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Volume CXXXII, Number 20 |
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Images of war: rationalizing the irrational
LARA JACOBS
COLUMNIST
Attending school in Maine, it's disturbingly easy to distance yourself from the reality of a world conflict. Unlike at urban universities, you are never bombarded with protesters or pamphlets while walking to class; you could easily confuse the posters for this week's social house party for national news, due to their prolificacy. I am often guilty of getting bogged down in issues more pressing to my daily life than national news subjects. Rather than worrying about Saddam or oil reserves, I'm focusing on symbolism in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
If I do find myself reading the paper or watching the news, there's a tendency to break the war down into smaller entities that are much easier to comprehend. Statistics of death tolls, of the number of troops in Iraq, and of projected costs are intelligible, while quotes from letters written by soldiers now dead and accounts of torture or capture are much harder to grasp.
There is a tendency in the news, and in us, to rationalize horror, to break down the war into elements that are comprehensible. American society values rational thought. If we can rationalize something, it becomes acceptable. While rationalization enables us to reduce a complex issue to a level of comprehension, in the case of war, this attempt to understand is but an effort to rationalize the irrational.
While the news focuses on oil, on politicians, on territory, war is really a question of humanity rather than a political contest for power between Republicans and Democrats. Nevertheless, war isn't about politics or oil; in the end it's a basic question of life or death, and a question that is forced upon the citizen who fights rather than the leader who stays behind creating conflict.
Therefore, the "real war stories" are the ones that never make the news coverage, not those of Saddam but the stories of Baghdad families hoping to survive the crumbling of their country; this war isn't about Bush, but the soldier who died at 19 for a politician's cause. While these life and death decisions, decimated city streets, and ultimately lives lost are irretrievable, it's important to never rationalize destruction in the name of a cause; we must still see war for the horror that it is, rather than a remote version of reality that ends when we turn the television off.
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