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February
3, 2002
Zoltan
Grossman
War
and New Military Bases
February
2, 2002
Francis
Schor
Carlucci's
Strange Career
February
1, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
The
Great Ashcroft Cover Up
Jeremy
Voas
Why
We're Suing Ashcroft
David
Vest
10
Things I Know About Him
January
31, 2002
Rahul
Mahajan
The
State of the Union:
A New Cold War
Dave Marsh
Miles
Copeland, War
and the Future of Music
John Pilger
The
Colder War
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Killer Dog, Weird Couple
Dr. Susan
Block
Blowback
and Daniel Pearl
January
30, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Linda
Lay, Hill and Knowlton and the Tears of a Clown
Jack McCarthy
Free
Noelle Bush!
Michael
Ratner
Memo
to Bush: Adhere to
the Geneva Convention
Jay Moore
Proud
to be an American?
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
January
27, 2002
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Enron's
Drip, Drip, Drip
Tom Turnipseed
MLK
Jr.'s Dream Perverted
January
26, 2002
Norman
Madarsz
Adieu,
Bourdieu
January
25, 2002
National
Lawyers Guild
Know
Your Rights
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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February 3,
2002
America's Strange Political
Culture of Grief and Dying
By John Chuckman
Death in America does not come easily. That is,
unless you are homeless or live on an Indian reservation or
in one of the nation's vast urban ghettos or are one of tens
of millions of working poor with the kind of health insurance
that features exceptions instead of coverage. In all these cases,
likely few will note your passing. Losers don't count in America,
except at Fourth-of-July speeches by congressmen in tight races.
Anyone living in the United States must
acclimatize to massive public displays of grief. Actually, "public
displays of grief" is an inadequate term, for, apart from
their Hollywood production values, they seem often to have a
starkly political character.
But the subject is complex, and some
of its ridiculous aspects reflect a society where beauty contests
for five-year-olds in mascara and half-time football shows are
cultural events. There is also a business aspect, for grief
like everything in America serves the greater "entrepreneurial
spirit."
And there is, amidst all the mess and
clutter, a sense of loneliness and anger that comes through,
the echoes of life in a society of flourishing Social Darwinism.
This last aspect will be the subject of a future essay.
Have you ever noticed the way Americans
refer to any event involving death as a "tragedy?"
This usage reflects the attitude of people who think they've
banished death in their child-like enjoyment of measureless
entitlements. Death must be really special, and so it is always
a "tragedy."
This word usage also reflects the political
correctness that muffles all discussion of serious topics in
America with a dense, fluffy coating of euphemism. It's callous
to talk honestly about something like death in America. Such
talk may even qualify as being unpatriotic.
Now, "tragedy" has a very specific
meaning, and it has nothing to do with accidents or unhappiness
or even tears. It has to do with heroic attempts at something
worthy despite the fates having ruled that one must fail. All
sense of this powerful word is lost in contemporary America.
When first built, the Vietnam memorial
was a remarkably dignified statement of grief, that seemed,
with its low profile, simple design, and dark color, to speak
to both the shame and loss of a pointless war. It was a miracle
that anything so thoughtful came out of those years of insane
violence.
But the dignity couldn't last long. Clumps
of statues -- including figures carefully representing every
identifiable marketing segment of the voter population, always
excepting gays and Arabs --are springing up like toadstools
after a period of warm rain. And, of course, there has to be
an "information center." Dignity is gradually giving
way to the ambiance of a Niagara Falls gift shop.
Endless photographs of people rubbing
names onto paper or touching the surface with tremulous fingers
or leaving teddy bears, an entire small library of coffee-table
books full of such pictures, have almost turned the wall into
an official national how-to display center for grief.
The private acts of individuals grieving
are, or should be, just that, private. Overly-photographed,
overly-televised, overly-written-about acts are not private,
they are public -- and not the public of solemn ceremony, but
the public of performance or advertising. Americans often no
longer seem to understand this distinction, or, as with so many
things, they want it both ways.
We also have a fake wall that tours the
country on a truck, as well as several hundred local mini-walls
and fake walls in cities, towns, and states that feature subsets
of the names on the wall in Washington. I am sure there are
people who imitate what they've seen repeated over and over
in magazines, movies, and on television when the fake wall pays
a visit at the local Wal-Mart parking lot. Tremulous fingers
rub names on a plastic wall inside a truck.
To placate veterans of another hideous,
pointless war, "the Korean conflict," yet another
wall was built --this one far less subtle or interesting, perhaps
reflecting its being a rushed after-thought. This one unfortunately
resembles a huge Russian-gangster tombstone with faces etched
on dark granite. It comes with an army of life-size aluminum
soldiers, "Joes," (wasn't that the name used by the
cute little Korean lads always asking the generous Americans
for chocolate in all the "B" movies about Korea?)
grimly trudging along.
Soon we will have the grandest memorial
of all --a gigantic pile of rock slabs and flags and mens' and
ladies' rooms honoring World War II. The artist's renderings
suggest a bowling-tournament trophy built on the scale of Egypt's
Great Pyramid. This eyesore is to be assembled after fleets
of Sikorsky helicopters drop the required eighteen million
pounds of granite dead center of The Mall in Washington.
Support for this one came right from
the grass roots, from the sale of t-shirts and baseball caps
at Wal-Mart and smoky beer-socials at veterans' posts. The resulting
memorial has everything you'd expect short of beer-bellied figures
in baseball caps and XXX t-shirts labeled "Proudly Made
in the U.S.A.," but, who knows, that may come over time.
Building ugly, expensive memorials is
not limited to Washington. Nor is their subject matter limited
to war. Walls of names at one time threatened to become as
commonplace as fried-chicken outlets. Several airline crashes
have their own versions.
Now, other conceptions have come into
vogue, perhaps inspired by the massive aluminum "Joes"
of the Korean-conflict memorial. For example, we have a memorial
with scores of concrete posts down in a Florida swamp in memory
of an airline crash.
If we were to build something like this
for every victim of every crash (about 50,000 Americans die
in automobile crashes alone each year), memorials would soon
represent a serious pedestrian hazard, with people tripping
over them or banging into them while talking on cell-phones.
But the strangeness of America's public
grief goes far beyond strange memorials. We have people who
gather, in Busby Berkley re-creations of 1970 flower-child scenes,
to throw flowers into the ocean years after the crash of an
airliner or to light candles in bottles along miles of shore
--not private, spontaneous acts of grieving, but choreographed
displays, carefully documented on film to become spots on the
evening news or the covers of magazines. Grieving here becomes
an avenue to Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame.
Being a victim --or part of the subset,
survivor --opens new prospects for even the humblest. Victims
are interviewed, photographed, appear on day-time talk shows,
travel, have books written about them, and often go on lecture
circuits. They may even have agents. It's pretty heady stuff,
and it sure beats what most people do for a living.
Indeed, there is an almost irresistible
movement in America to raise being a victim to the status of
a profession. It is already an occupation.
Soon one or two dozen of America's countless
weird little colleges --places like the Bull Connor Memorial
College for Christian Gentlemen, or the New Jersey Turnpike
Drive-Through College for the Performing Arts --will offer
courses and even degrees in victimhood and survivorship. Why
not? You can get a degree in circus in America. Or a degree
in recreational leadership. Or a degree in nothing. Four-year
B.V.s just seem too good a business opportunity to be missed.
Most people in the world, following the
loss of a loved one, seek peace or solace or some other definite
and recognizable state of being. But in America, people seek
"closure." The quest to find an acceptable personal
meaning for this undefined, self-help-book term is the starting
point for many a career as victim or survivor.
Closure may come quickly or never --it
is a very flexible concept, allowing for short, meteoric careers
or more sustained, long-term ones. Some captives of the American
embassy in Iran went on for more than a decade talking and
writing about little more than being on the receiving end of
what American armed forces are doing to al Qaeda prisoners
in Cuba.
For about a year or two, every relative
of every person affected by the Oklahoma City bombing was interviewed
so many times that every ounce of pathetic remembrance was
drained from them. I used to wince as soon as I heard the lead-in
for another of these on National Public Radio. There was this
awful mental image of reporters squeezing the ragged, pulpy
scraps of an exhausted lemon to get a last drop of juice.
Of course, there are Oklahoma City victim
support groups and associations of every description plus survivors'
reunions and home-coming events. Grief counselors --another
field for combining grief and profit in America --streamed in
for weeks, jamming the town's airport and bus station. And
probably upwards of four hundred books were published by and
about victims. Victims can spend the rest of their lives just
reading about themselves.
Again in Oklahoma City, there is the
unavoidable colossal memorial --this time, it consists of a
fleet of giant, ugly chairs that look as though no one would
ever have wanted to sit on one.
Undoubtedly, the terrorist attack on
New York will top all previous grief-events for intensity of
as well as endurance. This promises to go on for decades. We
already have decals, official logos, baseball caps, t-shirts,
shorts, lapel pins, books, videos, electronic games, and framed
prints. It is well on its way to spawning a major new industry
of survivor-souvenirs and memorabilia. And a stupendous memorial
is almost certainly in the works. Perhaps Disney will do a plastic
copy to minimize the diversion of tourists to New York.
Now, don't misunderstand. When the terrorists
attacked, America deserved the world's sympathy and help, and
she richly received it. But now, quite apart from its being
well past time for a grossly self-indulgent people "to
get a life," the country's brutal, stupid response --undoubtedly
killing more innocent people than died in the attack itself
and causing more misery than can be imagined in such a poor
land --means she has relinquished further claims to the world's
sympathy.
It's hard to sympathize with people who
insist on the very special, precious, eternal nature of their
own loss, while failing even to notice what they do to others.
The moral values here closely resemble those of certain survivors
or victims in Texas who parade outside the prison during an
execution and excitedly talk to newsmen about the closure someone's
death is bringing to their lives.
Closure on this one is going to be right
off the scale and probably will take generations. At the heart
of the matter, as someone perceptively noted, is that Americans
want to be liked and just cannot understand why someone dislikes
them so much. They could easily learn why if they only would
listen to others, but that will not happen.
Not listening is something of a national
characteristic, and there's almost a sense of pride attached
to it. But then, Americans are proud of a lot of loopy things,
like the fact that B-2 bombers are such neat-looking, high-tech
planes -- totally ignoring the fact that each copy costs them
about forty top-quality, well-equipped high schools and requires
maintenance for every hour's flying equal to the total annual
salaries of several teachers.
Besides, the entire workforce of government
and corporate media labor mightily day and night to keep emotions
on the boil. CNN stupidly blares from every office and public
place much like the tele-screens in 1984 reporting approved
details of Oceania's endless war. Outsiders are certainly not
welcome. At all. Unless, of course, they're sending troops or
money.
There is simply no perspective in any
of this. Every four or five years, Americans killing Americans
generate enough names to fill the Vietnam memorial in Washington.
They murder the same number of people who died in the World
Trade Center every few months.
Indeed, until a recent, not well-understood
decline in American homicides, this figure was enough killings
just-over every two years to fill a new wall. Enough killings
to equal the carnage of the World Trade Center about every six
weeks (just a few years ago, murders ran at 1800 a year for
New York city alone). That rate of killing created the equivalent
of ten Vietnam walls in the first couple of decades after the
war --all filled with names of Americans killed by Americans.
In the same state where tens of millions
were spent on the Oklahoma City memorial, there is no memorial
to, nor even much memory of, twice as many black Americans slaughtered
in Tulsa by insane white mobs and dumped into mass graves during
a rampage in the 1920s. Even their property was stolen, just
as was the case for Japanese-American internees of concentration
camps about twenty years later. Nor is there a memorial in the
state of Florida where a similar event occurred.
The colossal brutality of American slavery
receives no adequate memorial. The re-creations of slave auctions
at colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, actually help soften the
image of slavery, but even these silly play-acts by summer
students in gingham are quite recent. Slavery at virtually all
national historic sites was simply ignored.
Imagine the real auction blocks with
slaves stripped naked to display their muscles. Or, in the case
of females, to show other assets of interest to isolated plantation
owners. Imagine the chained slaves defecating like horses as
they are driven to or from the market in gangs. Imagine the
stinking holds of ships where they were packed like cord wood,
with the substantial numbers who died or got sick in shipment
being tossed overboard as they were discovered. America has
never come to terms with the immensity of slavery. Where's the
huge and piteous memorial owing here?
Something like two thousand kids a year
are killed by child abuse in the United States --that's another
wall full of names since the end of the war in Vietnam --all
children. But there is no wall provided.
Of course, the deaths of children and
the documented abuse of literally hundreds of thousands more
every year, doesn't stop "pro-life" folks from weeping
over fetuses. Never mind all those real kids in pain and difficulty,
never mind all the homeless, never mind all the runaways and
child prostitutes, and never mind all the families whose lives
are no more than emotional vacuums --they're murdering fetuses!
The bizarre outer limits of grief culture
were reached when dozens of Americans gathered in Washington
to weep over stem cells. Most of the mourners likely wouldn't
be able to offer a coherent definition of a stem cell, but that
fact didn't get in the way of their much photographed and televised
grief. It wouldn't surprise me if these people announce a special
memorial to stem cells killed in New York labs by the terrorist
attack.
Now, the discovery that a few middle-class
children accidentally were killed each year by air bags created
waves of publicity and demands for change. And change in the
regulations came quickly. But the murder of an American child
every few hours (until the recent decline, but the number is
still shameful), often at the hands of another child in urban
ghettos, generated only a flat-line graph on the monitor of
national concern.
Executions in the United States elicit
sympathy from some, but the death penalty is popular. Candidate
Bush saw no political risk in making sophomoric remarks about
people waiting to be executed in Texas. And there's a well-known
picture of him smirking during a remark about the upcoming
death of a particular inmate.
America is still the only country to
have used a genuine "weapon of mass destruction."
Twice. On civilians. Not much grief is ever expressed over that.
Actually, quite the opposite, as we are
reminded at every commemoration of Pearl Harbor that the few
thousand Americans killed in an attack on a military base more
than justified the mass incineration of women and children,
hospitals and schools.
One especially sensitive American reader
recently wrote to tell me that the entire Middle East should
have been reduced to radioactive glass after the attack on the
World Trade Center, and that I should just mind my own business
about it. Needless to say, such expressions of grief are touching.
Three to four million Southeast Asian
people perished in the insane orgy of killing Americans called
the Vietnam War, three hundred thousand went missing, and, over
the years since, thousands of farmers have been crippled or
killed by the mines and unexploded bombs left behind. Not to
mention the unholy effects of an ocean of Agent Orange bubbling
and gurgling its way through the water tables of Southeast Asia.
And yet, a quarter-century after that
holocaust, there were news stories about whether the Vietnamese
were being sufficiently cooperative in finding sets of American
remains. Remains that by that time and in that place were surely
nothing more than dust, buttons, and dental fillings.
This was just one of many demeaning rituals
the American establishment put the Vietnamese through because
of their intense rage at losing the war. But this absurd ritual
of digging for dust and buttons was possible and took meaning
precisely because Washington could exploit strange American
attitudes towards death --virtually encouraging the pitiful,
hopeless belief by a portion of the public in the survival
of missing men --to support a vicious policy.
Every three days, cigarettes kill as
many Americans as died in the World Trade Center. Does the Congress
take serious action to suppress or better control cigarette
smoking? Not really. Other countries have been far more imaginative
and aggressive.
America's courageous legislators leave
most of the responsibility to the courts with state lawsuits
whose very settlements presume continued heavy smoking and whose
proceeds often are not even spent on smoking or health.
Now compare the daily, genuine menace
of cigarettes with the threat of terrorism.
Despite the World Trade Center, an American's
chances of dying from terror are just about equal to slipping
on a banana in the bathtub during a thunderstorm. Almost nonexistent.
Here was one event involving three thousand
people out of a population of two hundred and eighty million,
one event spread over a period of many decades of America's
controversy-filled dominance in world affairs. And that one
event involved a series of unrepeatable favorable circumstances
for the perpetrators, circumstances which actually reflect on
the same glorious legislators' unwillingness to attend to business
before by mandating such simple measures as locked cabins and
more professional inspection staff.
Yet after that one event, the good old
boys in Congress instantly passed police-state legislation,
negated many Constitutional protections, launched an undeclared
war, ignored the Geneva Conventions, and stand ready to spend
countless billions more.
It truly does make a remarkable difference
who dies and under what circumstances in America.
John Chuckman
is a columnist with YellowTimes.
He encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.ORG
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