It has been over a week now since landfall by Katrina. It is time to speak of those who have lost their lives in this catastrophe (past time some would say) yet speaking for the dead is not a task the living can take lightly.
We speak of them, yes. Their numberless lives lost are referred to in passing by our media, anecdotes of their bloated bodies floating in the cesspool that is New Orleans are occasionally alluded to, but they are not the main subject of the conversation, merely a talking point for whatever argument some talking head on camera wishes to make about the severity of the disaster, or the lack of response by the government, or as a way to impress upon us the horror of the situation in order to engender donations for whatever charitable organization has center stage on our television screens at the moment.
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But speaking for the dead? Very little of that has occurred even as our News Anchors and Pundits and Politicians scramble for sound bites against a backdrop of the swollen carcass of a once great city, perhaps the most original and unique of all American cities. Not that I blame them. Speaking for the dead is not an easy task.
Anyone who has ever had to prepare a eulogy for one of the dead knows how difficult it is. You begin by trying to think of ways to sum up the life that has ended in the fifteen or thirty or sixty minutes that you have been allotted. Soon, however, you realize that no one, no matter how familiar, no matter how intimate with the deceased, is up to that task. You realize that the person you have been asked to speak for is essentially a mystery, that the web of relationships and behaviors, the successes and failures, the great and the flawed aspects of his or her character, are too extensive, too tangled, to complex for any living soul to comprehend, much less explain in a few neat and tidy paragraphs delivered in an appropriate tone.
So you fall back on your own experiences with the departed, trying to use a few set pieces from a life you have witnessed as a metaphor for the whole. And again you fail. In the end, you realize you are speaking for the living, for yourself, and for those who are grieving. You are left with speaking of the dead, not for them. And if that job is impossible to accomplish with respect to a single individual, how much more impossible is it to achieve for thousands. It as if you could perceive a myriad of infinities, each larger than the last, but all equally out of your grasp.
No, speaking for the dead is not a task for the living. It is a task only the dead themselves can undertake, through the mute testimony of their still and lifeless bodies. But in order to be heard, they must have an audience. And there’s the rub, as they say.
It is not pleasant to view a corpse, even one beautified and deodorized by the technicians of our modern funeral industry. There is a disconnect in our brains as we stare down at one, for we still see the human form: the arms, the legs, a chest and abdomen. A face with lips and lidded eyes, a nose, a forehead, and hair well coiffed, looking better, perhaps, than it did in life. Yet, we can sense that what made that corpse a human being has fled. The animate force has left behind inanimate matter, and though its shape is that of a living creature, we recognize the vast gulf between what once was and what now is. And therein lies the horror and revulsion we often experience, as well as the grief.
Yet, in our society we still have viewings of the dead. Whether the casket is open at the funeral service itself, or in the days prior at a funeral home, we still insist upon offering the dead our last gaze. In many ways it is the last chance the dead will ever have to converse with us, as we stand on our side of the divide and they on the other. That this communication is wordless, that it resides more in the imagination of the one who views, does not make it any less real or any less powerful. The dead have no further need to speak to us, but we do have a need to hear them speak.
What they have to say is not for me to tell you, or for you to tell me. The message the dead convey to each of us is personal even as it is universal. It can not be summed up in any essay, no matter how clever the writer, or how heartfelt his sympathies. Nonetheless, I believe it to be essential. I believe that the message each of us receives from the dead is vital to how we go forward with our own lives, both in the public arena and in the private sphere. But in order to hear that message we must first have the opportunity to bear witness. To put it bluntly, we must see the bodies.
It is ironic that, in our culture, the level of bloodshed and dead bodies has risen to new heights in our cinema and video games, even as our real life exposure to the dead has diminished. We are free to witness the death throes of numerous actors, and we are encouraged to examine in great detail heads being cut off and bodies being mutilated, blood oozing from artfully crafted wounds, as long as it what we view is a work of fiction. After all, there is profit to be made by it.
Yet, when real life offers us the same deadly visual effects, only this time with real corpses, our media and our government shield us from bearing witness, putatively on the basis that we will be unable to bear the emotional traumas that such dead bodies will present us. We are protected from these dreadful images of the dead in the interest of protecting our children, or common standards of decency, or some other honeyed platitude that falls falsely from the mouths of our media minders. We hear them describe the terrors, the atrocities, the dead bodies, but we are kept behind the curtain, while the grown-ups among us perform the rituals of modern mass media reportage in 21st Century America.
Think of it. What bodies (or body parts) do you remember seeing from all the 9/11 coverage? We saw our President in his bullhorn moment atop the rubble, we saw the airplanes crash into, and the fall of, the Two Towers in endless replays, and we heard the names of the dead spoken in solemn proceedings accompanied by the single striking of a bell, but when did we ever see any bodies?
Instead, we were told what to think and what to feel. Great paeans were sung to the need to rally round the flag, to love of country, to seeking justice against the evildoers. We were told that that this was all on behalf of the dead, those courageous sacrificial heroes (never victims) who surely would want us to do what our President demanded. All while any image of the dead was kept off our television screens and the pages of our newspapers.
And think also of the war in Iraq, that central front in the War on Terror. Here, again, the images of bodies are few and far between in our mainstream media. We are told we are winning the war. We are shown beautiful pictures of awe inspiring explosions, and the aftermath of that destruction, the rubble of collapsed buildings. But bodies? They are hard to find in our news shows and news magazines (though not in foreign media), whether bodies of Iraqi children, women or men, or those of our own troops. For a time we were at least shown portraits of our dead soldiers as they appeared in life, spiffy and handsome in their dress uniforms, pictures taken before they met their fate in Iraq, but after a few months that came to an end as well.
The government did its part, as well, to shield us from the dead in Iraq, even prohibiting the showing of photos of flag draped coffins returning to the states for burial. Imagine. Not just the bodies of the dead, but the symbolic totems of their deaths were removed from our eyes. Even that was considered too revealing! Yet no one in the media questioned it, and no one questioned the absence of our leaders from the military funerals of those who gave their last full measure of devotion to advance the cause of . . . what exactly? No one questioned that either.
Now we have Katrina. A devastating loss of life in New Orleans and the gulf states. And we are shown – destroyed buildings, rubble, before and after satellite photos of the storm surge — the extent of the property damage? Our own President, in referring to this tragedy refers to the loss of Senator Lott’s home in Mississippi, as if the uncounted bodies floating atop the floodwaters did not exist. Even the coverage of the worst refugee situations (the Superdome, the convention center) tended to shy away from the dead bodies laid out on the pavement or covered in sheets sitting in the very wheelchairs in which they died of starvation and dehydration. We heard about them, oh yes indeed. But did we see them?
No, once again, our government and our corporate controlled media have kept the bodies safely out of sight. We are being kept from the only witnesses with first hand knowledge of these twin catastrophes: those who have died. Secrets are being hidden, my friends, while the same old lies are being re-cycled with fresh new scents to cover up the stink.
It is time, as I said at the beginning of this diary, to speak for the dead. The dead in Iraq and the dead from Katrina.
Let us see the bodies Mr. President. Let us see the bodies that everyone else around the globe has seen. Lets us see the flag draped coffins of our soldiers. Let us see the mutilated bodies of Iraqis victimized by your squalid war. Let us view the bodies floating in the waters of New Orleans, or lying under the hot Louisiana sun. Let us bear witness to what the dead have to tell us without the comforting babble of pundits and politicians. Let us decide for ourselves what message they choose to convey.
Let the dead speak for themselves.
