The whole world is watching the United States, and the United States is watching Walt Disney.
What do Bambie and Drones have in Common?
The death of Bambi’s mother happens completely off-screen. Drones murder children, almost daily, completely off-screen.
Are we too fragile and sensitive – like the kids watching Disney cartoons – to be exposed to atrocities, and our magnanimous Overlords are good enough not to allow any gruesome images of spilled guts, blood or severed corpses to be seen on nowadays Altars – these translucent displays dominating our lives – and are, instead, inundating us with bread and circuses?
It would be in bad taste, to show the little ravaged corpses, anyway.
Enters Cecil the Lion
After that callous idiot killed “beloved” Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe the Net was aghast and went berserk. But, the living legend Dr. Jane Goodall asked a simple question: “Is Cecil any different from all the other lions and animals killed every day in the name of sport?”
However, during the lull days of summer, in August of 2015 Ashley Madison adultery hack took over the Internet collective nerve so no one seemed to care about poor Cecil any more. Or mutilated children for that matter. We need an entertainment with moral undertone – I am superior to that which I condemn (as Glenn Greenwald wrote in his brilliant expose of a collective puritanical glee over the hack) – so our Facebook likes would feel more like frowns.
(Think The Circle by Dave Eggers for our collective online Pleasantville is a virtual land of honey and milk in which our best faces happily parade around, liking every cute cat photo left and right and rhapsodizing mostly about ourselves)
Biologist Forrest Galante took this photo in 2011
Holocaust in Africa
We’re good people. Our Facebook pages were swamped with horror and love for Cecil the lion once we learned about his demise. Perhaps we would have also cared about another little African tragedy, a holocaust in Congo, if we only knew it existed.
The International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid, relief and development nongovernmental organization (founded in 1931 in Germany) in its Study about “Congo’s Neglected Crisis” tells us about 5.4 million have died since 1998 and inform us that in Congo as many as 45,000 people were killed every month. This is about 30 human beings being killed during an average episode of Seinfeld rerun. An average professional football game, that epitome of televised bread and circuses encircling our lives, lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes so, during each NFL game, about 200 people are obliterated in the most inhumane, heinous acts of savagery.
Alas, it all had happened off-screen.
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Coming next: Hierarchy of Death and Murder