Disrespecting the Bing? POW Abuse Overshadows Fallujah Massacre

[markses]

A few seasons ago on The Sopranos, Joe Pantaleone's character Ralphie beat a prostitute to death in the parking lot of the Bada Bing strip club, the mafia-owned hangout of Tony Soprano's crew. This, of course, caused a headache for the crew, and pissed off Tony mightily, since he had - in his mind - associated the girl with his own daughter. Ralph was in trouble, in other words, and he was forced to come to Tony and make an abject apology, much against his "proud" (that is, amoral) nature. Rather than apologizing for killing the girl, he apologized for "Disrespecting the Bing" - or not paying proper respect to and keeping his business separate from the club. Shortly after the episode aired in 2001, Slate writer Tim Noah attempted to popularize the phrase "Disrespecting the Bing":

http://slate.msn.com/id/1007576 /

For Noah, "disrespecting the Bing" should become a way of saying that one acknowledges and apologizes for the lesser offense in order to avoid responsibility for the greater fault; or, as Noah has it, "the 'I disrespected the Bing' gambit is served up to avoid pleading guilty to committing a much larger and very real moral transgression."

One wonders if the POW abuse story is not, in effect, a "disrespecting the Bing" gambit that swerves around US responsibility for the Fallujah massacre. As the Marines move back and the true toll of Fallujah comes into view, all eyes are focused on Abu Ghraib. Needless to say, the actions at the prison are indeed terrible, and costly. But how much more costly would be the systematic destruction wrought by US forces in Fallujah? How much less can they be attributed to personal foibles and how much more clearly are they part and parcel of US strategy?

Is the POW abuse - and the publicity it is receiving - a case of Disrespecting the Bing? I do not mean this in a conspiratorial sense (that is, I do not mean that the media and administration are in cahoots to disrespect the Bing), but rather in a larger psycho-social sense, meaning that we can handle (even with difficulty) the abject apology for the POW abuse, where we cannot even see the collective culpability for the US Fallujah strategy, any more than the sociopath Ralph could see the moral wrong of murdering the prostitute?