DON'T BE TOO EAGER TO DEAL IN DEATH AND JUDGEMENT
‘Death to the dentist,’ cries my Facebook, to a chorus of likes, shares and supporting comments. Friends have said it, so too Piers Morgan and PETA. And why not? In the digital age every mistake is retained forever, ready to be regurgitated at a moment’s notice forever. With lion’s blood forever on his hands, this guy might as well be dead. He’s dead to us. It makes a uniquely modern type of sense, right?
Have we always been so ready to deal in death? Maybe not. Perhaps it’s because we can now be so involved in whatever the latest outrageous act is. None of us knew Cecil the lion at the beginning of the week, but now almost all of us have seen him plodding around in a kindly and regal way. We’ve all now heard the stories of how Cecil was lured out of his safe haven into open ground where he was pierced by an arrow and then, much later, shot and killed. We’ve seen pictures of the evil dentist, grinning with giant white teeth, shimmering like a full moon. We’ve became involved and invested in that death. Cecil was our friend (albeit posthumously) so: ‘Death to the dentist!’
I don’t know when we become so wanton with other people’s lives, but I know when I first noticed it: New Years Eve 2006. On that day a leaked video showing a terrified man being led to the gallows while people spat and hit him with shoes went viral. It probably wasn’t the first execution I saw online, but it was the first I saw on the news, and the first that people we’re joking about. The man who was hanged was Saddam Hussein, who deserves death perhaps more than anyone in last few decades, but did we individually need to lust for his blood?
Perhaps we shared Shi’ite Iraq’s giddy excitement over the dictator’s death because we knew him, as we know Cecil. We’d seen handycam and mobile phone footage in Iraq of IED’s and car bombs. We saw the blood-splatted aftermaths of those attacks too. We’d not only seen that war on the news, but in our Facebook feeds. The fight against him and his type felt proximal, even though it wasn’t.
The Syrian conflict (not the first freedom-loving-citizenry versus evil-despot iteration, but the gritty Chris Nolan-style ISIS reboot) is immediate for us also. As we watch the latest ISIS propaganda video, we feel our own throats open, and our bodies fly towards the street having been tossed from a building. So: ‘Death to ISIS and all their supporters!’ That sense of immediacy is probably also informing our attitudes to refugees.
Death to Osama bin Laden though, right? We’ve all seen those planes slam into the World Trade Center more times than we’ve seen Luke Skywalker make the trench run. Surely bin Laden’s death we can enjoy.
I’m not so sure about that. When it was revealed that SEAL Team Six could have taken bin Laden alive relatively easily, it seemed to me that the perfect outcome would have been for him to end up in a bureaucratic hell, before a literal one. No one was ever so demystified than Slobodan Milosovic as he tried to defend himself the dock in The Hague, each day looking more like a raving hobo, and each day being more embarrassed by the power of civilized society.
A long, exhaustive trial stopping frequently so we can give bin Laden whatever treatment he needed so he could stay alive long enough to be called to account for every death he caused; I think that would have been one hell of a triumph. Then, if he was alive at the end of it all, bin Laden could have spent his final months alone musing on the real power of a civilized society, which is not a capacity for barbarity, but for process.
