Body Count
Cartoon by Mr. Fish.
Words by Pierre Tristam.
When an American soldier dies his story is written up in his hometown paper, powerfully enough usually, but the story’s effect is limited to that newspaper’s readership zone. There is no totality in the reporting of war casualties, no sense that one soldier s death, no matter where from, affects the whole nation. A town in Montana will ache for a lost son by itself, as if it alone is experiencing loss. What mourning and suffering does take place is solitary because inherently isolated. Existentialism at its bitterest, though don’t expect our information society ever to touch on the subject more than gingerly. It’s an aspect of that sickness of compulsive “localism” in American journalism: if it’s not local, it’s not relevant. If twelve Americans from other states are killed in a single day, your state, should it have been spared, will not care. Newsy attention will rather be focused on Nancy Grace and Larry King, who’ll be busy exploring the depths and breadth of the latest mystery disappearance of the white model with 38-C tits and a million-dollar estate. So news of the dead is forcibly diffused, its impact lessened to the point of irrelevance beyond that daily listing printed in a few newspapers.
And when it comes to civilian deaths…
When they are counted, they’re scabrously discounted, as has been the case since that study was published, showing possibly 650,000 Iraqi deaths since 2003. The debate over the study shows up the disconnect of the American public and media over the devastation of the war better than anything to date. No matter how much you downgrade the number, even if it’s cut in half, it still amounts to more deaths in three years, as a result of the American intervention, than all the killings of the Saddam Hussein regime in a quarter century-and all the killings at Hiroshima, Hamburg, Tokyo and Dresden combined. It’s still more than all the American dead of World War I and II combined. It’s still more than all the American dead, northerner or southerner, of the Civil War, and by far more than all the American dead, soldier and civilian, in all wars involving Americans since World War II, combined. (See for yourself.)
