A couple of nights ago, to my chagrin, we were watching the pre-game show for the MLB All-Star Game.
At one point, they decided to play "God Save The Queen" and have a moment of silence (I'm not sure it really qualifies as "a moment" - it was very brief, more like a pause to take a breath before continuing to jabber inanely) for the people killed last week in the terrorist bombings in London.
I made some quiet, smart-ass comment to my wife about the number of Iraqi dead, and wondered why we didn't give them a moment or two (or thirty five).
Well, hell, I know why. They are a different color, speak a different language, and worship a different prophet than us. More important than even that, their deaths have to remain unspoken so we can continue to justify the terrible things we do. "Freedom isn't free," they say over and over again. And they are right, unless you are an American warhawk - in which case it is probably someone else's kid getting blown up, and you are fighting the whole war on a loan your grandkids will still be paying. And even if we can fool ourselves into believing that the real reason we are dying and killing in Iraq is liberation, and not the WMDs, or the unshakable connection Saddam Hussein had to international terrorism, or our desperate thirst for petroleum products and the requirements of stability in the Middle East and a non-Saudi toehold in the oil-rich region, shouldn't we, at the very least, have asked the Iraqis if the price was too high and if they still wanted it even if the only color it comes in is blood-red before we delivered the product and gave them the bill?
So now I'm rambling. Anyway, James Wolcott has some similar thoughts in his Vanity Fair column, "
To Live and Die in Iraq"
...of the liberated, occupied, afflicted, battered-to-despair Iraqi people, Americans see and hear and, worst of all, care almost nothing. The Iraqis might as well be digitized extras in a Hollywood epic, scurrying in the wide-screen background and being massacred en masse as some tanned specimen of all-American man-steak is heroically positioned in the foreground, giving orders to the lesser-paid stars in his squad as if he had just teleported in from the Battle of Thermopylae. Apart from an occasional dispatch (such as a CNN report on May 13), the ongoing agony of the Iraqi people is the huge, tragic unmentionable in the televised war coverage... It doesn't seem to dawn on our pundits and leaders that when two dozen Iraqi police recruits are murdered by a car bomb it sends a shock wave through entire communities, leaving untold grieving widows, parents, siblings, children, friends, and co-workers behind to nurse their pain and rage. Imagine the impact it would have if 50 police or army recruits were wiped out over the course of a week in this country. Now imagine 50 dying every single week with no relief in sight and tell me the U.S. wouldn't be suffering a national nervous breakdown. But the Iraqi dead are discounted as the Price of Democracy. If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice harbored any semblance of shame beneath their aluminum-foil Vulcan armor, they would fall to their knees to express sorrow and beg forgiveness from the Iraqi people, even though Cheney might need help rising to his feet again. But of course they never will.
They never will. America never will.
