Counting coups with shoes

This photo from Falluja, Iraq, ran in The Washington Post on April 1, 2004. The photographer was Ali Jasim for Reuters.

Among several papers from the U.S. and Europe (and a few in the Middle East) that I took the time to check, it seems that only The Washington Post and the British Guardian ran this photo. Several featured those contractors' blackened corpses hanging from a bridge. Most ran the photo of a man next to a burning vehicle, his hands in the air and a broad smile on his face, with "atrocity," "horror," "dark day," "grisly," or "savagery" splayed across two to four columns. What still stops me about this photo, 12 hours later, is the boy's smile. I look at that, and then I look at the chanting crowd in the back, and I wonder how this came to be. I just stared at the scene for 5 or 10 minutes, thinking about what had gone on in these people's lives up to that moment. So many different thoughts came to mind, I decided to open up some sort of exchange. How is that people are able to revel like this over such a ghastly scene? Is it just because of a sense of victory -- revenge -- over the seemingly invincible invaders? Is it because the remains of this person are something they can touch, have power over, after years of being subject to the sanctions and violence wielded by the US and Europe from afar? I thought about how much violence these young men (and the one woman, in white, with the clog) might have seen in their lives, and I wondered if that cumulative experience somehow found release in this celebration. (I just thought of the ending sequence of Return of the Jedi, of all things, when the Ewoks beat on stormtroopers' helmets like a xylophone. "The oppressors are dead, and now we will make music with their skulls.") By bringing up all of this, I am not trying to find a way to lessen or excuse what was done. This is degrading and absolutely dehumanizing for all involved: the men who were killed and the men who killed them; the youths and adults who, in video coverage that I saw, let loose with rage and exultation as they shook the blackened, ravaged hand of one corpse, and broke off the legs and head of another with their feet, shoes, poles, and shovels. I think of what Krishnamurti asserted: "We are the world." Meaning: we are the agents of the suffering we see. While it's unlikely that you dropped 2,000-lb. bombs on Iraq, Krishnamurti's assertion was related to the aversion, animosity and anger within our hearts and within our minds that find contribute to unbalanced, exploitative or unsettled situations in our societies and institutions. (And entertainment, an episode of "CSI" that I saw tonight being an example. How hypocritical is it for networks to hedge on showing what happened in a real conflict in Iraq, yet the fictional beating and strangulation of a pregnant woman, followed by an evisceration and extraction of her child with a hunting knife, is prime-time entertainment?) At one point I thought, "This would never happen in America." But, then again... What if Osama bin Laden himself or a group of his agents were ambushed on your local main street? Can you say with certainty that a scene like this would not be repeated? Are there not those here who would want to take cruel liberties with the bodies to exact some sort of revenge for Our Boys or those killed on 9/11? Would such people not be the same SAVAGES decried on the front page of the NY Post? I look at this photo and I really cannot conceive of the unimaginably terrifying, painful, cruel death that came upon those men. Neither can I conceive of the mental place in which the cruelty depicted here -- counting coups with shoes -- is an outlet for happiness. Debasement is victory. Occupation is liberation. War is peace. Think of how incongruous and inhumane that is. It's very sad. This scene and this war are human disasters. They point to the tremendous work that must to be done to promote redress, healing and balance, to reaffirm what our lives and connections with each other -- each nation -- are meant to be... I might as well end there. << more words -- say something -- nmazca.blog >>