Violence and the Media.

WARNING: This post contains several very violent images. I guarantee my thoughts aren't worth reading if you don't want to see the photos.

I don't know if it's just Indian media or all media except our own, but despite our overexposure and over coverage by the media, and all the proclamations about "violence in the media"...our outlets remain extraordinarily sensitive to depictions of violence. This is something I understand, since no one wants their deepest grief and loss displayed for the entire world to see and sensationalize. I remember seeing the Fallujah attacks on the American contractors (i.e., Blackwater) and wondering what it must feel like for the wives and children to see the photos of these men...the people they love the most (I tried to link them to avoid posting them, but it wasn't working, so I'm just posting them.)
(I still can't get over the smiling kid on the left side of that photo.)

I was living in Bangalore when the tsunami rolled through Sri Lanka and southeast India on December 26, 2004. I remember sitting at my computer continuously refreshing the NY Times and watching the death toll climb from 1,000 to 10,000 to 50,000 to 80,000 to 100,000 to 150,000 to 200,000...completely unable to comprehend what was happening less than 200 miles away. What made the experience so different was going into work each day and reading the Indian newspapers and seeing the photos they printed on the front page. I remember seeing the front page of The Hindu which had a half page picture of an enormous pit, maybe 20 or 30 feet deep with a mass of dozens and dozens limp, bloated bodies rising from the bottom to the top, and on top of the pile were 3 or 4 naked and dead babies. I just stared at it. I had never seen anything like it. Mass death. It wasn't a movie. Real people. People who had never imagined their lives would end and would someday look like this. Everytime you see a dead body, it makes a little bit of sense because...they must have somehow put themselves in these situations to die like this...right? nope.

I always wondered how our foreign policy would have to be conducted if the real photos from the front line came back to us. If we were forced to look at the dead face and mangled body of a 21-year old American boy, I think the wars would end pretty quickly (...although I also think we would also lose any wars we did fight.) We've had over 4,000 dead American soldiers since 2003 and probably close to six figures in dead Iraqis. How many of their dead faces would we have to see before we just had to stop? And how many more before the zealots are satisfied?

In any case, I'm still disgusted to my core over the Bombay attacks, which is what this is about. At the center of it all is the fact that I really really fucking hate stupid people. I don't mean unintelligent people or people who lack the capacity - I just mean STUPID fucking assholes. Racists. Bigots. Ideologues. Zealots. I hate stupid people to begin with, and I hate it even more when they have power and they exercise it by destroying life. And die believing that their version of stupidity was right. Stupid hicks who think they understand who their enemies are. 20 year olds. Kids. These are the deluded school shooters. These are the Cho-Seung Huis who are so lost and so fucking stupid that they think they understand something. Ugh. Someone give me a cogent argument for the use of brutal violence against the violent so that I can go face-punching and nut stomping in Waziristan.

If you're wondering what any of this has to do with anything and are curious at how or why I just rambled on about nothing for the past page, the answer is that I went to a few Indian media outlets (Times of India, NDTV) and picked up some pics from the sites. I wanted to post them both because I always find my perspective on these events sharpened and intensified by seeing pieces of what actually transpired and because I'm so fucking sick of these people that I would like to foster tiny little well-spring of hatred against radical religion, and radical islamism in particular.

So here are some pictures of the victims and the scenes of the attacks.

This is Moron #1. (terrorist/scumbag)

This is Moron #2. I hope it hurt and that they dragged you naked through the streets after this.

Morons #3-9.