- "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt." --Mark
Twain
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- Violence pervades American media. From bone crunching,
brain-rattling "sports" like "Ultimate Fighting" and
professional football, to blood-soaked Hollywood films starring Bruce
Willis,
to sadistic "reality" TV shows depicting humiliation and torture,
we enjoy violence as a testosterone-boosting distraction from the strains
of everyday life.
-
- Make that fake violence, homogenized violence, and
"civilized"
violence. REAL violence is something that even the most desensitized of
us don't seem to have the stomach for.
-
- Millions of Americans went to see Quentin Tarantino's
Kill Bill movies - two-hour bloodbaths, replete with decapitations and
dismemberments by Samurai swords. But when Nicholas Berg was decapitated
in Iraq, American news outlets refused to show it, knowing that their
audiences
would respond with outrage and horror.
-
- We happily pay $50 to watch Mike Tyson bash a man's
brains
in on pay-per-view. But when Rodney King and Reginald Denney were beaten
to within an inch of their lives on national television, we felt sickened
and outraged and wondered, how could anyone do such a thing?
-
- We like violence as long as it's not something we feel
personally. It can only be enjoyed if there is a buffer zone shielding
us from the visceral horror. With this safe distance from another person's
suffering, carnage and mayhem become sport and entertainment. Thus, even
genuinely "civilized" and "cultured" persons can enjoy
violence as an amusing diversion.
-
- In fact, we can accept ANY horror, ANY outrage, if we
have enough distance from it. The anti-Vietnam war movement didn't really
get started until the first stomach-churning images came back of
slaughtered
civilians, burnt villages, and dead American soldiers. Without the visual
reality to cling to, Americans probably would have accepted any lie told
to them by their government indefinitely. As long as it's out of sight
and out of mind, even the murder of human beings can be reduced to nothing
more than an exercise in semantics.
-
- And now, we see this truth manifested in 21st century
America. A president who has sent thousands of American troops to die in
a war that has been waged on false premises was "elected" to
a second term in office. This is the same man under whom 155 souls were
casually executed during his reign as Texas governor. Some people have
noticed a curious paradox about George W. Bush: even though he has tallied
a body count that would make Genghis Khan envious, he seems like a
genuinely
nice and affable guy. But that is easy to explain: our president has always
had the luxury of killing from afar, never coming face to face with the
men, women, and children whose lives were snuffed by the scratch of his
pen. As far as Bush knows, he is doing "God's will," because
the screams of Iraqi children and the anguished wails of dying American
soldiers remains out of sight, out of mind.
-
- The same can be said of the "honorable" Judge
George Greer, whose will it is that an innocent woman be slowly and
agonizingly
starved and dehydrated until she dies. He ordered this, even as dozens
of doctors signed affidavits stating that she could recover with therapy,
even as nurses testified that she is conscious and aware and attempts to
speak, even as her parents begged for just ONE MORE test to see if she
is really in a persistent vegetative state.
-
- As many commentators have pointed out, Judge Greer is
the closest thing to a modern day Pontius Pilate. By sentencing Terri
Schiavo
to an end that one cannot legally inflict on an animal, he has effectively
said, "I wash my hands of this woman's death." The removal of
a feeding tube is the preferred method of "euthanasia" NOT
because
it is humane or painless, but for reasons of legal semantics - gutless,
cowardly, inhuman SEMANTICS. It is the law's way of justifying the
indefensible,
making it palatable for the general public. If Greer had sentenced Terri
to be executed by firing squad, her death would have been instantaneous
and free of pain, but it also would have been harder to sell to the public.
But the removal of the feeding tube is, in Michael Schiavo's words,
"the
most natural way to die." Thus, Terri lies in her bed still, clinging
to the tiny spark of light inside of her that refuses to be
extinguished.
-
- If Men in Power are going to take human life as a matter
of law, whether it's capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, or warfare,
they should have the decency to confront the enormity of their decisions
head-on. Rather than withholding food and water from human beings deemed
worthless by court-appointed doctors, judges like Greer should be required
to place a gun to the person's head, and pull the trigger - nothing painful
or prolonged about that method of execution. But somehow, I think that
Greer, like President Bush, is too great a moral weakling to bear full
responsibility for his life-ending decisions. Better to sit back and let
others do the dirty work. Out of sight, out of mind.
-
- The American people have become a cowardly and impotent
citizenry. They docilely accept any perversion as long as it doesn't dirty
up the scenery on their flat-screen televisions. The puppet-masters in
the news media feed us a sanitized and innocuous vision of world events
designed to keep outrage down, and patriotism alive. Visual images of the
horrors reaped by our government, our military, and our murderous judicial
system are non-existent. And Mr. and Mrs. America are too bored and
distracted
to seek out the truth for their selves.
-
- I know of only one solution to break us out of this
soul-crushing
malaise that threatens our very existence. At next year's Super Bowl
halftime
show, the bodies of all the dead Iraqi civilians, all the dead American
soldiers, all the executed death row inmates, all the aborted fetuses,
and all the victims of "euthanasia," can be dumped on the field
to the strains of Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White &
Blue."
-
- If our Men in Power want to wash their hands of the
deaths
of innocents, the least we can do is bathe in the blood.
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