I don't expect anything good from Al Qaeda or Sadr. When they behave badly, I am not shocked or even surprised.
I have no idea what most people I communicate with use as standards. For me, I am a voracious reader. I am famous for it among those who know me. They joke that if the house was on fire, and I was reading, I'd simply nod vacantly and keep reading.
Stories from all over the world follow relatively predictable patterns, and sub-categories of patterns. Some events simply don't catch the imagination.
"Bad folks behaving badly" isn't nearly as fascinating a story as "good folks gone wrong."
Reason being, in my opinion, that we don't see ourselves as the bad folks, we see ourselves as the good folks, we put ourselves into the shoes of Lynndie and wonder what made her to what she did.
Osama, well, he's pretty fascinating but we just don't know enough about him. I think that the contrast between him and the rest of the family, especially the contrast between him knocking down the former tallest buildings in the world, and his brothers building the newest tallest buildings in the world, would make a great novel in the right hands.
As for a one or two or three day spin cycle in the news, it's gone in the blink of an eye, unless it's a really great story. Great doesn't necessarily mean that it's one about the good of mankind, just that it resonates on a primal human level.
Abu Ghraib does that. Power in the hands of fug-headed yahoo rent-a-cops is scary.
I guess you've never been in a jail or a prison. Having all those doors on power locks closed behind you is a humbling experience. On TV, you don't see how lawyers have to go through a dozen or so power locked doors, step by step, submissively waiting to pass through, tail tucked between the legs, completely - but temporarily - in the power of the wardens, who aren't stupid enough to do anything to hurt you, but could if they were stupid, and there would be nothing you could do.
But lawyers can leave! And the inmates can't. They're completely in the power of the wardens.
Power corrupts. That's always an interesting story.
When I am in jail, I see people who are there for smoking dope, or forging prescriptions because they are addicted to painkillers after accidents, or did not pay a traffic ticket so their license was suspended. Most people in jail are not what I would call bad people. Just stupid.
Out of the many, many thousands processed in Abu Ghraib, only a few thousand remain. That tells me that most of them were just unlucky, or maybe stupid.
Yet, there they were, in the hands of the dumb-ass jackasses with the guns.
Yeah, that's a story for the ages. |
