Kill and Kill Again
by LINH DINH
It is a recurring theme: civilization committing barbaric acts to
feed its refined gluttony. As we found out about American Marines
urinating on dead Afghans, there was also a story about Brazilian
loggers tying an eight-year-old girl to a tree and burning her to death.
She belonged to the Awá, an Amazon tribe of around 300 members, with
only 60 still clinging to their hunter-gatherer way of life. To maintain
our so-called civilized standards of living, collateral damages are
inevitable, and “savages” must be sacrificed.
If they get in the way of civilization’s quest for petroleum, lumber,
tin, zinc, copper, whatever, they must be killed wholesale, or one by
one, as was accomplished by Chris Kyle, currently touring bookstores to
promote his American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.
Kyle killed 255 “savages,” his term, and can stand before God with a
clear conscience, he told Bill O’Reily, because he was saving American
lives. FOX being FOX, the question of why Kyle was in Iraq in the first
place was not probed.
With his tunnel vision specialty, teamwork ethics and preoccupation
with numbers, Kyle is the quintessential tool in civilization’s
machinery. Tasked with long-distance, targeted killing, he performed
outstandingly, and is proud of his feats, all carefully quantified. His 160 Pentagon-confirmed kills wipe out the previous
American record of 109, held by Delbert F. Waldron, not to mention the
relatively puny 93 of Carlos Hathcock. Kyle’s longest shot was 2,100
yards. Though impressively long, yes, very long, it’s dwarfed by the
2,700 yards recorded by one Horse Craig Harrison, a Brit.
Empire is civilization’s greatest efflorescence and final aim. With
empire comes the tallest, biggest and longest of everything. Citizens of
empire, down to the lowest cog, bathe themselves daily with numbers as a
kind of self-congratulation. Counting themselves hoarse to prove that
they are in fact content, they measure their achievement and happiness
with Dow and Nasdaq indexes, inches on flat-screen TVs, cars sold, runs
and touchdowns scored by sport heroes, and savages killed by even more
heroes. A large number denoting anything, even debt, cheers up denizens
of an empire since it is proof of their gigantism. Empires compete to
see who can piss the longest and furthest, over the most continents.
What a contrast this is to a primitive nomad, who sees properties as a
burden, and thus does not care to count hardly anything. The most
extreme example of this is another Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose
language includes no cardinal numbers at all. They simply can’t count,
and have no interest in doing so. American scholar Daniel Everett spent
an hour each night for eight months trying to teach them numbers in
Portuguese, with zero success, “It was just a fun time to eat popcorn
and watch me write things on the board.”
Though living on a finite planet, the subjects of empire are
indoctrinated into the religion of infinite growth, with anything short
of that seen as a major disaster. With their gross appetites, they
cannot conceive of a no-growth existence, though that was the economy of
man for thousands of years. During the age of fossil fuels, now winding
down, this infinite growth formula can appear sane and sustainable, but
as oil and gas go scarce, its murderous and suicidal nature will become
ever starker, like an innocent girl being burnt at the stake.
Most of the planet must slave and starve, so the anointed few can
consume, yet even these lucky buyers must themselves slave, commute long
hours and pop uppers or downers nonstop to afford that Ipod, Ipad and
Xbox. Speaking of which, here’s a still relevant insight from Ben
Franklin:
“Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.”—from his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America
With social networking, who needs face-to-face conversations? Slaves
to bogus needs and virtual thrills, we have become estranged from the
real, with our savage instincts, suppressed, flaring up as conceits or
pathologies. Often they explode overseas, as the T-shirt says: TRAVEL TO
EXOTIC LANDS, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE THEN KILL THEM.
In an advanced civilization, a nomadic existence, with its hunting
pack, can only be approximated in a war, but instead of hunting animals
for subsistence, our boys are gunning down people who are merely trying
to prevent us from exploiting and humiliating them. With such a dubious
reason to kill or be killed, it’s not surprising that many of these
soldiers come back home only to kill themselves.
As I write this, the US is encircling, harassing and sabotaging Iran,
yet few Americans seem alarmed that for the sake of oil, again, and
that increasingly elusive economic growth, their leaders may kill
millions and wreck this earth even further, but as their empire
convulses and collapses, most Americans will find themselves reduced to
the level of those they’ve been annihilating. They will discover that
they, too, are just collateral savages.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.
