Murder is murder

This posting is about universal civil rights and how U.S. citizens must regain respect for international law. The news-media's capacity for double-think (term taken from Orwell’s novel, 1984) is fully developed in 2009. All of us, seem to be able to accept without apparent cognitive dissonance these two events:

1. In Raleigh, North Carolina “Federal authorities are searching for an eighth alleged member of a North Carolina group that authorities say plotted "violent jihad" overseas, prosecutors said Tuesday…. Seven other men have been arrested on charges of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder abroad" (CNN, 29th of July, 2009). I underline that this plotting is considered to be a crime.

2. “ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States conducted two drone missile strikes in Pakistan's South Waziristan region Wednesday, killing at least 45 people, in the latest example of expanded direct American support for Pakistan's military offensive against key Pakistani insurgent leaders” (Saeed Shah, Wed Jul 8, 2009). I understand that this killing is considered acceptable by the U.S. government and new media, even patriotic.

First of all, I want to declare that I believe all assassination to be unlawful, immoral, and inefficient as a method of social control. I do not condone either side. But people’s capacity for choosing sides and saying that the same conduct is OK when “we” do it, but criminal if “they” do it is perplexing to say the least. According to the news sources I have seen and read, if you are Moslem and want to kill people, well, you should be tried and sent to jail, or even killed outright by a drone. But if you are part of the U.S. “war effort”, it's a patriotic thing to do.

In my book, murder is murder, even when the objective is a known criminal. Civil rights is one of democracy’s chief historical conquests: everyone has a right to his/her day in court. Kings and generals do not have the right to “hit” or “put people out” –to use the latest euphemisms for homicide.

In addition to all the killing, another result of all the violence in Pakistan, in which everyone (insurgents, U.S. drone-bombing, and local armed forces) participates, is:

“Pakistan is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947, and while the world may be familiar with the tent camps that have rolled out like carpets since its operation against the Taliban started in April, the overwhelming majority of the nearly three million people who have fled live unseen in houses and schools, according to aid agencies” (Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009.

This is not right.

References:

1. CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/29/north.carolina.terrorism.charges/index.html
2. Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, Wed Jul 8, 6:33 pm ET, http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3268368
3. Sabrina Tavernise, June 17, 2009, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/world/asia/18refugee.html
4. Ornate letter: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm

Michael Jackson: a shamanic figure

Image of a sculpture in Campeche, Mexico

I admit that I’m getting to this topic a bit late when everyone else has mercifully begun to think about other things. But I’d like to ask about the explosion of feeling caused y Michael Jackson’s death.

The first days afterward, CNN didn’t talk about anything else at all, even the wars, the massacres and all that was going on in Central America. The BBC was a bit less monothematic, but even that channel dedicated hours and hours of broadcasting time to it. Internet congestion was total.

Why? There hasn’t ever been this much outpouring of grief for one person. If we compare the concentration of broadcasting time over MJ with that given to the deaths of other figures (for example: María Callas, John Lennon, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Monseñor Oscar Romero, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong) we have to admit that it has been disproportional. And I do not doubt that he was an excellent singer and dancer.

In his lifetime he attracted hostility and legal aggression, almost always related to some sort of moral repudiation. Again, why?

Here is a possible answer: he was a mythic, even shamanic figure. He wasn’t a man or a woman, an adult or a child, a father or a son, a black or a white, a hero or an “abnormal”. His “moon-walk was out of this world. We could only adore him or hate him.

The shamans break up our comfortable world views. They cause terror when everything we have hidden on the other side of the looking-glass shows up in the real world outside its oniric borders.

But we need the shamans because every-day life isn’t enough. We need more than work, homework, paying bills, shopping at the grocery store and the like. We need to penetrate normal-life barriers

Maybe Michael Jackson offered that. It is interesting that fantastic figures like Harry Potter and the Hobbits are so attractive. But they are clearly fictional. Michael Jackson was real.