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
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment