Nigerian-American Teju Cole’s Haiku-Like Tweets Hint at the Immorality of Drone Murder — but Only to Those Who Still Have Functioning Souls
© 2013 Peter Free
11 March 2013
Climbing out of evil’s hole is difficult — when we don’t care enough even to recognize that we have fallen
Under those circumstances, the morally obtuse are sometimes aided by reminders from someone who still sees.
To wit, Teju Cole and his gift for tersely moral language:
Seven short stories about drones.
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist's.
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.
4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.
5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.
© 2013 Teju Cole via Sarah Zhang, Teju Cole on the "Empathy Gap" and Tweeting Drone Strikes, Mother Jones (06 March 2013)
The American public’s acceptance of drone murder as a legitimate expression of our values — exposes how illusory our talk about freedom and human rights really is
It should not take a language genius like Cole to point out that ordinary empathy would prohibit the circumvention of due process in the killing of anyone in something so abstract as a metaphorical "War on Terror," especially innocents.
Yet somehow, the American public breezily accepts drone murder as a legitimate expression of America’s loudly professed (i) democratic, (ii) rule of law, and (iii) allegedly predominantly “Christian” values.
In regard to the last, one has to:
(a) wonder what these people actually do in church
and
(b) question the moral authority of those who spiritually guide them.
Unlike murders by Islamic terrorist groups — America’s Drone Death program is sanctioned and carried out by America’s commanders in chief
If the hypocrisy underlying America’s War on Terror eludes us under these circumstances, we are moral idiots, indeed.
Our stony hypocrisy adds fuel to anti-American fires.
The moral? — Instead of pointing fingers at others, we would be better served to look at ourselves
Teju Cole’s micro vignettes light the way.