PROLOGUE: The opening scene of an episode of "CSI Miami": Early morning ... the sun is just coming up on a golf course. It's completely quiet ... all you see is the totally empty, meticulously-manicured green of one of the holes. Dead silence, now being broken by ... a quiet rumbling of some kind, picking up in intensity, getting louder, louder, until, suddenly, heads of people walking quickly appear over the edge of the green. More and more of them, striding briskly, dozens, maybe even a couple hundred, rushing onto the green, mingling, talking excitedly with one another and, just as quickly, they leave, and the golf course is empty again ... except for the body of a young woman lying in an adjacent sand trap.
The twist here is that the young woman had been murdered the night before and all of the people had been text-messaged that next morning to show up for an impromptu gathering of some kind. (I forget what the name for it is, but it involves a rapid-response approach to being able to gather a crowd quickly, perhaps for a protest or show of support or something like that.) In any event, it was the murderer who arranged for the gathering in order for the crowd to trample the green and destroy any possible evidence of his crime.
What an interesting concept. All those people, involved in their own little worlds, suddenly getting a call to drop what they're doing and congregate with little explanation for a higher purpose ... fascinating ...
As many of you will have already read, one of the storylines in Wankerville these days is the murder by terrorists of the brother-in-law of the authors of the blog "Iraq the Model." This, naturally, necessitated an overwhelming, heart-rending outpouring of grief from everyone in Wankerville. I, of course, had my own take on this, with which you're free to agree or disagree.
I didn't get a whole lot of flak over that piece, but blogger "liberal catnip" wasn't quite as lucky. I'm a little baffled as to how a fairly innocuous (and, IMHO, respectful) post by "catnip" could have generated 61 comments, including this opener:
I think you shame yourself twisting his grief (and anger at the anti-democratic terrorists, you know... the part you left out) into an "illegal war" post. His hopes and dreams for his country are in direct oppostion with your nostalgia for the days of Saddam and his sons.
What the hell? How is it that someone who almost certainly has never even met the blog's authors, much less the brother-in-law, can get so wildly cranked up over LC's post? And only after several minutes of thought did all of this become clear to me:
None of those people give a fuck about the dead brother-in-law.
Quite simply, all of those people currently in public mourning couldn't care less about that dead man. Not even a little bit. And this is going to require some explanation so make yourselves comfortable.
For starters, I couldn't quite figure out why the wankersphere was so (allegedly) devastated by this one death. I mean, they'd certainly never shown any overwhelming compassion for tens of thousands of other Iraqis dead at the hands of terrorists or the U.S. military. In fact, if you could sum up the general attitude of the wankersphere towards all of that Iraqi "collateral damage" in one word, that word would be "indifference." Remember, these are the people who weren't interested in keeping body counts even of U.S. casualties, so why the sudden outpouring of emotion over this Iraqi?
OK, there is the fact that he wasn't a complete unknown to them. If you're a regular reader of a blog, and that blog's author shares some sad news, it's only natural to sympathize and pass on condolences. After all, if you read someone long enough, you start to feel like you know them, and their sorrows become your sorrows. Perfectly understandable, right?
Except that, as far as I can tell, the man who was murdered was not one of the blog's authors. He was only the brother-in-law. And while I'm not trying to diminish his death that way, it certainly makes it a bit more puzzling as to why so many people were howling in emotional anguish over someone whose words they may never have even read. (Disclaimer: I was never a regular reader of that blog so perhaps I'm wrong and the brother-in-law was a contributor. If someone wants to correct me on this, feel free.) But none of that is the weirdest part. The weirdest part is that, as far as I can tell, none of these mourners even know the dead man's name.
Go back and read the original ITM post. See what I mean? No name. All we read is that it's the "sister's husband." Think I'm making too much of this? Check out Crazy-Assed Racist Bitch who, while weeping crocodile tears over this, doesn't appear to know the name either. All we get from her is a reference to "the family of Mohammed at Iraq the Model." You don't even know the guy's name, do you, Michelle? (I should also point out that, for someone who seems so saddened by this, Michelle doesn't have ITM on her blogroll. You can make of that whatever you wish.)
So, to recap, what we have here is the death of a man that, by all accounts, was utterly unknown to the readers of that blog, whose life and achievements ("He was a brilliant young doctor with a whole future awaiting him...") had to be explained to those readers, and whose name was not even provided and, based on that, we have the entirety of Wankerville rending their garments in sorrow. Not to sound crass and hard-hearted but, really, what the fuck is going on here? And then it all became clear.
(Continue reading Part 2 here.)
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