|
The Look of a Killer
BRENDAN COONEY
Counterpunch
Thursday April 26, 2007
There is a look on the face of someone trying to understand the
recent mass killing by Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. Blank eyes,
a furrowed brow, a slowly shaking head. The brain hits a wall of
comprehensibility. The part of the mind that imagines what happens
in other minds reaches its limit; a rational person simply cannot
identify with what Cho did.
There was something familiar in that look. I realized it was the
same look I have seen over and over in the past four years on the
faces of those I talk to in other countries about what Bush has
done in Iraq. "Why?" they ask me, as if my nationality
might shed some light. "Is he mentally ill?" I have no
simple answers. They shake their heads. I remember the eyes of a
woman in Argentina tearing up at the senseless tragedy.
Within two days of the Virginia Tech shooting, people in the United
States had moved through three stages: 1. Shock; 2. Realizing there
is a problem and trying to identify it; 3. Grappling with ways to
avoid a similar disaster.
The absence of this process with Iraq was, and still is, startling
and eerie. A souring toward the Administration's Iraq policy has
moved into the mainstream, yet we skipped the shock. Critics rebuke
the "management" of the war in the same measured tones
used for other bad policies.
Should there be a difference in the level of moral outrage between
the Cho shooting and something that killed 10,000 times more people?
Yes. According to standard utilitarian morality (the greatest good
for the greatest number, or in this case the least bad for the fewest
number), one event was 10,000 times worse than the other.
The reason there was not 10,000 times the reaction is simple, and
all the more troubling for its simplicity. Virginia Tech is closer
to home, had a single perpetrator, and is easier to imagine. It
happened to people who speak our language, whom we imagine to be
somehow in our community. There was a single person responsible
who did it with his own hands. And as horrific as it would be, we
can imagine sitting in a classroom and being shot, whereas we have
no idea what it is like to be bombed.
What single person can we hang the invasion on? Wolfowitz? Cheney?
Bush? Rumsfeld? And even if Cheney made the decision, it wasn't
him in the cockpit pressing the button that delivered the bomb.
Cheney wasn't the one who gunned down 24 civilians in Haditha. (I'll
hang it on Cheney for the moment, less for the sake of alliteration
than the fact that his snarling mug would go well beside the sort
of "Mind of a Killer" stories that proliferated beside
Cho's picture. Given that Cheney favors bombing Iran, and still
seems to relish the Iraq occupation, why haven't we seen any "Mind
of a Killer" stories beside Cheney's picture? Why haven't we
seen stories speculating about how weak those five Vietnam draft
deferments must have made the young Cheney feel?)
If this diffusion of guilt confuses people, so does the hazy area
of rationale. So many voices were (and still are) flooding our airwaves
with messages that there was a central aim of the invasion that
justified the human toll. This propaganda requires a modicum of
critical thinking to see through, and when our journalists bought
it we were sunk. On the other hand, there is no central aim behind
a classroom slaughter that could justify it in the minds of any
healthy mind. In Cho's case, of course, we are talking about a clinical
mental problem; in Cheney's we are not. That should not make one
more shocking than the other. I would argue the reverse, that the
lack of a diagnosable mental illness makes the latter far more dangerous.
People like Cho may be able to buy guns, but people like Cheney
lead the nation into war.
Two things must be explained: why Cho caused shock domestically
but the invasion did not, and why the invasion caused shock around
the world but not here. The answer lies in a growing intellectual
and moral vacuity that leaves our journalists and citizenry not
only vulnerable to blatant propaganda but devoid of the moral imagination
that gives people around the world a gut feeling that something,
such as a massive unprovoked invasion, is wrong.
To feel shock at something happening far away as if it were happening
nearby; to feel shock at something happening to people who do not
belong to one's culture as if it were happening to people belonging
to one's culture; to feel shock at people being killed by airplane
bombs even though one has not seen bombings depicted in movies as
vividly as shootings; all of this requires a sort of moral imagination.
The death of this moral imagination in the United States is why
there was such a discrepancy between reactions around the world
and reactions here after the Iraq invasion in 2003. It is also why
whatever U.S. administration wants to persuade the U.S. public that
an attack on Iran is necessary will have an easy time of it.
Going back to the post-massacre process outlined above: Because
there was no Number One (shock), there will be no Number Three,
no serious work done toward figuring out how to avoid the next one.
If Bush and Cheney decide to bomb Iran, for example, they will snow
the people with propaganda and pull it off just the way they did
Iraq. The disastrous ramifications for the United States, and the
question of whether or not Iran poses a real threat to us, will
be irrelevant.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
