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We Need To Focus On This Week's Deaths In Iraq - They Belong To Us
Any Sense of Proportion About Fear and Death Has Been Lost As This Age of Individualism Demands Me-Me Mourning
It's been a good week for death. In Iraq, 200 people were blown to bits in what witnesses called "a swimming pool of blood" with "pieces of flesh all over the place". Remember that the dead are only part of the story: add to each of the war's hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses all those burned and crippled survivors, far beyond Iraqi medical facilities' ability to cope, breadwinners and babies lost. Few families are untouched by the sheer scale of slaughter.
But it is hard for news media to find new ways to refresh repeat tales of daily carnage. The pictures and the thoughts tell the same dismal story day after day, raising the same terrible questions: what have we done, what have we unleashed, how can it end? This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war. But because news needs to be new, Iraqi deaths struggle to stay on front pages.
Nor does the war find a place in the nation's top concerns: people worry about terror attacks more than the war, this despite the distrust it has engendered that is now driving our three-times prime minister from power. Perhaps the public compassion fatigue is because these deaths are caused mainly by extremist Iraqi sects killing other Iraqis, and many fewer are at the hands of our soldiers. For whatever reason, neither the horror nor the national shame quite comes home to roost. Yet on Wednesday morning more ordinary Iraqis died than all the British troops killed so far.
There is a growing disproportion and incoherence in public attitudes to death, with a curious blend of indifference about deaths that should concern us, prurience about deaths that don't, and a squeamishness and fear verging on denial about mundane dying.
It was a good week for death too on the Virginia Tech campus. Although it was hardly less unpredictable "news" than bombs in Baghdad, there was more press relish for this story. (College kids like ours?) On day one and day two, the BBC's 10 O'Clock News, like the press, gave it vacuous acres of coverage from a flotilla of senior correspondents. But these 32 dead students follow in a cortege of identical tragedies: as soon as we knew this was just another deranged loner, what more was there to think? It happened in Dunblane, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Tasmania and elsewhere, routine school misfit revenges.
The collective insanity of Americans about guns is an oft-reprised wonderment to Europeans. But there is nothing new about the National Rifle Association: even Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth had to prove he was a regular guy by talking affectionately about his guns. Lionel Shriver made the best point: why encourage copycats by giving these narcissistic fantasists the publicity they kill for? This boy's glory video means his name liveth for evermore - and a good deal longer than the roll call of fallen US soldiers.
Attitudes to death and mourning grow odder the rarer dying young becomes. There is less sense of proportion about the risks of dying, or about the inevitability of death itself, even when people die in old age. The temptation is to regard every death as avoidable, deny any accident is ever accidental, always find someone to blame, and hunt down that doctor in charge. (A third of all NHS maternity cost now is for insurance.) At the same time, the public dare not face up to the reality of the prolonged agony modern medicine imposes on the dying. Until it happens to them or their parents, people fondly imagine morphine or palliative care will always ease the end. That fallacy means many will enter the grave via the torture chamber, for failure to demand the legal right to die at a time of our own choosing.
People no longer know how to approach death and its rituals. Abandoning religion doesn't necessarily mean resorting to reason. With no hereafter, body parts are gaining morbid significance in a strange new fetishism. The story of secret biopsies taken from dead Sellafield workers in the 70s and 80s is interesting and potentially sinister for those who live and work there, since the reports were never published. But defying all sense, the focus of the story for relatives and the media has been on the "shocking" discovery that removal of mostly small slices and some whole organs from corpses means that loved ones buried less than whole bodies. Alistair Darling had to announce an inquiry about missing organs 30 years ago, rather than the alarming "strong circumstantial evidence that plutonium ... found its way into the tissues of the local populace".
This sits oddly with the recent appetite for TV forensics dramas featuring pathologists weighing brains in scales and disgorging stomach contents in close-up. Or Six Feet Under's embalming with guts routinely extracted. All this started with the Alder Hey hospital children. It was easy to see how parents' unbearable despair at losing a child could be displaced into rage over the loss of an organ. But that seems to have set a new national attitude towards the sanctity of innards: it should only be a fetish for odd religious sects where lacking complete organs jeopardises entry to heaven. What of the growing number of people who have their loved one's ashes compressed into diamonds to wear for ever?
Fading cellophane bunches of flowers tied to lamp posts are a drive-slower salutary reminder that the roads kill over 3,000 people a year. The clear and present danger of the car should raise as much or more public fear than panic over very rare UK deaths by terrorism. The anxious taste for daily health scares when we have never been healthier or safer is another necro-neurosis. (HRT kills this week, though last week it was reported to save lives.)
Those harmless temporary floral and teddy bear memento moris draw snobbish criticism. Useful park benches with small plaques of remembrance are good memorials to benefit the living. But another breed of permanent memorial is now sprouting up everywhere, not just some 2,000 permanent plaques by roadsides, but slabs and artefacts scarring the slopes of Ben Nevis and other places the deceased ones loved, imposing private griefs on public places. It will not be clear to many in a few years why 28 British holidaymakers blown up in Bali have a large memorial outside the Foreign Office in a national beauty spot facing St James's Park, constructed of 20ft of Portland stone and a 5ft granite globe. Each was a tragic death, but war memorials remember public servants who died for communal national endeavours: this seems oddly disproportionate.
So does pomp and circumstance with a bishop and City of London potentates this week interring the unknown bones of an ancient Roman teenage girl, with memorial slab. If every accidental death has a "never forget me" memorial in a public place, the country will soon be a necropolis.
The real objection is not aesthetic, or distaste for emotional ostentation. It is about a sense of proportion over fear and death. An age of over-individualism is demanding individual recognition for every painful death, me-me mourning regardless of its collective significance. Near-pornographic fascination with the gory details of a meaningless madman's murders in Virginia was just grisly. This week's deaths in Iraq are the ones we should all be contemplating with due solemnity, because they belong to us.
© 2007 The Guardian
16 Comments so far
Show AllBloodshed and destruction, and the psychology behind them, are elements within human nature we try to understand.
When we see the connectedness of certain aspects of the terrible and difficult things going on around us, we might be able to make progress toward a better world.
Many different resources and assets can be useful in trying to move forward in these areas. For ideas on this, the articles below may be helpful:
"Events at home and overseas trouble our souls: New directions provide opportunities"
PopulistAmerica.com
October 13, 2006
http://www.populistamerica.com/events_at_home_and_overseas_trouble_our_souls
- - -
"Unconventional Human Intelligence Support: Navy SEAL's report"
PopulistAmerica.com
January 7, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/unconventional_human_intelligence_support
This is an interesting and thoughful piece. It seems that the expectation of technoogy providing us with instant fixes to every problem has helped to undermine our ability to come to terms with death. While While Ray Kurzweil believes that we (rich white guys)will be able to transcend death via biotechnology, many people seem to believe that the police in Virginia could have prevented the killing that took place if only they had sent out e-mails earlier, or if only they had known a killer who seemed to be satisfied executing two people in their beds whould go on to slaughter 30 more people a few hours later.
The "me-me mourning" serves as a shocking contrast to the anonymity of mass death that is served up each day in Iraq. We create the familiar narratives that have been spawned by school shootings, the brave professor, the talented young sives cut short, the grieving parents, but deaths in Iraq are simply daily body counts, people with no names, families, talents, hopes.
Americans seem to be waking up to the disturbing activites of the Bush-Cheney administration and their associates.
To get through this troubling situation, we might want to reconnect with the roots of our nation's history and get solid perspectives on what we face now.
Ideas to consider about some of these things at:
"Winds of change again blowing across America"
PopulistAmerica.com
April 20, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/winds_of_change_again_blowing_across_america
A primary difference between the tragedy at Virginia Tech and the debacle in Iraq is that one event is the result of a mentally ill man acting out his delusions while the other is a result of a pre-meditated crime by an entire nation and its leadership. As a result of the media frenzy of hokie journalism that focuses on one ad nauseum while being complicit in the much worse other, I see that we are all flying our flags at half staff. I suggest we continue to do so until this criminal administration is removed and our troops brought home.
So long as weapons are celebrated, life will be (perceived as) cheap.
It's a pretty sorry day when the "liberators" are sorry at governance than the "tyrant" they deposaed. Except that they do not now nor have they ever cared about the Iraqi people anymore than they ever have about the American people.
I believe the distinction between the Virginia Tech deaths and the Baghdad deaths is to be found in the phrase "there but for the grace of God go I". Americans can see themselves in the shoes of the kids and teachers mown down by the psychotic loner, whereas they find it hard to visualize being blown up at a supermarket or kidnapped and tortured for their faith. This is tied to the intense fear of death we in the West have. Same applies to the memorial commemorating the vacationers. "That could have been me." It's an irrational fear really. Hence the fight to preserve life no matter how miserable. Fear is the engine behind so many irrational beliefs.
But fears can be overcome. That is the message of hope.
The bigger leap may be to realize that Iraqis are our family as well. It requires a broader inclusive mind. Not impossible, but very difficult.
If Love exists at all it is unconditional and all-inclusive.
Maybe a few people have Loved(Gandhi, King, Jesus, Dorothy Day)--Maybe, I wouldn't know. What I am sure of is that neither I nor anybody I have known personally are capable of any such God-like attribute.
Some people believe in progress--believe that evolution is proceeding toward some goal. If we can escape the human condition which, as Buddha said, is synonymous with suffering, it would be a far worthier goal than colonizing Mars.
If reincarnation is a reality I have no interest in coming back here until and unless people like me are long gone.
Pardon me but call the Iraq misstake what it really is and not "Anericans invasion ", it is Bush's misstake. Many of us here in the US have always been against all wars for that matter and invasions such as this. We worked hard to keep Bush from doing it but he and his party stole the election in 2000. The democrats could not stop him.
Bill
If you have paid your taxes ,for the last six years then you have supported this war,excuse me ,these wars ,without end!About 50% of your contribution goes to the M.I.C. that President Eisenhower (sp?) warned about.It may be Bush's war but we all have paid for it, even if Shrub "owns it".In fact Clinton's bombing and sanctions caused 1/2 million deaths according to some sources.The total estimated Iraqi casualty list from Desert Storm to O.peration I.raqi L.iberation (excuse me "Freedom")is about a million!Thats right!Plus 1.5 million external refugees,and half a million or more internal refugees.A U.S. led HOLOCAUST! We have all paid for this.It is our Karma ,and responsibility to end it! Peace in and out! jh
Remember the movie THE THIRD MAN? Orsen Wells played a war profiteer whose black market watered-down penicillin permanently damaged children who received it.
Our depleted uranium pollution in Iraq makes him look like a petty thief.
We shouldn't be surprised when a society that has so successfully separated and isolated us produces a free radical that malfunctions due to that crushing isolation. Cho chose an anniversary, that was his message. Like a Kilroy sign, written in bullets - "I was here."
Thank you for this piece.
Although I was moved by the deaths at Virginia Tech, when I heard President Bush's speech at the memorial service, I found it disturbing when he said:
"It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."
I thought, couldn't this be said every day of the Iraqi civilian deaths?
Well said pamela! What Bush does not have the sensitivity to see is that the 90 odd deaths daily in Iraq are a consequence of his America's actions and policies and that the Virginia Tech deaths, horrific though they are, are really small beer compared to the fact that all Iraqi men, women and children live 24/7 in fear of being slaughtered - that it is a daily fact of life that permeates every aspect of their life.
Virginia Tech was horrible but, in light of the daily murders in Iraq as a consequence of ill-conceived and greed driven American actions/policies in that country, the rest of the world is inclined to tell the US to get some perspective.
In 2004 2,852 children in the US died by gunfire. Almost 8 per day. In other words, we have the equivalent of a Virginia Tech massacre every four days.
Makes you proud to be an American.
The writer of this article left out an important ingredient regarding Iraqi deaths and how such massive slaughter could be related to the Virginia massacre. All of these deaths are the result of intense hate that has been festering for years. Cho was a lone hater, and the different sects in the Middle East consist of nations bent on hate and destruction of each other. If you can't give up the hate, you are not going to give up senseless destruction of innocent children.