The Hobbes Threshold

by tristero

There are many people who refuse to go to horror or action films because they find screen violence so upsetting. I’ve always been puzzled by that because, no matter how gory it looks, it is, after all, nothing but ketchup or Karo syrup and dye. We all know that afterwards, the actors simply open their eyes, get up off the stage set, take a shower, and go off to have dinner with their friends and families.

Scenes of real violence never look like a Terminator movie, or even much like Spielberg’s “Munich.” Real violence comes in blurred, random images poorly framed, without slo-mo, without artfully symmetrical splatter patterns and goosed soundtracks with shrieking bird-like fiddles. A movie of real violence isn’t a Peckinpah or Hitchcock movie, but a cheap, fourth-generation video with bad sound, showing a reporter getting his head sliced off. Or it shows those insignificant little things falling off the burning skyscraper, things which happen to be real people, with real children, real friends, real enemies, real thoughts, real fears, and real lives that are about to end. For real.

And when real violence gets reported in words, it’s with one or two inadequate adjectives standing in for the ghastly, reeking smells and the unspeakable textures and sounds of mass murder. And since I have a very active imagination, reports of real violence never fail to revolt me. I know how many countless tragedies – many still to come – are created by each death, and then compounded:

Police found at least 65 bodies in Baghdad in the past 24 hours, including 15 men bound and shot in an abandoned minibus, in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal attacks, officials said Tuesday.

The timing of the killings appeared related to the car bomb and mortar attacks in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad on Sunday in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

The sectarian violence marked the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since Feb. 22, when bombers destroyed an important Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra, north of the capital.

The minibus was found on the main road between two mostly Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad, not far from where another minibus containing 18 bodies was discovered last week.

The bodies of at least 50 more men were found discarded in various parts of the capital, police said. All had been shot and many also had their hands and feet tied.

It is only moral – since after all our tax dollars helped create the State of Nature in which these murders happened – to ask each of us to sit quietly and imagine the last 2 or 3 minutes of these people’s lives. And what their mothers, and their children, and their husbands and wives were thinking about, perhaps wondering where they were, if they were just late, or playing with friends… Not that any of these dead are innocent heroes. They are just people -good, bad, and indifferent – who were killed as the result of the dreadful violence unleashed in Iraq on America’s watch. And for which all of America will be blamed.

And with the images of their deaths, and the images of their living loved ones and friends in our mind, it’s time to ask a few questions:

Anyone care to defend anymore the ridiculous proposition that the Bush/Iraq war was a good idea? Or the corollary absurdity that this level of horror could have been avoided simply by 25,000 or 50,000 troops, or “better planning”?

This catastrophe was predictable. The people who refused to listen have blood, not ketchup, on their hands.