War Porn II: Invitation to a Beheading

I share little in common with my father except nightmares and genes. Echoing through the silence of the years during which we have not spoken there winds the terror and horror of an insanity that was his and which I have guarded against. As with most shadows, though, the danger in fighting them brings the danger that you will mistake what's real for shadow and shadow for what's real.

There's no doubt that I have often taken a no-prisoners strategy in defending those I love and myself from often paranoiac fears that my father was on the highways, headed my way with a trunk full of automatic weapons and bent on a rampage that started with the death of my mother and would end with the slaughter of my children and me.

These personal comments relate to the paranoia that strikes deep in the heart of fantasy and illusion that comprise the American dream. When attacked, the US public responded with a hysteria that can only astound the rest of the world for its over-reaction. ...

While we sit and watch the fantasy war unfold, US citizens sit bemused and impotent at the sight of their representatives who are apparently incapable of doing anything to stop the madness that their own hysteria set in motion. Asserting the type of sovereignty and authority that a head of state is supposed to exhibit, the mannequin that voices testosterone-filled apothegms that beggar grammar strides the world stage like an idiot savant known for bringing death and destruction to innocents.

It's said that during the first days of the Afghan invasion Pres. George Bush once told the CIA to send him the head of Osama bin-Laden after the terrorist was caught and killed. The CIA agent on the ground took the order seriously enough that he gathered the materials required to pack the head in dry ice and ship it to Washington.

What this story says to me is that the facade created by the civilized US invasion is nothing but a charade created by a sophisticated media effort. The real, on-the-ground actions that buttress the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never made it into the US public sphere. Instead of the decapitation fantasies of our leader, we see the US portrayed as the army of light versus the forces of darkness.

I have drawn attention to the appearance in the public fantasy show of a genre called War Porn. This genre gains in popularity, it seems, throughout the US and perhaps the world, as suggested by hits at my blog with "war porn" as the search terms.

Yet, the indecency of this genre is many-sided. What differentiates the prurient interests of adolescents and young soldiers looking for, trading, and selling this type of porn and the types of videos put on the web by the oh-so-virtuous jihadists? Consider the beheading of famous Iraqi female journalist Atwar Bahjat.

As the following description shows, the thin line separating the video of this crime and that in porn is a diminishing, if not non-existent, value:

We now know that it was not that swift for Bahjat. First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman but particularly so for a pious Muslim who concealed her hair, arms and legs from men other than her father and brother.

Then her arms were bound behind her back. A golden locket in the shape of Iraq that became her glittering trademark in front of the television cameras must have been removed at some point — it is nowhere to be seen in the grainy film, which was made by someone who pointed a mobile phone at her as she lay on a patch of earth in mortal terror.

The scene could come from a snuff film. Yet, tragically and inhumanly, it comes from a group of brutish men who think they perform this defilement in the name of Allah.

In a book called Toxic Religion, it's stated that the religious fanatics are often plagued by sexual thoughts that are perverse and violent. I suggest that the jihadists fit this description to a tee. That these demons in the form of men believe that they are virtuous because they can carry out this brutality only shows how empty and filled with a despairing sin their version of religion is. They manifest their own sickness and wretched feelings about sexuality in crimes that reveal nothing but corrupt hearts and spirits.

I have included this description along with my personal reminiscences for a reason: in his despair over his divorce and what he considered his betrayal by my mother, my father once described for me the very type of scene that was played out in Bahjat's death. That vision--of my mother's head in my father's hands and plunked on the hood of a car--haunted my late adolescent years and still does. I cannot watch the movie Seven because the ending plays back too realistically that vision for me.

Does the personal nature of my father's insane fury obviate in any way the crime he nurtured in his heart? Does it make what these so-called men did to this woman, who simply wanted to be a woman, more or less heinous once we see it from the perspective of the crimes and despair that fill not a personal life but the vengeance-filled fantasy of our leader?

Do these thoughts provide a spectrum of ghoulish sensuality that festers in the heart of men who despair of their own humanity so much that they cannot stomach a woman leading her own life and who must therefore degrade her sexually and monstrously?

Simone Weil once wrote that we must recognize that given the right circumstances we are all capable of the most despicable acts. I believe that she was right in this, and I therefore recognize that the acts of these men and the crime fantasized by my father are also potentially acts that I myself could and would enact.

Some will say that what separates us from them is the barbarity of their acts. Yet, barbarism is a reality that seems to change once we begin to plumb the depths of our own sins.