, as it would seem to prove that not even religion is strong enough to erase our inborn tendencies towards compassion).  It isn’t terribly surprising that a Christian’s first reaction to this cognitive dissonance isn’t to say “You’re right, the Bible is a lie!”  I merely submit that, if one is interested in a thoroughly honest evaluation of the consistency of one’s own worldview, then the only answer available to the Bible-believing Christian is that Anne Frank is in Hell.

That isn’t to say you can’t be religious, or even a Christian, and believe Anne Frank might have been spared.  I would wager, although I certainly can’t say this authoritatively, that most of the theistic people I know would say Anne Frank is NOT in Hell, that the Bible is not to be taken literally, that perhaps God’s true measure of Heaven-worthiness would be the depth of her courage, her unflaggingly optimistic view of humanity, the beauty of her testimony to the horrors of war and tyranny.  And hey, that’s fine by me - I’m generally in favor of any worldview that values human virtue over scriptural minutia - but it’s not biblical, and if that’s something you value, it’s a contradiction you will have to work out.

I doubt I need to say this, but as for myself, as an atheist, I have no cognitive dissonance on this point.  Anne Frank is not in Hell.  She is not in Heaven, she has not attained Nirvana, and she has not been reincarnated (some people think this is a “bleak” outlook.  I say, any worldview that would send a scared little girl who died alone in a concentration camp to an eternity of suffering and unanswered pleas for help for what amounts to a theological technicality has absolutely zero fucking business calling any dissenting opinion “bleak”).  Anne Frank died in March 1945, and her body was buried in a mass grave at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, ending forever the existence of one more witness to the most calculated genocide in human history.  A human life was extinguished for a whole host of extremely shitty reasons, and we are right to mourn its loss.

I feel like there are very important parts missing from this story.

A pretty damning testimony to the inhumanity of DADT in particular and the Army in general.

A Sarajevo Rose marking where an individual was killed by a mortar explosion.