As tragic as the Virginia Tech
shootings are, let's face it: 32 dead is a slow day in U.S.-occupied
Iraq. "Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their
fate," President Bush said. "They were simply in the wrong
place at the wrong time." He would know. In America, we have the
luxury of mourning our dead for days or even years (see 9/11). If Iraqis
tried to
"pull together" and "come to grips" with every massacre
of innocents...well, you get the idea.
In America, we post photos of the man responsible for the latest mass
murder on the covers of our newspapers and magazines "psycho."
In Iraq, those to blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths remain as
nameless and faceless as their victims. They're just doing the job they've
volunteered to do.
The media, of course, dutifully follows its dog-eared script thus guaranteeing
very little critical analysis. In his book, Endgame, author Derrick
Jensen powerfully challenges this curious arrangement when he writes
of how the New York Times, after 9/11, published, "profiles of
people killed in the attack on the Word Trade Center." Through
these profiles (which were syndicated throughout the country) readers
learned, for example of the "efficient executive" who "never
forgot the attention to spit and polish, in his work or play,"
and a top stockbroker: a "prankster with a heart" who'd "pull
up next to you in his Porsche-a 911-flip the bird, grin,
and take off in the wind."
"Imagine how our discourse and actions would be different if people
daily detailed for us the lives fears and sorrows Jensen. "Imagine
if we gave these victims that honor, that attention. Imagine if everyday
newspapers carried an account of each child who starves to death because
cities take the resources on which the child's traditional community
has forever depended ... Imagine, too, if our discourse included accounts
of those nonhumans whose lives this culture makes unspeakably miserable
... Imagine, finally, if we considered their lives as valuable as our
own, and their contribution to the world and to our neighborhoods to
be as valuable as that of a stockbroker does drive a Porsche, flip us
the bird, and take off like the wind."