“In the deserts of the heart/ Let the healing fountain start…,” Auden wrote, and he was grieving for just one man, not for cities and nations and last shreds of civility and sense.
Here’s my question for the weekend: which would be worse? (1) a world habituated to the hateful random vengefulness of the London subway bombers or (2) a world where the insufferable pieties of the imperial bunglers Bush and Blair, and their smug seats of power, were unanswerably shielded from the back-spatter of their own triumphant violence?
The most challenging commentaries I’ve seen so far on London turn up in Rebecca McKinnon’s survey of Arab bloggers at Global Voices. Like this one, on a site called From Cairo with Love:
Damn. One hell of a terrorist attack in London. Devastating. We already know how mindless sick bastards those terrorists are. But I have one question, what the hell have Bush and Co. been doing for the last few years? Four years fighting that alleged war on terror, making us live hell in the process. And our Ambassador to Iraq has just been executed today. Boy, do I feel safer now!
Mohamed, From Cairo with Love
The dichotomy between Red Staters and Blue has perhaps never been as starkly apparent to me as when I noticed a new conservative comic strip this last Sunday called “State of the Union.” In the strip, Uncle Sam is watching a TV broadcast, in which the announcer reports on a Baghdad car bomb killing 60 people, ending with, “Of course, its all our fault!” Uncle Sam looks at the audience with a “what planet is this guy from?” expression.
How can neighbors in the same country connect the dots in such different ways? To me, the announcer is stating an undeniable truth, from the standpoint of moral responsibility. Obviously, the cartoonist is pitching to an audience that finds the opposite conclusion to be equally obvious.
But before we Blue Staters feel too smug, here’s another kick in the stomach to me. As my wife flipped the channels after the news tonight, I saw a show I had never heard of before: “Law and Order: Special Victims” I asked my wife what that was all about, and she said “sexual assault, pedophilia, etc.”
My God – what can we expect when we objectify horrible human conduct towards others and hideous suffering, and call it entertainment? Today, we call it a plot line when people like us are tortured during primetime television shows. Why not real people we don’t know, and that don’t look like us in Abu Gharaib, or Guantanamo? Do we actually empathize with human beings at all anymore, or have we cauterized our souls with “entertainment.”
For another example, see: Social Standards, School Violence and Taboos: In respect of Red Lake
The attacks that occurred in London could take place in any city, on any subway system in this country. Now is the time for our legislators to ask how we could possibly have spent over $1.6 trillion on defense from 2001-2004 and nearly $200 billion more to invade a country with no links to Al Qaeda, while our elected officials slash spending for security at subways and train stations that are vulnerable to the type of atrocities we witnessed in Madrid and London. What we’ve done at the airports is nice, but did we think Al Qaeda wasn’t going to notice that 29 million people take the train to work every day? (You can read more at my blog http://pandachews.blogspot.com/)