Monday, April 6, 2015

Following Human Disasters


The barbarity of war is one thing, a less obvious barbarity comes next. I find it difficult to decide how I feel about media reportage of human tragedies, but I follow it, sometimes avidly. Somewhere in that morass there is a level at which I am sharing in the inhumanity.

“At half six I turn on the television to see how the war’s coming on.
Tracers are arcing down on Baghdad;
the reporter keeps looking over his shoulder. 

Shoes off, I stretch out,
rest my feet on the coffee table.” 

And somewhere out there, the headlong mania of reporters and photographers looking for the money-shot.
Ed Behr recounting a scene among Belgian civilian refugees in Congo, 1960, “Into the middle of this crowd strode an unmistakably British TV reporter, leading his cameraman and sundry technicians like a  platoon commander through hostile territory. At interval he paused and shouted, in a stentorian but genteel BBC voice, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?” Ed Behr, Anyone here been raped and speaks English? 1981

 A Brief Note on an Imminent Famine. 

Everyone here will starve:
each bone will be a stripe,
each hand a bowl,
each leg a stick.

Then there'll be the gluttony
of cameras:
our threadbare skin
will be devoured,
our eyes exported
shining like pickles.
 

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