One Radical Opinion

by "Radical" Russ Belville
Wednesday, January 5, 2005

"Radical" Russ Belville was born on the first day of the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War in the town of Nampa in the "red" state of Idaho, where any opinion to the left of Reagan gets you labeled as "radical". He currently resides in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon (a.k.a. "Little Beirut") where he works in Information Technology. In his spare time, he enjoys writing about current events, playing the six-string bass guitar, and volunteering for liberal political causes. You can contact him via e-mail at letters 'at' radicalruss.net.

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Welcome to 2005, dear readers. It's been an exciting and eventful holiday break, both personally and globally, with plenty of subjects just begging for a few of my radical opinions.

The foremost event was the devastating tsunami that struck Indonesia and other areas of the Indian Ocean. As of this writing, the official death toll is up around 150,000 people. Of course, you probably know all this thanks to the media's relentless coverage of the story. Like me, you've probably seen hours of repeated footage of those waves wiping out people on the coastlines. I've seen that one shot of the wave cascading over the swimming pool at the luxury hotel at least fifty times now.

If there's one thing our sensationalistic infotainment juggernauts love, it's a natural disaster story. Whether it is an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado, or a hurricane, it is always bound to get lots of attention on the news. It's just the perfect vehicle for selling ad space. There's plenty of death and destruction without the nuisance of pesky analysis of policy and personality.

It's nice and clean from a storytelling perspective. Mother Nature is a bitch sometimes, and every so often, she rises up and wipes out thousands of people. There's no malicious intent, political overtones, or economic agenda; it's just nature. Therefore, the American public is free to grieve over truly innocent people with no nagging guilt about what could have been done differently, no nuanced wrangling over who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, and no lingering doubt about the motivation behind the destruction.

To be sure, the quick extermination of 150,000 humans in a natural disaster is a newsworthy event. However, there are thousands of humans dying every day from a variety of causes. Tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed during our military mission to disarm Saddam's weapons of mass destruction protect us from the Iraqi al-Qaeda terrorists topple the regime of Saddam Hussein liberate the Iraqi people from torturous imprisonment insure free and fair democracy in Iraq install an American oil-company and military-base-friendly puppet regime in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, a story like that is harder for Americans to digest. Aren't they the bad guys, or at least some of them? If we grieve for dead Iraqis, don't we have to admit that we are the ones killing them? Besides, some of those Iraqis are killing some of our soldiers. A story like that is too messy. It's too hard to grieve the dead innocents of Iraq without delving into the fact that this disaster is completely man-made and manufactured by choice, which is why you don't see endlessly repeated loops of broken bodies in the rubble of Fallujah like you're seeing the endlessly repeated loops of broken bodies tossed about by a tsunami.

What about the genocide occurring in Sudan? There, too, are hundreds of thousands of foreigners dying from a disaster. But again, it is a man-made disaster with all manner of politics involved. Besides, what does anyone in America know about Sudan, other than it's a hot place in Africa? At least the tsunami disaster has resort hotels, vacationing Americans, and even a story of a supermodel surviving the wave. There's just no good footage to run about Sudan. That clip of the way-too-skinny mother and child huddling together in a refugee camp is just too generic to pull American heartstrings. We don't even know where Darfur is, much less who the bad guys and good guys are. Huge tidal waves are good for ratings; African civil wars, not so much.

What we do get a lot of are body counts. When the tsunami first hit, the newsmodels would breathlessly report the rising toll – 22,000 dead, 44,000 dead, 115,000 dead, 150,000 dead. I'm not sure for what effect this grim scorekeeping is intended. Do we somehow grieve more strongly for 150,000 dead over 22,000 dead? Or is this the only way we understand the magnitude of suffering of complete strangers on the other side of the globe? Judging by the amount of news coverage of recent events, it would appear that 150,000 dead Southeast Asians are roughly equal to the murder of a pregnant American woman by her cheating husband.

When it comes to body counts, dead Americans are much harder for us to accept than other dead humans are. We are quickly given the highest estimates of foreigners dying from this tsunami, but the statistics on American casualties from the Iraq war are a deftly manipulated underestimate. As of today, the military announces that 1,341 American soldiers have perished in the war, but that is a purposefully misleading figure. It does not count soldiers that are gravely wounded and die in military hospitals after being evacuated out of Iraq, which could possibly double or triple that body count. We're presented with reel after reel of dead foreigners washed out to sea by a tsunami, but American deaths are so disturbing that we're not even allowed to view footage of flag-draped coffins carried off a transport plane.

Then there is the American response to the tragedy. The Bush Administration initially offered $15 million in aid. When it comes to waging war, the purse strings are loosed and no amount is too large, but to help victims of the worst natural disaster in modern times, we Americans can only offer up the equivalent of a nickel per person. When this miserly pittance became a public relations nightmare, Bush bravely offered up $35 million – ooh, we're up to almost twelve cents apiece! When it was pointed out that we spend that much money in Iraq in just a few hours, Bush was finally prodded into giving $350 million in aid. Finally, each American could give up the price of a Taco Bell half-pound burrito to bring clean water and medicine to millions of devastated Asians.

I wonder if we all get magnetic "I support Tsunami Relief" ribbons for our cars?