Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh Nineteen, Nuh-nuh Nineteen
Donald Rumsfeld has been harping about the news media's exaggeration of deaths in Iraq and the severity of sectarian violence in that country. Regardless of who is accurate in this instance (and Clinton's former Pentagon spokesperson summed up the spat best by saying Rumsfeld's complaints are a colossal waste of energy) a whole lot of people are dying.
Given that arguments like Rumsfeld"s tend to generalize (and thus dilute) or make abstract (and thus numb) the violence of war I was drawn to CNN's list of deaths in Iraq among coalition forces: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/index.html There you will find photos and age and hometown and military job and how each died. Despite the vastness of the list (2500 plus dead) and the scarcity of details, it is profoundly effective (for me, at least) in turning argument or statistics into people.
By their very absence on a similar list, the names and photos and details of the seemingly countless Iraqi (civilian) deaths looms large, as well.
The headline of this blog comes, as you music literates will no doubt know, from an '80s tune in which a deep voiced announcer is inserted into the music and lyrics to explain the average age of Vietnam soldiers was 19. That began playing in my head as I scrolled down the age column of the list of coaliton war dead.
Rumsfeld needs to go fuck himself and then use his "airtime" for more meaningful discourse.
Given that arguments like Rumsfeld"s tend to generalize (and thus dilute) or make abstract (and thus numb) the violence of war I was drawn to CNN's list of deaths in Iraq among coalition forces: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/index.html There you will find photos and age and hometown and military job and how each died. Despite the vastness of the list (2500 plus dead) and the scarcity of details, it is profoundly effective (for me, at least) in turning argument or statistics into people.
By their very absence on a similar list, the names and photos and details of the seemingly countless Iraqi (civilian) deaths looms large, as well.
The headline of this blog comes, as you music literates will no doubt know, from an '80s tune in which a deep voiced announcer is inserted into the music and lyrics to explain the average age of Vietnam soldiers was 19. That began playing in my head as I scrolled down the age column of the list of coaliton war dead.
Rumsfeld needs to go fuck himself and then use his "airtime" for more meaningful discourse.
posted by Heipel at
10:45 AM
1 Comments:
I still can't believe how they ended up being there. I hope they could liste to the usual phrase. War is not the answer. But then, it only happens in the perfect world we are illustrating in our head. let's just hope it won't get worse and things get better. But in order to do that, there's gotta be a lot of chanages...
Peace!
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