Vick, Benoit, Tillman, Iraq

Vick, Benoit, Tillman, Iraq

Where’s the outrage? Pointed in the wrong direction, to allow us to acquit ourselves of participatory guilt.

Everywhere you look there’s outrage at the accusations against Michael Vick for running a dog-fighting ring. With good reason; the fighting alone is a disgusting thing, not to mention the gruesome executions. But I don’t really understand why people are surprised, or why it’s such a big deal.

Compared, say, to Chris Benoit’s murder of his wife and child, quite clearly a product of the same chemically-induced rage that Vick and his fellow scumbags sought a release for.

Or to the accusations that Pat Tillman was killed intentionally by comrades, shot three times in the forehead with an M-16 from ten yards away.

Or to the deaths of about a million Iraqis, and the torture of who knows how many others.

In my book, people are more important than dogs. I expect I’ll be accused of speciesism, but there it is. Hell, I may as well go all the way and declare that I believe war is more important than wrestling (especially fake wrestling), and, God help my future book sales, even football.

But it’s easier to direct one’s inner rage against a target like Vick. Especially given the sensitive nature of the steroid issue right now, and the approach by Bondsy Barr to hallows everyone knows he didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, the official records of which should in my opinion be erased, not asterisked (at least his chemically-induced rage hasn’t killed anyone, as far as I know). Benoit, after all, has the benefit of being dead.

Just as with the war in Vietnam, and for the same reasons, Americans have a lot of inner rage right now. A lot of it comes from inner conflict, very especially among those who found some reason to support the war. It’s not just the right-wing warmongers who feel this; liberal interventionists like George Packer are still struggling to resolve the contradictions in their positions without having to admit they were wrong morally, wrong legally, and wrong realpolitik-wise.

Given all those inner conflicts, plus the constant drumbeat of distraction from the media, it’s not surprising that people look for scapegoats, and focus on things that don’t really matter to the exclusion of things that do.

http://badattitudes.com/MT/