Body Count 1001

Stan Goff puts the infamous milestone of "1000" into its proper, depressing, enraging context:

One thousand times now, people have arrived home or looked out the front door only to see a military sedan, with two troops in their dress uniforms.

This was my nightmare while my own son was there. An army sedan.

When people see it, they know in that terrible instant that someone they pushed out of their own body, someone they saw take a first step and speak a first word, or with whom they made love, or the anchor in the stormy world that is a parent, someone called brother or sister or grandchild, that sedan with the survival officer and the chaplain signifies that this someone has been erased and is no longer in the world with us, that something shocking has happened to the living body we once held close and will never hold again.

One thousand times now, as George W. Bush and his entourage smirked and plotted and slapped each other on the back, those left to live have been flayed with grief then set adrift in the void of their own loss to seek some trifling scrap of consolation. Why?

It's so the oxygen thieves who run the US Empire can chase after their grandiose delusions in drawing rooms, surrounded by an army of servants attending to their every whim, and so the class they represent can continue to accumulate money. That's why a thousand ripped up bodies have been shipped home--boxed and draped in bright new flags to sanitize the obscenity.

These pampered fucking sociopaths have no conception of the anguish of ordinary people, of how inconsolable is this loss.

When we reflect on the personal enormity and breathless depth of the sorrow of ordinary people that we know, then maybe we can begin to understand how that pain is mirrored in the ordinary Iraqi people who have been occupied--where their children have been bombed, homes destroyed, husbands and fathers and wives and mothers and best-friends and sons and daughters and grandchildren and neighbors and schoolmates killed and maimed, whole communities reduced to rubble, dignity daily kicked face first into the mud, humiliation their daily bread and fear their meat, the very soil transformed into a radioactive toxin that leaves women giving birth to pitiable monsters and people rotting in their own bodies from inexplicable malignancies.

This is what we can appreciate about others when we begin with the loss of those we think of as our own. This is what we can comprehend about who is the real enemy here; when we begin to really see the kind of personal devastation that is the price of this war. And a price paid for what?