The History That Peace Made - Part 2

"It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

Wislawa Szymborska, I Don't Know: The 1996 Noble Lecture.

That the 110-storey 1,353-feet tall World Trade Center should crumble into a heap of stone and steel and dust was a likelihood so far removed from the psyche of the average person that the reality of it, once injected like a fatal disease into one's consciousness, brought all other realities to a brutal standstill. The image of giant aircraft hurtling one after another into one tower after another and sending them rushing like twin vertical landslides toward the earth embedded itself inextricably in the minds, tears, and heartbeats of people worldwide. As is the gift and curse of modern media technology, the rapidity with which this frightmare made real attached itself to the public's consciousness was matched only by the intense permanence with which it scarred the same. This deed having been accomplished, it was then done again, and again, over and over on emergency television broadcasts, on simultaneous Internet webcasts, and in virtually instant special editions of newspapers, magazines, and books. It evolved from a single powerful blow into a permanent mortal wound that all acknowledged, but few were willing to see healed.

Once the bleeding from the fall of the twin towers began, there was no question of allowing it to cease but only the demand that is should increase. From the United States' initial anxieties over how soon the county should attack Afghanistan to the Congressional debates over the propriety of then possibly attacking Iraq, the media met the call for blood with a flow of alternating images framed to indicate that only further violence, no matter how accurately or inaccurately directed, could provide an adequate response to violence already inflicted. Close-ups of the wounded burying the dead, the proliferation of shrines draped with flowers, burning candles with photographs of departed loved ones, poems denouncing horror and wrestling with grief, ceremonies blessing the instruments of war, and avenging heroes collecting scalps and skulls to reestablish an illusion of safety in the world all pushed the envelope filled with votes for combat.

"The cause of war is preparation for war," said the great historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century ago. Du Bois might easily have added that war also stems in too large a measure from humanity's glamorization, institutionalization, and marketing of delight taken in violence. Churches, mosques, and various centers for meditation do not receive the billions of dollars supporting their dedication to spiritual intelligence that armed forces receive in support of their dedication to military conflict, helping to make faith in mass murder and destruction more widespread than faith in mutually sustained unity among human beings.

War compresses the most definitive and passionate elements of life into unsurpassable irresistible drama by placing it within the sounds and motions of death. Love between two people is never so eagerly expressed as when they believe one or both of them may be lost to the bullets and bombs of the enemy. Courage before the overwhelming shadows of death is rarely more dynamic than when motivated by outraged patriotism. Neither Hollywood nor Broadway nor the ablest pen of the ablest writer can match the raw seductive power of martyrdom in the name of a quest for justice. And where neither love nor courage nor quests for justice abound, few things are more thrilling than the orgiastic anarchy permitted by life battling death in the war zone.

The television cameras that made their way into the cities-turned-battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq provided United States civilians with the ultimate vicarious experience of war. They surpassed by far the best movies or novels dedicated to the subject and elevated the concept of reality TV to the unimagined levels of the super-fantastic. Cameras panning the night skies of Iraq lit up like cracked open stars satisfied less the First Amendment right of United States' citizens to be informed about issues effecting their lives than it did an acquired and trained taste for chaos as entertainment.

In terms of balanced reporting, the images piped instantly and nonstop from the frontlines of war back to the United States were skillfully unbalanced. Scenes of United States marines and infantrymen attempting to cope with a major sandstorm while "racing" toward Bagdad and expressing longing for loved ones back home were plentiful. So were those of both the authentic and bogus surrender of Iraqis to United States servicemen. Likewise were all the reports of the "minimal" casualties suffered by United States forces and the "daring rescue operations" carried out by the same. All but absent from the reports from the front were any images of the thousands of civilians corpses in Afghanistan and Iraq that more than doubled - possibly quadrupled - the number of lives lost September 11. While United States photographers and cameramen clamored gleefully for shots of an Iraqi youth sitting atop the decapitated head of a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, nearly all shied away with selective nausea from a second Iraqi youth who himself had fallen to the blast of a bomb at a different location. The second youth lay on the ground with the flesh of his face severed from his skull yet macabrely intact as though it were a rubber mask about to fall off. Less reticent in its depiction of such horrors was Al Jazeera, the Arabic language satellite television station based (like the United States military during the Iraq war) in Qatar.

Al Jazeera, which had previously aired taped messages from Osama Bin Laden, drew fire for its broadcast of captured and slain United States military personnel and its shots of entire fields covered with the dead bodies of Iraqi civilians. Considered by some to be sensationalistic to the extreme, those images broadcast by Al Jazeera were in fact nothing more than the brutal unadorned truth of war from their perspective even as those of us in the United States received a more scripted Hollywood version of the war to appease a sense of interactive theatre and gamesmanship at its best. In short, those sided on the team with the biggest and loudest guns could afford to sit back (or at least thought they could) and view the war as entertainment, all the more dramatically thrilling and engaging because of the supporting roles played by many of their loved ones. Those sided on the team with the less powerful weaponry were too overwhelmed - shocked and awed as intended - by the total real-world collapse of their lives, filled with too many physically real severed body parts, uncountable gallons of blood, and destroyed homes, to view the war as entertainment.