A tale of two horrors

The Virginia Tech massacre made America shudder. But will it awaken us to the nightmare of suffering in Iraq?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

April 24, 2007 | It is every parent's worst nightmare. Your child is at school, going about his or her business, doing the ordinary, everyday things that are woven into your heart. Then someone who lives in an invisible universe of hatred suddenly appears and starts shooting. And the bullet that ends your child's life ends yours too. You may live on. But your old life, the life in which the world, or God, or whatever you stand on, seemed to be on your side -- that world no longer exists.

The Talmud says those who save one life save the world. Four hundred years ago, John Donne said the same thing, in reverse. "No man is an island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." We like to think that we embrace these teachings, with the similar teachings of Jesus Christ and Mohammed and the Buddha, with the compassion for human suffering that lies at the core of every great religion.

But most of the time, we don't. In the age of universal media, it's impossible. In the modern world, death is at once too ubiquitous and too distant. The morning paper brings us dozens of deaths, each of which ends a miraculous human life, each of which diminishes us all. And we feel nothing. There are simply too many of them.

But there are deeper reasons. Our society pushes death offstage. Even when those close to us die, they usually do so in a rationalized, bureaucratic hospital setting which shrink-wraps death. The inexplicable mystery becomes as ordinary as a corporate newsletter from beyond.

It isn't just our society as a whole that is responsible for this. We demand it. Death is the great unthought, the face we don't want to see. As the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in "The Denial of Death," denying death is wired into humans. Our very personalities, our religion, our sense of the heroic -- all, Becker argued, are a response to our fundamental terror at our finitude.

Certain public events, however, can shock us into a confrontation with death. The Virginia Tech massacre, in its metaphysical obscenity, forced us to take notice. With our defenses momentarily torn down, the subterranean river of simple fellow feeling flowed to the surface: sorrow for the young lives lost, admiration for the teacher who saved his students' lives at the cost of his own, compassion for the victims' families.

As humans do, we try to ensure that this awful spectacle of death was not for nothing. Hence our national soul-searching and debate. How could this happen? Is our society somehow to blame? Our values? Our gun laws? What could we have done differently to save this tortured soul?

But half a world away, similar horrors are happening every day -- horrors, unlike Seung-Hui Cho's slaughter, for which America bears direct responsibility. And we feel nothing.

On Sunday afternoon, 23 Iraqis were pulled out of their buses outside Mosul as they were on their way home from work, stood up against a wall, and shot to death. Their crime belonged to the Yezidis, a religious sect. The story appeared on page A-6 of the New York Times.

In Iraq, where dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people are brutally murdered every day, the Virginia Tech horror would be a respite. Yet we pay no attention. We put them in a little closed box marked "casualties of war."

The Iraq war is a tragic demonstration of one of the oldest, saddest truths in history: Victims often become executioners. Bloodshed and tragedy all too often lead not to wisdom and compassion but to more bloodshed and tragedy. The sadness and sickness in America's soul today is not just that we launched an unjustified war, and betrayed the humanity of the Iraqis we said we wanted to help, but that we betrayed our own humanity -- and the memory of those who died on Sept. 11.

The nightmare that is Iraq was born in the nightmare that was 9/11. A self-righteous president learned all the wrong lessons from that national tragedy. He truly believed he was honoring the dead and preventing another atrocity. But by launching an unjustified war, one that predictably went terribly wrong, he proved that he understood nothing about what war is -- and, ultimately, about what death is.

Bush's America is righteous. Baptized in the blood of the 9/11 victims, it has been born again. In its sanctity, it can do anything. This is an old story. Before they go to war, nations always insist that they are blameless victims. It is essential that a nation's people be convinced that God and right are on their side and that the enemy is evil and monstrous. The powerful drugs of patriotism and moral supremacy are necessary to sell the upcoming horror show.

Bush believed after 9/11 that he was called by God to fight a great war against Islamist evil. But Iraq is just the latest war to show that those who decide to play God can create not heaven on earth, but hell.

Next page: It's hard not to fantasize about killing Cho before he killed someone else