Writers on Suffrance

"Recently we have been extending the reach of democracy by killing people in the hope that the survivors might get to vote"

"Killing people, especially killing people at a distance, is something we now do very well," barbed Inga Clendinnen, startling her "Republic of Letters" audience with sudden ferocity.

Our inveterate and ever-pensive SheepOverboard editor sent me hop-scotching along to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in Melbourne, Australia. Yet another assignment, I presumed, to sycophantically serenade influential artistes and forlornly ingratiate both he and this, his insipid instrument. But I digress.

To the great relief of our starving suffocating intellects Ms Clendinnen denounced our expectations by renouncing her intention to deliver "a winsome little speech suitable to the occasion.." Gratefully awed, we emulated dumfounded spot-lit kangaroos, entranced for the duration.

Inga's our kinda gal, might she forgive me saying!

" We are .. encouraged not to think beyond a certain point. We know that when armed men erupt into unarmed villages, there is likely to be rape, pillage, killings. But if it’s done by the other side, we classify these acts as unattractive tribal survivals, or if it’s done by our own men, murmur about lack of leadership or lack of education.

" And meanwhile the landmines keep exploding and the bombs - smart or stupid - keep falling.

" I think it is this induced moral myopia that allows our exhilarated waging of technologized war, the culpable vagueness of our aims, above all our vagueness regarding the consequences of what we are doing. We used to believe that torturing people - the wilful infliction of pain on a powerless other - was wrong, even when they might know something we might like to know. Now ‘rendering suspects amenable to interrogation’ has slithered into the standard repertoire of tactics in the war against terror."

Ms Clendinnen heedfully rubbed our noses in the great sin of these selfish times, the bribing of 'western civilization,' its citizens now full-bellied, trinket-laden whores and minions to the power-broking ideologues and their callous two-legged rottweilers. Not merely inured are we to the woes of barbarized foreigners, but too comfortable to care. This was not, however, her exact message, addressing the audience in somewhat different tones.

[Our favorite sport at SheepOverboard , it must be said, is haranguing wayward Googlers :-]

" .. evidence is rapidly accumulating that taking pleasure in other people’s pain is not against human nature. So is there a difference between them and us? We used to think there was, and that the difference was called ‘progress’ or even ‘civilization’. In the wake of September 11th it is increasingly difficult to believe that, given the dreadful celerity of that resort to torture and then the solemn deformation of law to protect what had already become established practice."

Conscience-pricking now relinquished to photojournalists, Ms Clendinnen laments, by writers' concordance to sloganeering"a picture's worth a thousand words" spin from marketing 101, and the game appears over: "War journalists have lost their independence and, with the world arranged as it is, I do not think they will soon get it back."

Writers, Ms Clendinnen advises, must ".. reengage with new fervor, if less hope; with that old task of stretching human imaginations far enough to forgive difference. We have to stand witness to the importance of individual human lives, and so make our masters keep a closer accounting of the costs of deliberately inflicted suffering and death."

The second Iraq war revealed reporters tightly controlled by the Pentagon's astonishing adeptness in at least one area: media management. The administration needn't have bothered, their job already done by press HQ. Six o'clock newstainment, an incoherent joke, comprises a rambling cocktail of traffic reports from choppers with astonishing camera zooms, weather presenters' circuses-in-miniature promoting all but the weather, brazen derelict headline dash through crucial national politics to the bloated sport segment, shameless promotion of tonight's network programming, an idiot's cuisine of mock-soap heart-soul-anger classics - only the footage differs - and the endless deft sprinkling of key words "gone horribly wrong road rage outrage terrorist alert uproar" ... but I, again, digress.

It is this reporter's loathing for even our public broadcasters' fawning mimicry of corporate newscasters - shining their focus on whichever trivia might earn ratings, value-added news service be damned - that makes him pound the plastic alphabet to the wee smalls in a ranting frenzy of frustration. Were only his neighbor's lights burning with similar fervor the world might change overnight.

Chiding is my grail, a beacon in a sea of signs. When someone with the mental wherewithal stands up to be counted, SheepOverboard latches on!

Inga, thank you for the sore reminder, the call to arms. From our lowly perch - our commiserable little eZine commotion - we can only wonder at the searing clarity your mind projects, scoring civilization's skyline with blazing commonsense and uncommon sensibility.

Were we (the Sheep of Overboard) au fait generating an iota of original value to the Republic of Letters, or even to the unfashionable lesser-realms of the Internet we haunt, it would flood my editor's heart with warmth and excite, more than a little, his dim mind.

If only.

On Photo-journalists

For a long time, we writers thought that indifference to or pleasure in the pain of others could be eroded by the realisation that people strange to us are humans too. It seemed a reasonable belief; few families tortured their own, and when they do the dirty business comes wrapped in elaborate, usually religious, justifications. What we in the Republic of Letters had been trying to do for that long time (I try not to think how long) was to effect the imaginative expansion of familial sensibilities to include distant others.

However, more recently I think we have de-facto relinquished that task to photographers, understandably. War photographers used to manage it with beautiful economy, beginning with those famous American Civil War photographs of the obscene flesh heaps left after battles which would soon be airbrushed into occasions of sacrificial glory.

Photography helped to end a war in Vietnam. But over these last five, ten years, especially with the second Iraq war, television and print journalists have lost their freedom. We see a great deal of triumphalism but remarkably little violence, while the few brief scenes we are allowed to see—fathers weeping over children, funerals—are simply too exotic for us, we’re distanced by the wailing, the beating of breasts, not drawn closer.

Among the last high-impact photographs still appearing on American television are on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, on, unsurprisingly, the public broadcasting system, which sometimes ends with the photographs of the American soldiers confirmed dead in Iraq on that day; in silence, the faces, the names, the ages, the home towns, always going on for longer than we can bear. This being overtly a celebration of heroes, there can be no patriotic intervention, but it is also a celebration of the casual cruelty of this war.

And as we watch that sequence of young faces, we remember that the Iraqi dead are not counted at all except by those who love them and who will seek vengeance when they are able.

[ Meet Inga ]