I couldn't help but scorn myself for missing a screen shot of the front page that lie before me at 6 o'clock in the morning. At washingtonpost.com there was the image of James Cameron founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum, dedicated to educating the general public of the injustices suffered by people of African Heritage in America. Under this image was an article of appreciation and below that his obituary. James Cameron died at the age of 92 and is the only known survivor of a lynching attempt, which occurred when he was 16 years old. As amazing a feat it was, being one of thousands to escape such a fate, a greater spectacle lie in the headlines beside it.
I didn't care that George Bush made a "surprise" visit to Iraq (much like all the surprise sound bites he gives us each morning trying to raise his polls from the 30 percent monster) or that there was another shocking car bombing in Iraq. What I did take note of is
U.S. Officials Detail Zarqawi's Last Hour. Was it sheer irony the Washington post was trying to convey or a mere coincidence the articles lie side by side. A man who survived a lynching decades earlier died only two days after the public lynching of the "the new people of color"'s representative.
Here, at the Washington Post's website, they feed America's bloodlust and decrepit justice by flaunting the body of this dead man. They flaunt this dead man's body and then assure us he isn't human. "Look at what he's done! He's an animal!" Then in the same breath you kill dismiss four others. "They were collateral damage." Followed by a mask of humanity. "We let him die peacefully. Look at this picture of the man. He practically died of natural causes. The bomb didn't kill him and neither did our soldiers" as if it isn't the fall that kills the man but the sudden stop at the end. And they assure us it was necessary. "But it's going to help a lot," (and they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima) "Zarqawi was a loose cannon who gave al-Qaeda in Iraq a bad name with gruesome beheadings..." (and they drove the Native American off their land) "as it is the people's resistance and every youth can become al-Zarqawi" (and they enslaved the African children).
Fortunately for us, we do not have ropes anymore. We do not have museums where bodies have been quartered and genitals displayed of this strange humanoid animal. We no longer have lynched people sold on postcards for a few cents. No, now we have "tolerable" pictures, autopsies, and the mystique in whether or not they shot the man after they bombed him.
The lynching doesn't end there. Just as the lynching didn't stop with James Cameron, as it continued through Emmett Till, as it continues with Zarqawi and as they target Abdel Rahman al-Iraqi and Abu Masari... then Iran then some other non western civilization (because we all know North Korea is bad) who I suppose are only names to us, they'll find someone else. They might be people to some. They might be the next blood stained flag for others.
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