|
the reason for going in that direction is pretty simple: the tendency in the thread amongst folk who defended the americans to treat the people killed under the rubric of abstractions like "collateral damage" or "unfortunate side-effect" while at the same time doing as you do--going on at some length in an empathetic story about the hardships endured by the americans--how one cannot know, how hard it is on them to be a colonial occupation force.
and it is. it has to be. colonialism degrades everybody.
it doesn't particularly matter what folk say when they're confronted with something like this, because usually in being confronted they recognize the point and are already moving past it, making it go away or addressing it (sometimes these are the same, sometimes they aren't).
and taking things in that direction was a matter of chance: i happened to run across this collection of namir noor eldeen's work. and looking at the images drove home the gap that separates the abstraction who is killed as "collateral damage" from the human being who was shot up by these people in a helicopter by mistake. and it added a bit more perversity, as if any was needed, to the audio in the clip.
like i say, colonialism degrades everyone and every thing.
it'd be good if people from the bush administration were made to stand trial for this debacle. if it weren't for the project for a new american century, none of this would have happened.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|