Numbers

By Abu Fatoush

Briefly, for a twenty-four hour period, the body count out of Blacksburg, Virginia rivaled that coming out of Iraq. It was a weird juxtaposition--the War on Terror eclipsed by an all too familiar brand of American violence that will never get its own “War on . . .” moniker. But the numbers were there--thirty two dead. Thirty-two people presumably for whom the “War on Terror” was being fought but for whom it could not possibly protect, not even on its best day.

Perhaps this is the elephant in the room that none of those media professionals tasked with explaining our world could address. All the No Fly lists, the terror alerts, the duct tape, the Gitmos, the renditions, the water boardings, the shoes off at airports couldn’t stop one maladjusted kid from the suburbs. Thus giving lie to the absurdity that “if we don’t fight them over there, they will come here.” There was here and here was there.

The key of course is to keep the two separated. We need to believe that we can be made safer in one context while ignoring the obvious vulnerability in another. To stare too closely at one is to see the weakness inherent in the other. And so our national fear is neatly compartmentalized. We can even catalogue the shootings by type: school, workplace, post office, McDonalds, beltway, mall. But we mustn’t understand these as acts of terror. Terror is what the government is protecting us from. Terror comes from the “outside” and is produced by those who seek to destroy our “freedoms.” One of which must be our right to kill our fellow citizens in numbers rivaling those of the terrorists. Think of it as a kind of insourcing.

Of course the terror was always with us is in some capacity, even if the “us” in question wasn’t all of us just some of us with the misfortune of living in a certain place and time in American history when the insurgents spoke with southern accents and reconstruction came with a capital R. It took a hundred plus years of struggle against those insurgents now made respectable by time and government office to make good on the promises made. And now this President is bringing this freedom to Iraq. Bless him. Nevermind the fact that the party in power became the latter-day refuge for those who felt the Confederacy wasn't such a bad thing under the circumstances. It would be funny were it not for the fact there are so many bodies piling up.

The bodies pile up but we don't count them. Not all of them anyway. We count ours of course but the media can't give us the numbers for theirs. It cannot be pinned down, not unlike the rationale for the war itself. Whatever number affixes itself in our mind is quickly supplanted by five more. And so we've become conditioned to ignore them and yet the numbers remain like some forgotten guest left over from a dinner party two weeks old. Once relegated to the back pages, we are surprised to stumble across them. Oh you're still here? Every one else has gone home. Oh wait. The war isn't over is it? No it isn't.

Invited by men and women who sought to assuage the fear of more planes flying into buildings, Death has made a home in Iraq in a sprawling duplex rivaling that of the new US embassy under construction. Yet it refuses to be contained there. It isn't reading from the same playbook we are. One minute it's in Anbar Province, the next it's in a shopping center in Kansas City and you find yourself ducking behind a display case in the middle of a nameless war flown under the banner of the 2nd Amendment.

None of it is meant to make any sense. You can buy the gun but you can't figure out how your dog's name is on the No Fly List. Much less why New Orleans is now gone. But there haven't been any more 9/11s! This becomes the club with which they beat us over the head until we understand that these thwarted attacks also have a number. They can't tell us the number mind you but the understanding is that were they to we'd be in a state resembling shock and awe.

That is the hope at least. The hope is also that as we mourn youth cut down in the prime of life that we don't connect these fresh faces to those lost trying to shore up this administration's Iraqi misadventure. But they dovetail into each other. The difference being only the number of lunatics involved in the planning.

Abu Fatoush is a lawyer slash struggling screenwriter living in New York City with his ipod and a wireless connection.