Tags
- A killer-soldier, allegedly of the Free Syrian Army, knifes the heart out of the chest of a battlefield casualty and bites into it.
- In numerous videos: beheading.
- From combat footage: jading, numbing recordings, from clinical green-screen Apache strikes to anti-tank weapon and RPG-abetted tank kills.
- In the news: the aftermath of bombings of every kind.
And you are there!
Watching.
Already this morning — by 5 a.m. — I have either seen or been shown (both) drone footage of Taliban types planting a roadside bomb and, a day later, footage of an army vehicle being blown up at the same spot (while what looks like a mine sweeper stands off about 25 yards ahead of the blast).
Could have been a training clip, a how-not-to, punched up online as “testimony” to defense contracting conspiracy.
* * *
About ten years ago in the forums of a completely unrelated industry (fashion photography), some then idiot posted a link to the green screen cockpit recording of an attack against Muslim terrorists transferring weapons out of the back of a pickup truck. Outside of Hollywood, which had the inside track on the look of night vision technology, few civilians had ever seen anything like it, and the clinical “range control” chatter and aim-and-shoot routine may have added to the outrage of aesthetes and tall girls.
Ah, those were more innocent days!
The imaginative wonders supplied by Stephan King notwithstanding.
🙂
It seems yesterday’s idiot would be a great — and entertaining! — Facebook buddy today.
* * *
The ever present advanced guard of sophisticates might argue that the world is the world, dude, get used to it.
No problem.
I have gotten used to it, and, dude, that’s the problem.
* * *
As we drink the world through our eyes and ears planted before hundreds of millions of computer monitors and gadget screens, should we wonder about the depth of our own depravity and jadedness in our having sought, perhaps, to see and hear too much?
Setting out to “track” conflict and related themes, whatever the motivation*, necessarily involves turning up unpleasant media and engaging as witness and commentator with the tragedies of the day, but one needs also to defend one’s humanity, more specifically an empathy with others, a sustained sympathy for the suffering, a whole response to encounter, even and especially online, and that as opposed to a clinical, jaded, and numbed reduction to political or other engineering devoid of sentiment.
So here I may be ready for some extended web-free “R and R”.
The Internet won’t care if I absent it awhile: it is a cold medium, more the invention of engineers than of poets, more the province of marketers, programmers, and pollsters intent on dipping into lives and pockets for gain than of artists and scholars delving into language and exploring the contours of the heart for a greater good.
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*Between advanced degree work in English and social psychology, a stint within the Office of Naval Research (public affairs environment, no clearance), enthusiasm for writing, and a well rounded American experience, I happen to think I’ve been cued and cut out for this sort of thing.
Associated Reference
BBC. “Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’. May 14, 2013.
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