Associated Press never tires of reporting exactly how many "suspected insurgents" U.S. forces killed on a particular day in this or that occupied third world nation.
Air strikes on a farmhouse; Boom! On an apartment building; Boom! followed by a bodies count.
What is it that makes that great so-called silent majority in America enjoy reading and hearing daily enemy body counts so much?
Is this a streak of cruelty in the American character; a weird sadistic mind set? Or just traditional time-honored but superficial score keeping.
'Who is winning?' 'Which weapons are working more cost effectively?'
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'How many did we get yesterday?' And was that less or more than the day before?'
'Are we giving it to 'em good?' 'How good are we doing?'
It does not seem important which of the various designated enemies we are mowing down: suspected al Qaeda or al Qaeda supported; deposed Taliban government troops or other anti-occupation Afghan rebels; former Ba'athists government troops or Iraqi al Qaeda; Sunni insurgents or Shi'ite armies too friendly with Shi'ite Iran; Somali Islamic Courts government militants fighting occupation by our proxy Ethiopian Army, or al Qaeda in Somali; etc., etc. The group targeted can change from week to week.
The bodies of America's enemies are counted with the same satisfaction if not glee that one feels while removing the opponents eliminated counters when playing a board game.
Naturally civilian bodies and bodies of children occasionally also receive coverage - but much less so, for they don't figure in the score keeping - except when too many bodies of children rack up negative points or points for the enemy.
Funny how one never hears weekly, monthly, yearly or war's totals for enemy bodies. These totals are continually added up for American bodies. The much higher count of 'enemy' dead is only added up daily - day by day by day, ad infinitum.
The bodies of America's enemies are counted as if they were different than the bodies of American soldiers. Enemy bodies are not imagined as inert, stiffened, sightless and eerily quiet corpses that bring suffering and destruction to the lives of daughters, sons, sisters, moms, dads, brothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, teachers, dear friends and neighbors.
How do bodies of dead Americans really differ from bodies of dead Afghanis, Iraqis, Somalis, Vietnamese and Koreans?
1. The America bodies are out of place. They have to be shipped back to where they came from.
2. The Afghani, Iraqi, Somali, Vietnamese, and Korean bodies are at home lying on their own soil.
Of course it's not their soil anymore! A corpse cannot be said to own anything - not even the soil the living gave their lives for. Neither can a cadaver be said to own its own skin and bones, for we all know, "You can't take it with you!" (And even if you could, you might not want to – the skin is cold and unfeeling, the eyes blind, ears deaf, and it all smells of putrefying flesh.)
And the above described condition of these bodies of 'foreigners' is the exactly the same as the inanimate woodened skinned, rigid, blind and deaf condition of American bodies laid out for shipment back to where they came from, at a time in which they were filled with life, vigor, sanguine complexions and high expectations.
For all the unctuous praise and hailing the glory of wars in which they served by dying heard on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, and read in Time Magazine, US and World Report, Newsweek, The New York Times, Daily News and Post newspapers and indeed all the newspapers across the nation, the cadavers of Americans shipped back in coffins are absolutely no different than the cadavers of the enemy they killed and were in turn killed by. Both the American bodies and the non-American bodies left behind are all ex-living human beings – dead Earthlings.
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