{"id":688,"date":"2004-04-01T09:36:11","date_gmt":"2004-04-01T09:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=688"},"modified":"2004-04-01T09:36:11","modified_gmt":"2004-04-01T09:36:11","slug":"on-covering-barbarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/04\/on-covering-barbarism\/","title":{"rendered":"On covering barbarism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a lump in my throat most of the past 24 hours while trying to make sense of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/01\/international\/middleeast\/01IRAQ.html\">Iraqi jubilation over the dead, burnt bodies of Americans.<\/a> I can&#8217;t help wonder what moves people to such depravity, what silences the inner voice telling people the terror I visit on others today will be visited on me tomorrow. The concept of &#8220;there&#8217;ll be hell to pay for this&#8221; generally keeps people in line, so I wonder: what the hell happened?<br \/>\n<P>Newsdesigner <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsdesigner.com\/archives\/000149.php\">has a bunch of the front pages,<\/a> which generally show Iraqis mocking the dead, stringing corpses on bridges, celebrating madly.<br \/>\n<P>The pictures say one thing, but I&#8217;ve been looking to the stories for more context, more explanation, more something to help me understand, but so far I haven&#8217;t seen much.  Something has to trigger the barbarian impulse. It&#8217;s in all of us, straw waiting for a spark.   I&#8217;d love to know who lit that spark, but so far all we have is description of the carnage.<br \/>\n<P>Description is fine, as far as it goes, but we need a lot more. Is it fair to ask if yesterday&#8217;s atrocities were hell-to-pay for the damage we&#8217;ve done to Iraq?<\/p>\n<p>I saw one story which mentioned Iraqi resentment over the high salaries paid to American security personnel. Were these contract employees deliberately targeted to send a message?<\/p>\n<p>We need a lot more answers, and until they arrive it&#8217;s wise to suspend judgment on what this whole thing means.<br \/>\n<P> One small point of comfort: if we ever get to the point where gore like this is not news, <i>then<\/i> we&#8217;ve got something serious to worry about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a lump in my throat most of the past 24 hours while trying to make sense of the Iraqi jubilation over the dead, burnt bodies of Americans. I can&#8217;t help wonder what moves people to such depravity, what&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/04\/on-covering-barbarism\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}