Shouldn’t this have been on the news or something?

No one around the accident who crowded behind the police lines with looks of worry, curiosity, thrill, and sympathy etched unmistakably on their faces, even those who tried not to betray their particular reasons for having rushed down to the corner after hearing the screeching and the scream and the unmistakable crunch of metal on metal by the ton, unable to leave the scene until they had seen firsthand the results of the work of the emergency crews with their torches and saws, could stand the waiting. Three large men were gathered together to one side, having found some shade and a long low wooden fence rail that served well as a bench. All had come from their patio table of empty pint glasses and residual greasy red bones that had been hot wings but moments before the commotion on the corner, and talked loudly to each other about what awful shape the survivors, if any, would be in when finally pulled from the heap of gnarled metal that had been cars, until the sharp and disapproving glance of a young mother in blue jeans and pea coat standing nearby had the effect she intended, which was not to change the attitudes of men who regarded such tragedies as if they were merely the highlight clips from some gruesome sport on television so much as to quiet them enough to cease reminding her of the utter lack of what she had always considered to be a fundamental human sense of compassion in the face of suffering, and not incidentally to prevent them from muttering callous commentary and jokes that she was sure to overhear later slipping tonelessly from the mouth of her son to one or another of his playmates, spoken without awareness of the meaning or the connotations of jesting at death but only because he tended to repeat things he heard when followed by laughter.

It had not occurred to the thin bald man on the other side of the street unconsciously rubbing his large bony wrist—who, bent on rediscovering himself in the newfound freedom of retirement, had been out walking all morning, reviewing the streets of his neighborhood and reminiscing about who had lived where, wondering how old their children would be now since last time he’d seen them it must’ve been, God, 1987? No, they moved back to Jersey the summer after Linda died, so it would have been 1985—that his wrist felt so large and naked because he’d decided this morning for the first time in years not to put on the watch, for a retiree, he proclaimed to himself, has earned the right to keep no schedule but what he chooses. More curious about the reactions of the spectators than the accident itself, he scanned the faces in the crowd and lingered, upon catching her eye, at the young mother turning from the group of men with accusation still wrought in her brow, just as her eyes swept smoothly down his face to his chest and then, the tension about her eyes passing away like a disappearing shadow, darted toward something else that must have caught her attention, but he kept watching her for no other reason than that something about her manner seemed agreeable as she, still looking toward whatever had drawn her attention, absent-mindedly and lazily rubbed the top of her son’s head, no higher than her hips, bathed in straight blond hair shorn angularly and shining almost white in the sun. The old man suddenly noticed that his arms were raised awkwardly and that he was rubbing his wrist; realizing that her chestward glance must have been directed toward that curious movement, he immediately and self-consciously dropped his arms to his sides and put his hands in his pockets. Raising his eyes again toward the dark-haired woman in the pea coat, he saw instead a reflection as if from far away, a frightfully malformed image of that unconscious moment: a lanky hunched old man with slightly sunken eyes and liver spots and a frantic paperwhite fringe of hair above his ears, wringing his hands manically while gawking at a motor vehicle accident, but this passed as soon as it had appeared, and he found her still gazing distantly over to his right. He turned to see what so captivated her but saw only a patch of cloudless sky partly framed by the storefronts that lined the street, partly fettered by an abnormally cluttered and unsightly moiré of wires running askew from the top of a wooden telephone pole on the corner where so many men in dark uniforms were still rushing about and yelling to each other.

Regarding those men now, the old man shifted his weight to his other foot and in a familiar motion swept his right hand from the pocket of his tan slacks into his front shirt pocket and adeptly pulled out a cigarette, patted his pockets to locate his lighter, and turned away to look for a place to sit.

People who met him barely remembered having met him. When they did, they remembered having sought the first convenient exit. At the party with all the Russians a few weeks back, the ex-marine and the Lithuanian guy, the one who loved knives, the one who had emigrated to study the military arts the American way, actually whispered and pointed not five feet from him, wondering to each other why he hadn’t spoken literally in hours. They cracked jokes about him, forgetting that he could hear despite remaining mute. He could hear without even watching their lips move.

“Why haven’t you said anything all night?”

“I’m listening.”

It’s not that he was nondescript. Not overly handsome, he was at least memorable looking, tall and barrel-chested, with a broad round nose, glasses slightly crooked. Almost as if by choice he let conversations fall into silence until others would shuffle their feet and find excuses to go. Perhaps he seemed unfriendly. He liked it that way. There’s an inordinate pressure to say interesting things to people you don’t know, he thought. Or, more accurately, most folks prefer to form friendships in real time, while he preferred to take in impressions, ruminating over them at his leisure, and if all was according to his liking, introducing cordiality into his demeanor in the subsequent encounter. By then it was often too late. He wondered why people were slow to warm up to him. In fact, lately, they’d begun to develop an outright distaste for him.

It used to be that conversations seemed so cliché, the exchanges so choreographed. Didn’t we see this in a movie? Or do you call them films? He preferred conversations like amateur tennis matches, where he knew his opponent knew where she thought he’d lob it, so he volleyed elsewhere just to keep it interesting. He liked saying what needed to be said at any given conversational crossroad, regardless if it fit the persona he ought to want to convey. Sometimes these techniques failed, though it’s inaccurate to call them techniques, as if they were so by forethought or design. Call it an inclination. But it was an inclination that required through practice keeping the wit sharp and the rhetorical abilities keen.

It sounds pretentious, but it wasn’t not really. It was all in pursuit of attention to detail.

As he spoke less, the words he heard his mouth speak more often disappointed him than not. They didn’t capture the substance of the thought. The thought may not have been particularly grand or well-crafted. It may have been under construction, and he resented being expected to give voice to it before completion. Sometimes, it had seemed like an interesting thought, worthy of words, when it was floating around inside his skull, but as he uttered it he became bored with himself mid-sentence. He suspected that this was a result of his consciousness becoming more fluid—asynchronous? chaotic? alingual. Whatever its cause, the effect was a real awkward manner in his interactions and, as it increased, an increased avoidance of social contact at all.

It would be a sad story, but during those same years, he became a much more eloquent writer, and those who read his writing thought him fascinating, his luxurious words as slippery and inviting to the bare feet of open eyes as a river-wet bed of algae-smoothed boulder bits, mountain-hewn, time-strewn. Writing allowed him the time to find the right word, the time to structure the idea, to frame and embellish it, to buff and wax it. And as people who met him through correspondence grew more emphatic in their admiration of him, and people who met him in person grew increasingly ambivalent, he began to wonder about the divide. It made him smile, though at times it caused him worry. He did not consider it wrong, merely unconventional and hard to explain.

This time, The Economist wraps some numbers and some very thoughtful analysis around the two-pronged question of income-inequality and social mobility in the United States. This is something that we rabid left-wingers have been blathering on about for years, so it’s nice to see some in the miserable science make an attempt (1) to quantify it, and (2) to point out that social mobility is a prerequisite for functional capitalism. When the rich get richer because of family connections, regardless of their abilities, and the poor get poorer because the rope is being pulled up out of their reach—and further, when the rich align themselves with those in power, or as is increasingly common, when the rich pass on power to their children behind closed doors so that it never comes out into the open market—we end up with nothing but an unregulated plutocracy masquerading as a democratic republic. Bill Clinton was probably the last poor boy done good we’ll see in high office for a long time. And no, Gonzales doesn’t count, because the real point is not that there exists one anecdotal case of a poor immigrant kid making it to Attorney General, but that most folks who aren’t born into wealth are finding the impediments to affordable education and well-paying jobs increasingly insuperable.

The Economist’s conclusion? “A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

The full text of the article is here.

According to army literature, American soldiers should deliver the following message before searching a house: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we must search your house to make sure you are safe from anti-Iraqi forces [AIF].”

—in The Economist

Ok, so by now you’ve figured out that I only read one magazine, and I should stop worrying that this blog, on those rare occasions when I post, is starting to sound more and more like an Economist cheerleader. I don’t care. Amid the glut of pulp news being coughed out at you by Fox and CNN and the rest, intelligent assessments of the world around us are hard to come by. With “Support Our Troops” ribbons coming out everyone’s asses and every news channel under the sun portraying the plight of our noble democratic-missionary warriors who risk their lives spreading freedom to ingrate freedom-haters, the first two paragraphs of this week’s missive from the The Economist’s Iraq correspondent serve to remind us of some of the realities of fighting a war that the prime time often whitewashes:

There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hand, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sergeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: “Back this bitch up, motherfucker!”

The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: “Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.” In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

I guess that is kind of a shame, killing a lot of innocent people. Good thing it’s happening so far away. From here, if you turn your iPod up loud enough, you can’t even hear them screaming.

The article continues, praising the abilities of our well-trained and technologically-unparalleled military to fight the war it must now fight. But the well-chosen quotes from the troops remind us (for we had actually forgotten) that the particular Americans likely to volunteer for military service these days are the ones who were raised on the daytime-ratings mob morality of Jerry Springer and Montel Williams in the ’90s.

Yet armies can be good at war-fighting or good at peacekeeping but rarely good at both. And when America’s well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise. At peacekeeping, peace-enforcing or policing, call it what you will, they are often inept. Even the best of them seem ignorant of the people whose land they are occupying—unsurprisingly, perhaps, when practically no American fighters speak Arabic. And, typically, the marine battalion in Ramadi has only four translators. Often American troops despair of their Iraqi interlocutors, observing that they “are not like Americans”.

American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. “It’s not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it,” he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: “Where’s your black mask?” and “Bitch, where’s the guns?” In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. “That tells us the people here are OK,” said Corporal Robert Joyce.

On a darker note, here’s what Bruce Jackson, writing in Counterpunch has to say about images of death in the media...

Since the tsunami hit, the mainstream press and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast and cable network news programs, have been chockfull of images of the freshly dead. We’ve seen images of bodies of children and adults where the water left them; we’ve seen them arranged in neat rows; we’ve seen them bagged and stacked.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was. TV executives say that is because their images come into people’s homes where children might come upon them unawares, so they have to limit the reality on the airwaves. Hardly anyone believes they have the children in mind when they plan their programs.

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we’ve seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks. Most of the people murdered that day were pulverized or vaporized, but not all. Some of the most horrific images were the sidewalk remains of those who leapt from the World Trade Center’s upper stories before the structures collapsed. The New York Times published a photo of a man diving, his body almost tranquil in flight, the implications of the image horrific. But nothing at ground level. None of the print press and none of the mainstream electronic press published anything at ground level. You could find those images on some hard-to-find web sites: skin and heads with insides elsewhere, with bodies looking like punctured balloons.

Those images showed what every cop and combat soldier knows: violent death trivializes and shifts to someplace you do not want to go every single thing you ever thought about life. But the press—individually or in some collaborative council—decided those images were too much for you to bear, so (unless you roamed the web) you never saw them.

Likewise the carnage in the Holy Land. How many reports have you read of Palestinian bombers with explosives strapped to their bodies, perhaps with added layers of nails to provide extra shrapnel to maim and mutilate whoever wasn’t close enough to be killed outright? How many reports have you read of Israeli tanks blowing up inhabited buildings or nervous Israeli soldiers shooting down ordinary people on their way to work or children on their way to school? And how many Holy Land images of shattered bodies, of a hand, a jaw, an emptied skull, of guts draped over the hood of a car have you seen?

Likewise the carnage suffered by US troops in Iraq. You’ve read about the numbers of U.S. dead and mutilated, and perhaps (if you watch PBS “Newshour”) you’ve seen head and shoulders studio photographs of the most recently killed soldiers. But how many images have you seen of American soldiers dead on the road, their eyes and mouths open, if they still had eyes and mouths? How many images have you see of the limbs blown off the thousands of amputees now filling VA hospitals? How many images have you see of body parts blasted into the roofs and seats and floors of Humvees they hadn’t gotten around to armorplating?

And likewise the far greater carnage suffered by Iraqi civilians. A study published in the British medical journal The Lancet put the dead civilians resulting from the American war of choice in Iraq somewhere around 100,000. Critics say that is off by at least 100%: the US has killed only 50,000 Iraqi civilians, they say. The scholars who did the Lancet study say they were conservative in their numbers, that there are probably far more civilian dead who remain uncounted because there is no one responsible for counting them and no one interested in counting them. However you figure it, there are a huge number of Iraqis who died because of American violence, and a lot of Iraqis who died because of insurgent violence. For every dead Iraqi, how many mutilated Iraqis are there? Two? Five? Ten? Twenty?

Where are their pictures, those dead and mutilated Iraqis? How many images have you seen of Iraqi children blown to dripping pieces of flesh, puddles of blood, scattered white chunks of bone? How many images have you seen of Iraqis who have lost hands, feet, eyes, jaws when bombs when off, when machine guns fired, when mortars fell, when vehicles blew up?

You’ve gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations, but precious few images. The images are parked in the periphery of the information spectrum, on web sites hardly anyone visits. Time doesn’t publish them, and neither does Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post or the Buffalo News. You won’t see them on CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, or CNN.

Why? Because the daily press and evening news are so attuned to our sensitivity or sensibility they just don’t want to offend us? Because their editors are old and literary enough to be crippled by T.S. Eliot’s fey line, “Humankind cannot stand very much reality?” Or because they just don’t want us to know what the words they hurl at us are really about?

I’ll tell you how powerful pictures are in a world of words. Three photographs changed American opinion about the Vietnam war: Eddie Adams’s photograph of Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of a handcuffed prisoner on a Saigon street, Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc Phan Thi running naked down a Vietnamese road after her skin had been burnt off by napalm, and Ronald Haeberle’s photographs of the slaughter at My Lai. People in the U.S. saw those images and they said, “What the fuck are we doing there? Who are we when we can be doing things like that?” Those images trumped the politicians’ words.

Think about what the Abu Ghraib jpgs did to American opinion about the war in Iraq. They’re clumsy, low-res, amateur tourist photographs of ordinary folks having a little fun torturing some other folks nobody (they’d been told) cares about. And those low-res jpgs blew the cover off what the U.S. was really doing to Iraqis, what the U.S. government really thought about Iraqis. After those photos became commonplace, who—other than those idiots and ideologues who have shut off the upper stories of their brains—can look you in the eye and say, “We are in Iraq to make life better for Iraqis?”

But it is less and less likely that we’ll have an Eddie Adams or Nick Ut or Ron Haeberle showing us what we need to see to understand what we’re really doing in Iraq. During the US invasion of Iraq, almost all press photographers were imbedded, dependent on U.S. military support for their survival. (Unembedded press sometimes saw more than embedded press, but they had a far higher death rate.) Even with all the fancy technology that permitted a photographer on the ground to upload images directly to a satellite, few images that would piss off anyone in power ever made it off the ground, and the nearly all of the few that did were killed by editors stateside. Nowadays, photographers can’t go anywhere without a platoon of soldiers to protect them: they can’t roam the countryside, they can’t roam the streets of Baghdad or any other major Iraqi city. They don’t see very much and they are very careful about what they photograph, and their editors back home are even more careful about which of their images you and I get to see.