Worth a 1000 words?

You did know that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed, right? Hard to miss it, as his dead face has been plastered across TV screens and newspaper front pages across the world.

No, that's not him on the right. It's Somebody Else. But you would think we were trying to give al Qaeda a bit of iconographic help in creating a martyr. (Help I reckon they don't need.) Because sure enough the widespread picture* of the deceased terrorist (and so he was by about all, non-al Qaeda, accounts) shows a striking resemblance in kind to the traditional images of Another who was also killed, and killed wrongly (by about all accounts, and, by accounts of his supporters, absolutely, even cosmically wrongly), by that famous, ancient empire-cum-superpower using the means they reserved for those they counted as "terrorists"-- that is, they crucified him. (Is death by F-16 cleaner?)

I do not IN ANY WAY equate these two--to the contrary. But the similarity in the pictures and the absolutely unacknowledged, unnoticed irony of it, are breathtaking. It is hardly the only irony we face these days.

The subject of Zarqawi's death and his famous death-picture came up Friday in a class I'm teaching. A student commented that CNN (or its equivalent) was running the picture almost continuously. He added, a bit apologetically, that in many areas of the world, the report would not be believed without such graphic evidence to confirm it.

I didn't get into it, but there are two problems with this explanation. The first is that this isn't really so necessary for American cable TV news-- something else, something not so nice, is at work here. And the second is, how would I know that this picture is that of the deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? As far as I can tell, it could be any dead Iraqi, killed by Americans or Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds or Zarqawi himself. It could be Jesus or any of the 10,000s of Mediterranean peoples crucified by the Romans, for that matter. (It certainly isn't a picture of the face of the child killed by an American Air Force pilot with the same bombs. "Collateral damage", yet again, proves less newsworthy. To show that picture, for me to mention it, is Not To Support Our Troops, and we wouldn't want that, now, would we?)

No, I think the graphic picture of the dead man's face is plastered across our media to satisfy some sort of blood-lust, genuine or perceived or being-manufactured, on our part. The problem here is not the GOP, and not (quite) the MSM (this piece notwithstanding). The problem is us. Why are some deaths OK and others not OK and others (like that Iraqi child) simply beside the point? Why should we care to show and to view his picture so glibly and not others at all? I am reminded of the '50s era lynching photographs: they were first taken as some sort of Kodak moment, but that is not how we would see them now (by, as they say, "all accounts").

In writing this post, I am finding that I do not quite have words yet to express how and why this disturbs me so. In part, I am disturbed because in this struggle against terrorism, I want my government and my nation (that is, us) to be clearly and distinctly and measurably different from them, and the plastering of this photo indicates how I do not think we are. We are seemingly to enjoy the spectacle of this death and simultaneously to ignore or diminish the reality and grief of the others. And, speaking in a largely Christian (so-called) nation as I am, I don't think that Zarqawi's look-alike would follow us there.

This picture is worth a thousand words (as the lack of other pictures also speaks): but which words? The words would make a difference: is it Jesus or Zarqawi we are seeing? Innocence or guilt? Innocents died in each case.

Or are we just enjoying the PG-13 show? That would be the worst of all.

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*And, no, I am not posting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's picture here. It's been done.