HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Kerr and Rothstein

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Monday Morning Massacres

By Edward Rothstein
Posted Monday, March 8, 1999, at 10:23 AM ET

Dear Sarah:

RSS

Monday mornings tend to be an odd time for newspaper reading. Pre-planned pieces make up for Sunday's lull. I'm looking at the front page of today's New York Times, for example, and aside from Stanley Kubrick's death, most of the news revolves around issues of government regulation and social policy: cable rates to rise as regulation ends; control of antibiotics in animal feed to increase as regulation expands; Medicaid mothers overcharged for pain relief in childbirth; New York police lagging in diversity.

I don't know if you want to take on any of those issues--or the Russian economy, which gets star attention in the Wall Street Journal and L.A. Times--but I am still thinking about two stories from yesterday, one "high," one "low."

First, the low, because I seem to be in an unusually morbid mood this morning. Yesterday, John F. Burns reported in the New York Times about the easing of strife between the military rulers and the Islamic militants in Algeria. But what stuck with me was the nature of the "strife" created by the Armed Islamic Group ("a guerilla faction known for its brutality") and the Islamic Salvation Army ("the group that started the war"). Descriptions of the massacres do not make for breakfast table reading, but they are not dissimilar to other massacres we have been reading about in recent weeks, in Rwanda, Uganda, India, Sierra Leone, etc., etc. I think of them as machete massacres--and many of them are.

They almost all involved unspeakably bloody brutality where no distinctions count other than the ethnicity of the victims. Actually, ethnicity is too modern a word. There is something almost primeval here, mocking any rationalist pretensions. There are loads of explanations around--the artificiality of the modern nation-state, the high level of unemployment, grudges and counter-grudges--but I am coming to think of these horrors as eruptions breaking through the thin veneer of "society." Forget the liberationist ideology, the talk of democracy and human rights, the challenges mounted to injustice: These are tribal confrontations, assertions of blood rule--the common parlance of human conflict before the brief eye-blink of civil society. The medium--machetes and knives--is the message, mocking any other claims of authority or judgment.

I think McLuhan once called the stirrup one of the formative inventions of civilization, since it changed the art of war, allowing fighting on horseback. But these killings are pre-stirrupal. They seem to have no goal other than the elimination of the competing tribe, while producing as much blood and dirt as possible. Policy is less crucial than power. Maybe this is why the modern state has been so powerless in dealing with this kind of killing. The modern democratic state has other premises, other goals; its threats have no machete-weight.

I was going to ask you about Latin America, Mexico, and machete war, but maybe this is too much for our first meal. And the "high" question I had? Well, it might have to wait for lunch. It was about Ethan Bronner's piece in yesterday's Times about the effect of teaching Plato and Aristotle to the homeless.

Best,

Ed Rothstein