Denied last December and back for another round with fresh confirmations, the U.S.’s use of white phosphorous, aka Willy Pete, in Fallujah. A blog With a View is one of those that’s posted on it and I followed the link to the photographs of charred flesh and bone dressed up in unburned clothes, charred flesh and bone resting on their beds, still snuggled in relatively undamaged linens.
I’m up when I should be in bed and had just finished reading for a second time today the comments to Nick’s My Rape Story at “Alas, A Blog”. I had just finished writing a couple paragraph comment that I deleted. Thinking I really should try to get some sleep I went over to “A Blog With a View” and there was the rain of white phosphorous.
Some of the comments on Nick’s “My Rape Story” (an almost rape story) were leaning towards “if you put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time”, and there had been several who said, No, that puts blame on the victim and doesn’t cut it, and I was going to comment as well that it doesn’t cut it. But I didn’t as I felt my thoughts were superfluous and not very well stated.
Below is the comment I didn’t post.
I’ve been around this earth for 48 years and have heard a lot of different excuses for what constitutes a “yes”, quite frequently remarked upon by women in the “she was asking for it” vein. What is taken for constituting a “yes” changes, as it were, with the movement of shadows. Different generations, different backgrounds, different outlooks upon life. And so if one thinks about it one realizes that there are thus no firm parameters in that regard. They shift, they slide. Is the showing of the ankle a “yes” in a society where the ankle is considered risky by some, by not all? Does walking through a room nude constitute a “yes”? The “she asked for it” argument doesn’t work. What some believe qualifies as a yes, shifts and slides from person to person, generation to generation, culture to culture.
“No!” does work. “No!” is definite.
The comparison with the open window made by one commentor is a good one. A long while ago, we used to live in a neighborhood–and not your old time country neighborhood–where air conditioning was rare and everyone left their door open at night. At first I was amazed, then it made me realize that really it should be all right for people to leave their doors open at night. Now, as before, we live in a place with burglar bars and the windows screwed shut and little burglar alarms hooked up to the doors. It wouldn’t be us “asking for it” if we didn’t have these things. It is a matter of fear and knowledge of lack of respect for boundaries that causes us to live this way.
The problem is lack of respect for individual rights. Making judgments based on supposed cultural indicators/assumptions not only ignores and neglects the rights of the individual, it supposes that the rights of the individual are ultimately without value. If by reason of a particular setting one feels that a person raped is a person who asked for it, it’s no less than society inflicting punishment on the victim and virtually raping them again.
Our society really has very little respect for the individual and this plays out in every aspect of life, not only the sexual.
I stated that what some believe qualifies as a yes, shifts and slides from person to person, generation to generation, culture to culture, but that is only a half-truth as I tried later to communicate in the above not-posted comment. For we all know about boundaries. We all sense to some degree the sacredness of the individual. It’s just that our society, for all its supposed love for and fascination with the go-get-em individual (who is said to have built the West) tends to despise the rights of the individual and to hate the individual.
I see the loathing of the individual all around us. For instance, the loathing of the individual is the blame heaped on Katrina survivors for being in the position they were in. It’s the hatred for American Indians reminding us of hundreds of years of genocidal policies. It’s contempt for anyone who is in dire straits and somehow didn’t live up to their societally understood obligation to fend for their individual selves and never need any help–which is a rather bizarre societally understood obligation when anthropolgy tends to have as a defining point for civilization, the care taken for the vulnerable and the frail. But too often (and as ordained by our government) what the vulnerable get is punishment for vulnerability, and such as in the case of women raped who are said to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, what society feels for them is no less than outright hostility. How dare they put themselves in that position. How dare they.
When down damn deep in our hearts we know about the sacred integrity of the individual. We know it with such surety that when graves are violated, though there’s no voice to say yes or no anymore, we understand it as treachery, a rejection of individual boundaries. That is, as long as we’re not businesses like Wal-Mart digging up or or building over American Indian burial grounds, which they have a pecuiliar history of doing.
I’m not qualifying vulnerability here even in terms of an absolute inability to help one’s self. Vulnerability is instead, in power over societies, the person standing half an inch shorter. It’s the person who says “No” but hasn’t the power to assert that “No”.
So I had been thinking about all this when I dropped by “A Blog with a View” and read the white phosphorous post and followed the link to the pictures and thought there are some who ordered this done who will not look at such pictures and be horrified, instead they’ll be enraged at the witness of the charred flesh, or maybe they will feel nothing at all. And I thought really this is no different from rape, it’s no different from the man who becomes enraged at the individual who says no and rapes them, it’s no different from society saying to the victim they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s all the same rage, comes from the same desire to violate, to humiliate, to annhilate. It happens in small ways all the time on the one-to-one. It is societally regulated and approved by different institutions, churches and governments that seem to have at their heart, as what most fundamentally binds their parts, an agreement on the distribution of that rage and what dimension of individual shall incur that wrath, whose measurements aren’t in accord with the corporate jacket. And then we wonder “ah, how” when it blossoms into atrocity. Or some of us don’t wonder at all, in the way that some believe no atrocity has taken place, that humankind has merely acted as a conduit for divine vengeance.
Wrong is wrong. Violation of the individual is simply wrong, that’s all there is to it. Whether in war, in jail, in school, in the home, in the hospital, in the nursing home, on the street, by government or by business, violation of the individual is wrong. The inability to see where exception is in fact the rule, and that all are exceptional. We know that we’re all exceptional too or we wouldn’t, when faced, for instance, with the textile mills, the grind of the mass production line, feel such horror at least for ourselves, though some of us may be convinced that others are indeed different and little better than cattle to be managed from birth to grave. Lose that knowledge of the exceptional, and respect for the individual in one part then two then three and you’re well on your way to a sick society.
Ah, but forget that. I’m a damn unrealistic stupidhead idiot idealist and am miserable 9/10’s of the time because of it.
Why do they call white phosphorous Willy Pete? I dunno, but hey, forget the bad talk on white phosphorous. I read it can be loads of fun! A september 2005 review of Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six Lockdown” gives it as one of the most popular gaming returns on the Xbox. “Terrorists have seized a deadly new weapon to unleash on the populous and Ding and the boys (and girls) of Rainbow Six neet to shut them down. Ubisoft has made some significant changes to their successful franchise, and Boheim has the full review.”
Boheim writes,
The enemies have about the same variety as every other FPS on the market, which is to say not a huge amount. But there is enough here, and the Havoc engine with its rag doll physics is fantastic. It’s satisfying to lift a terrorist high up into the air with a well placed grenade, or seeing one plummet off a tower bouncing as he hits the ground. My only knock is the change to the death effect when hitting a terrorist with the Willy Pete grenades. They used to run around screaming as they burned, which was always funny no matter how many times you did it, and now they are not only silent, but simply drop to their knees and slowly thrash about like they are swatting at invisible bees. I keep hoping that one of these times the old screamer will come back (and if anyone else has seen him, please call me), but he appears to be gone.
Ubisoft…the same people who have brought you “America’s Army”, the game that offers a built-in partnership with the U.S. Army.
Forget the “individual” crap. Life is one big game of losers and winners. If you’re not one, you’re the other, right? That’s how it works. There’s the heap and there are the winners who climb to the top and the losers upon whom they stand.
And, horrors, Ubisoft please bring back the death effect of the guy screaming bloody murder when hit with a Willy Pete grenade. Sounds fucking hysterical. Falling to the ground in silent tortured misery as you die is no fun at all to watch. I’ll be sure to remember that from now on with every winner-delivered blow I get in my little ring of life. “Must be entertaining and funny. Run around and scream. Hope I can remember to do both!”
Everyone’s a clown. Hey? Ultimately.
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