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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Monday, October 18, 2004
"Funny - the Fastest Guy In Iraq"
About a year and a half ago, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a friend of mine at work sent a video around by email. The video was entitled "Funny - the Fastest Guy in Iraq". It was about five seconds of what appeared to be nose-camera imagery from some sort of missile or bomb, the kind of footage we all became familiar with during the 1991 Gulf War. In those few seconds of noisy video imagery, you could see the vehicles that were the apparent targets of the strike, but that wasn't what made this video "funny". What was funny was the ghostly white silhouette in the shape of a man, who could be seen running away from the center of the image -- from the aim point of the weapon. Clearly, he was running in vain, because at that moment, the bomb was only a second or two away from impact. It's unlikely the guy in the video made it more than a few meters away from the blast.
As the video made its way around the office, I could hear a few of my coworkers chortling over it. But I didn't find the video funny. I found it tragic and unspeakably sad. The poor schmuck in the video was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For all we know, he'd never done anyone any harm, and in all probability was only in the army because it was the best job he could get. Not only was he blown to bits, which is surely a rotten way to die, but his last frightened moments were then sent around the world for the amusement of the people who paid to have him killed (i.e. us).
A few videos of this sort were in email and web circulation in the wake of the odd euphoria which was in the air at the close of the invasion, when it appeared as though the US forces had triumphed in Iraq. Now the war has taken on a decidedly different cast, and videos of a different sort are circulating. The jihadis are sending out videos of them beheading their Western captives. My friend hasn't sent any of these around. I don't think he'd consider any of these to be "funny". In fact, I'm sure he'd be disgusted by them. I certainly am. I haven't looked at any of those videos, and I'm not likely to.
I'm not saying that there's a moral equivalence between American and allied forces and the jihadis in Iraq that are opposing them. I'm not talking about who's the "good guys" and who's the "bad guys". I'm just saying that a snuff film is a snuff film. The one thing that all these videos have in common is that the victim is just some poor sap who got caught up in events and has no desire to be there, especially now that it's clear that these are his last moments. Who among us wants to be the star of such a sick video? Who deserves that?
I'm not writing this because I feel morally superior to the people I work with. My friend who passed the video around is a good man. I don't think he's cruel, or that he'd stand by in the face of cruelty. Sometimes we play Unreal Tournament together, and we laugh at each other when we blow each other into virtual bloody chunks. Perhaps at some level, he appears to have confused the video game world with the real world. More likely, I think, is that he was channeling a little bit of War Fever, which makes anything "we" do automatically good, and excuses anything done to "them", since "they" deserved it anyway.
War is a tragically necessary business, which must be undertaken sometimes to defend ourselves and our country, but it is also a dirty and disgusting business. We should always honor the men and women who stand up and put their lives on the line to defend our country. However, we should never glorify the act of killing, and war is ultimately about killing. It's a terrible thing to do. It's not fun, it's not funny, and it shouldn't be taken lightly. I believe that part of the reason we're in this tragic, wasteful, stupid, useless war in Iraq is because as a nation, we thought it would be fun, because we glorify war all too easily, and there is a part of our culture that wants war, because we have obscured that it's really just organized killing. I don't think my friend really thought about what he was watching when he sent his "funny" video around, any more than the American public really thought about what we were really getting into when we invaded Iraq.
0 comments
About a year and a half ago, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a friend of mine at work sent a video around by email. The video was entitled "Funny - the Fastest Guy in Iraq". It was about five seconds of what appeared to be nose-camera imagery from some sort of missile or bomb, the kind of footage we all became familiar with during the 1991 Gulf War. In those few seconds of noisy video imagery, you could see the vehicles that were the apparent targets of the strike, but that wasn't what made this video "funny". What was funny was the ghostly white silhouette in the shape of a man, who could be seen running away from the center of the image -- from the aim point of the weapon. Clearly, he was running in vain, because at that moment, the bomb was only a second or two away from impact. It's unlikely the guy in the video made it more than a few meters away from the blast.
As the video made its way around the office, I could hear a few of my coworkers chortling over it. But I didn't find the video funny. I found it tragic and unspeakably sad. The poor schmuck in the video was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. For all we know, he'd never done anyone any harm, and in all probability was only in the army because it was the best job he could get. Not only was he blown to bits, which is surely a rotten way to die, but his last frightened moments were then sent around the world for the amusement of the people who paid to have him killed (i.e. us).
A few videos of this sort were in email and web circulation in the wake of the odd euphoria which was in the air at the close of the invasion, when it appeared as though the US forces had triumphed in Iraq. Now the war has taken on a decidedly different cast, and videos of a different sort are circulating. The jihadis are sending out videos of them beheading their Western captives. My friend hasn't sent any of these around. I don't think he'd consider any of these to be "funny". In fact, I'm sure he'd be disgusted by them. I certainly am. I haven't looked at any of those videos, and I'm not likely to.
I'm not saying that there's a moral equivalence between American and allied forces and the jihadis in Iraq that are opposing them. I'm not talking about who's the "good guys" and who's the "bad guys". I'm just saying that a snuff film is a snuff film. The one thing that all these videos have in common is that the victim is just some poor sap who got caught up in events and has no desire to be there, especially now that it's clear that these are his last moments. Who among us wants to be the star of such a sick video? Who deserves that?
I'm not writing this because I feel morally superior to the people I work with. My friend who passed the video around is a good man. I don't think he's cruel, or that he'd stand by in the face of cruelty. Sometimes we play Unreal Tournament together, and we laugh at each other when we blow each other into virtual bloody chunks. Perhaps at some level, he appears to have confused the video game world with the real world. More likely, I think, is that he was channeling a little bit of War Fever, which makes anything "we" do automatically good, and excuses anything done to "them", since "they" deserved it anyway.
War is a tragically necessary business, which must be undertaken sometimes to defend ourselves and our country, but it is also a dirty and disgusting business. We should always honor the men and women who stand up and put their lives on the line to defend our country. However, we should never glorify the act of killing, and war is ultimately about killing. It's a terrible thing to do. It's not fun, it's not funny, and it shouldn't be taken lightly. I believe that part of the reason we're in this tragic, wasteful, stupid, useless war in Iraq is because as a nation, we thought it would be fun, because we glorify war all too easily, and there is a part of our culture that wants war, because we have obscured that it's really just organized killing. I don't think my friend really thought about what he was watching when he sent his "funny" video around, any more than the American public really thought about what we were really getting into when we invaded Iraq.
