June, 2004

Strange how Americans are more determined to protect the dead than the living. 'Although the conduct of a few American soldiers was abhorrent,' wrote Linda Grant of Rozelle, Illinois, to Time magazine of the Abu Ghraib tortures, 'even more repulsive were the crimes of the Iraqis who burned, dragged and hanged four of our citizens.' Why, I wonder, does Linda think the way she does? For the dead have no feeling, no pain, no eyes to see nor hearts to mourn the shame inflicted on their burnt bodies. They do not care any more, no more than Ramses II in his glass case looking out with dead eyes at staring, fidgeting tourists in the Cairo Museum. The dead cannot be humiliated, shamed, unsettled. They are beyond all that.

The living, however, can suffer mightily in many ways -- pain, fear, dread, the horror of living in cold wet dark no knowing when the next blow to the genitals will come, the anguish of being told that one's wife, one's daughter, one's mother have been violently killed. The living can die many deaths before they die. And this is why torture is always worse than killing. Torture takes up more time.

So why do Americans not think this way? Why did they think the desecration of four burnt corpses in Fallujah cause enough to kill two hundred children, two hundred women and five hundred male adults and to smash up a city and bring to sorrow and frenzy ten thousand fellow human beings? Their dead were precious, it seems, and gravely dishonoured and had to be avenged.

The cause for this may lie in their belief -- more closely embraced in America than elsewhere in the West -- that we live beyond the moment when we cease, that death is a mere interruption, a moment of pause, on a journey that sweeps us ever onward through sheaves of light to a place of reunion in a high and golden city where all forever after is well. And looking down at our corpses being dragged and kicked and hung up is to observe an impertinence we should not, from that altitude, have to endure. It is all too unseemly, too insulting, too much beneath our heavenly pride. So the street where it happened, and the people who watched it, should be burned and cursed like Sodom, and the desecrators killed and the people who know who did it...well, horribly tortured, really. Because we have to find out who did it, who desecrated our dead. Desecrating the dead is worse than anything. It has to be.

What a strange nation this is entirely. They are equally ready to give Michael Jackson twenty-five years for offering a glass of red wine to a twelve-year-old boy as they are to forgive and thank Chip Frederick for beating a man to death. They judge the killing of five thousand Iraqi children in war a necessary tactical accident, but the killing of three thousand New York adults a hellish abomination that changed the world forever. They find Janet Jackson's nipple a moral shock but not the 'targeted' blowing up of a quadriplegic in his wheelchair. They think the killing by bombs, bullets, prison beatings and sanctions of a million Iraqi Muslims no reason for their kinfolk not to like them, or hail them as their saviours on the street.

How blind they are. And silly. What a silly, silly nation we're in bed with, on John Howard's orders and against our will. It is like being led by some Neanderthal on a quest that came to him in a dream. We are being told that this is Year One, a new Genesis, and trial by jury, presumption of innocence, the right to a lawyer, family visits, family phonecalls are not there any more in this New World Order and killing and bulldozing your political opponents and their family homes is the way you fight for freedom now. Hitler's fuhrerprinzip was just as silly. It too asserted the Leader's whim was law, and his murderous impulses all for the common good.

We are being told these things, and, worse, we are listening. Or John Howard is, and we are following amazed through the muck and blood and wreckage in his trail. It's time, it's really time, to come up for air and see sense. We have made a god of a monster and it's time we cast him off. Yankee go home. Go quickly.

© Bob Ellis