Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead and the Collateral Damage to America's Soul...

[bridgit]

“United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts”, Reuters headline

“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”, Herman Melville, Moby Dick

All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist, or too benumbed to resonate with their content.

Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatist States of America have experienced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee's retirement accounts . . . sans conscience above -- sans conscience below.

Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around them. It would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now includes Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for anti-depressants, urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to enter its inner most circles.

As stated, human beings have always possessed an immense capacity for self-deception -- but, at present, we Americans can no longer afford stupid, naked monkey business as usual: The stakes are too damn high. When we, as a people, cannot or will not connect the needless deaths of well over half-a-million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our driveways, the situation has grown dire indeed.'

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct06/Rockstroh27.htm