Death and Murder

How can anyone in their right mind not fear death? I agree that working five days a week for a new car is a meaningless affair, the elements are out to get us and there is nothing more beautiful than the world of dreams and visions. But life is the only thing we’ve got! I must admit I’m fascinated by people with enough conviction in their beliefs to fly a plane into a ship. Indeed, I wish I knew what those beliefs are. Perhaps to the devout I sound like a heathen suffering from the pangs of a misdirected heart, but I believe such bold beliefs as an afterlife—in the physical sense—are reserved for the young and the ignorant; and isn’t it mostly the young and the ignorant who are out there duking it out on the battlefield? If one takes the time to listen to the elderly, one will hear a different story—one devoid of glory, often tainted with uncertainty and generally dealing with the theme of tiredness.

Nevertheless, one of the most toxic delusions art fosters is the idea that death doesn’t kill, for there is nothing worse in life than death. We would like to think of it as a release from the pressures of existence, but this is a fatally mistaken thought: it is the ultimate culmination of those pressures. Fantasies of rebirth and transformation into an elevated sphere rarely consider the pain of entry and never provide a view of what lies in store for us when nature decides to blow out our candle—indeed, how does one provide a view of blackness?

What percentage of the population commits murder—and from that number how many do it voluntarily and how many do it under orders or for a cause? It would not surprise me if this number is quite low: let’s say 5% and from that perhaps 1-2% do it voluntarily. That means 95% of us don’t commit murder during our lives. (Please oblige me here. I know full well that I’m building an argument with absolutely no scientific foundation—but, at the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not a scientist. So what I’m trying to say is this:) I believe the power of people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Jesus Christ lies in the simple fact that they speak what 95% of us feel: hurting someone else is bad. This collective pacifism presents a formidable threat to two groups of people: (1) those who murder, and, more relevantly, (2) the greedy who exploit them. Indeed, it means nothing less than the end of their way of life; and, accordingly, these complicit groups invariably strike out against the vocal pacifist. They strike with a vengeance, and that’s how martyrs are made.

How does a pacifist avenge the murder of a loved one? All too many of us dream up heroic scenarios, laced with violent images of us over our enemy. So what happened when those jets went crashing into the World Trade Center? Where were the heroes? By no means do I want to undervalue the torment of any victim, nor do I want to deny the valor shown by individuals under such circumstances. I merely want to point out that reality is less charming than our perception of it. And, if I may speak in the broadest generalizations, I believe most of us when confronted with horrific reality cower before aggression and avoid violence at all costs.

So, let’s say that 95% of us don’t murder. How come people vote for war? Because more than half of that 95% are greedy, and, as long as they’re never put in the position to experience real violence, they are willing to let that 5% do its dirty work. To my mind these people are pathetic: they constitute the multitude of slobs with beer cans balancing on their paunches, gazing at TV sets showing reruns of propagandistic war films, half-baked westerns, football games, and imbecilic cops and robbers serials—and, for the record, I’m not speaking of Americans here, I’m speaking for the world: the monosynaptic Muscovite, the dingbat from Deli, the hick from Hong Kong, and the Parisian peon. Do I really mean to be offensive? You bet!

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to point out a trap that arises from this situation. Apart from greed, another vice that we, the 95%, suffer from is curiosity. It is not because we want to kill, but because killing repulses us that the majority are fascinated by the few bad apples who do; artists, journalists and scientists are no better and, in fact, they understand this—exploit this—and accordingly offer the public a negative product, because, as Kirk Douglas’s character in the film “Ace In the Hole” (1951) declares: “Bad news sells and good news is no news.”

There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they’d discover that 95% of their peers are fine people. 2,500 years ago, Aristotle declared that: “Poetry is truer than history”—and he was right. For in contrast to the battles, coups and putsches that constitute “the grand march” of time, poetry speaks of the human condition, from the individual perspective, and the message is one of love, or the pain when it fails.