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One of the stock devices of fiction is a scenario in which everyone is waiting for an answer before it dawns on the characters that they have asked the wrong question. Better still is the plot where the world the characters take for granted is shown to have no reality at all. Two years before September 11 the snuff film was an urban legend only rumored to exist. Since then the legend has come to life; hardly a day passes without terrorists releasing a video of some new decapitation on the web. If you live in the right part of the world, you may even get to watch one on TV. Roger Simon's readers are still trying to come to terms with the bombing of Christian churches in Iraq by Islamic terrorists, asking whether it might be a sign of "religious war", which, like the dinosaurs, was thought to be extinct.
Genocide fits that category too. That was something that happened long ago on Schindler's List. So when a few new ones walk out of the front pages we really don't know what to do with them. But when in doubt, make a movie. The BBC reports on the upcoming new film Shooting Dogs:
As filming starts in Rwanda, some human rights groups have claimed another genocide is under way in the Darfur region of Sudan. "As far as I can see, there isn't a damn bit of difference now from then," says Mr Caton-Jones. "There is a reluctance for western governments to be involved in something that has no material impact on them." Shooting Dogs, backed by BBC Films and the UK Film Council, is among a batch of new films being made about the genocide this year.
That's where the BBC gets it wrong: there is a reluctance to acknowledge that these things exist at all -- religious wars, death cults, dysfunctional societies, biological weapons in the hands of certified maniacs, blackmarkets in nuclear weapons -- beyond being film subjects; because to do so would imply having to do ugly things to solve them. The Strategy Page has links to videos of jihadi platoons getting vaporized in Fallujah; pitiful RPG men in cheap tracksuits getting double tapped by SAWs; clueless mortarmen getting picked off by Apaches. All of it brutal and all of it necessary. The San Diego News has run a story built around Marine citations for valor in action in Fallujah.
It is a picture of the world beyond the border, theworld we almost had ignored, except for September 11. The real problem with that day is not what happened, but that it happened on TV. Three years onward those images are still de-materializing John Kerry's universe and making him, despite his best efforts, seem like a creature from another dimension. One of Roger Simon's readers quotes Russian journalist Sergei Lopatnikov:
To a great degree there is no Democratic party candidate John Kerry. There is an abstract "anti-Bush" candidate who has been compelled, in accordance with the US electoral system, to take on human form and assume a human name...
...come to take us back before it is too late. Forty years ago, the classic science fiction TV series Outer Limits began with the narration:
"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. ... We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure."
Which ended variously and always disturbingly. Reality has intruded on long slow dream of the last years of the twentieth century. And the monsters are real.
posted by wretchard
