Saturday, April 2, 2011

Thanks to Rolling Stone

While the cover of the last issue of Rolling Stone features a "pop icon"with a beautiful ass, the most beautiful picture is within the pages that offer a photographic record of the brutality that soldiers have indulged in.  It is a gross indulgence, a total compromise of the human condition, it is sub human.  It is more egregious when we consider how arrogantly our media had, from the start, asserted our superior grasp of Democracy.  The mere sight of the word exudes a sadness.  Politics is not just pragmatic, it is also spiritual.  The movement to desensitize us, all of us, to what matters in this world, to the necessity for compassion, is fighting and winning, even though they will never win the spiritual battle.  I look at the photographs of these soldiers who pose triumphantly above the mutilated body of a young Afghan male  They betray the enormous weakness of their being.  It is not simply the obvious cruelty, the overwhelming cowardice of the soldiers, but how they will never triumph. I know I am naive and ignorant to their pain, the pain and suffering of the soldiers.  It is perversion that causes one, or, in these times, many, to overlook the innate value of life.  Life, today, is a politicized concept in the for profit model.  A premium is placed on the brand new life for its maleable quality, for its helplessness, for its delightful distraction, its beautiful folly.  Who speaks out for the value of this young man?  Who speaks for the value of his self determination, or for anyone's, when we have the raw proof of what will become of human life on earth? 
This human corpse, bloodied, mutilated, has kept the evidence of its beauty.  Its a handsome face that resembles someone I used to love.  This is the face of someone whom I could have loved, I could have met, and now I will not be able to.  He is beautiful, I cannot emphasize this enough.  Maybe this is why they could only take away his pinky..if only they had the sense not to kill him, or any of the others...who is being foolish now?  They are soldiers in a wholly unprincipled war, it is a battle not for principle, but for resources, a purely political battle. Killing is the order of the day and what we see in these pictures is the best of it. Over here we can barely uphold the veneer of a concerted hatred for any one enemy. One day it is Al Qaeda, the next it is the Taliban, it was weapons of mass destruction, and there are those very uncreative people who try to incite a mindless riot about Muslim Extremists.  It is an absurd task, the one of developing propaganda.  It becomes dangerous when people, especially policy makers, become so incensed as to devote too much time and attention to this when the massive violence and destruction wreaked across the globe is the destructive force of the most powerful war machine on the earth.  It is wrong that they would abuse this privilege...no, it is wrong that we the people have offered up this privilege so readily.  War is a crime and it reduces people, humans, to corpses and sub human creatures. 
I can only look at the beautiful face of this dead body.  There is beauty in death, in weakness...there is beauty where brutish and artless violence is not.