Five Unconnected Anecdotes About Killing
I was at a storytelling event Wednesday night where a former University of Tennessee professor recapped how in 1992, when the United States began bombing Iraq the first time around, students flooded into the streets to celebrate. Showin’ them A-rabs who’s boss. Those kids are parents now. Someone stood in the streets holding peace signs and according to the professor, the cops arrested him “for his own safety”. One of Donald Trump’s many (many) lies has been that American Muslims celebrated 9/11 in the streets.
In Dave Grossman’s On Killing the army ranger turned psychologist explores the effect of ordered-murder on the individual. He tries to show that despite points about humans being animals too (as if that alone were explanation), often made by the military-minded, being violent and murderous towards “an enemy” seems taught. During World War II fewer than 15 percent of infantry admitted to firing their rifles during combat, according to his book. The US military propaganda machine whirred to life, in combination with movies glorifying war, and by Vietnam that number reached 90 percent. Yet Grossman and other researchers document cases of US soldiers holding fire (and Vietnamese/German soldiers doing the same), when face to face, sometimes having dropped right into the trenches with the enemy, because they simply couldn’t take another man’s life. They saw themselves in “the opposition”.
I once had to break up a dog fight that I really believe would have resulted in one dog killing the other. I’d broken up other dog fights and I’ve broken up bar fights. There’s always a certain repelling force at play. Either participant wants to be pulled apart. Two same-polled magnets that hope to bounce off after making a (physical) point. But these two dogs felt as if they were folding together. The hate of their snarls and eyes––hate in a final sense. One was going to become the other. But no sooner had we yanked them apart, uncoupled them, that the two were trotting around, chasing the same tennis ball like nothing had happened.
A few months ago I attended a talk with New Yorker staffer Jalani Cobb and author John Edgar Wideman, who was promoting his new book about Emmett Till, a 14 year-old black boy lynched for flirting with a white woman; killers were never brought to justice; the US military hung Till’s father while serving in World War II on murky charges of rape and murder; the family’s saga was a big part of the early Civil Rights Movement. The talk was at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and was standing room only. An audience member asked Wideman, as a fiction writer, what he thought about the people––“as characters”––who desecrated memorials for hate crime victims. Wideman thought about it for a second and said he saw it as a form of suicide. To do something that cruel meant the person wanted to destroy something about themselves.
Hard to watch the vitriol crawling from beneath rocks now and not feel Wideman’s point. They’re sad at themselves. Very difficult to hate The Other without hating The Self, perhaps impossible (if we have to view the world as Self/Other in the first place). To a time without reality TV and smartphones, but really no less violent, Marcus Aurelius: “To break off any particle, no matter how small, from the continuous concatenation––whether of causes of any other elements — is to injure the whole.”
