Tuesday, December 18, 2001

Remora

Limited Inc is, as our many happy readers know, ahead of the curve. Perhaps our more unhappy readers are doubtful; perhaps our happiest reader also writes this rag. A week or two back, Limited Inc was talking about death toll politics. We shopped our pitch around, actually, trying to awaken various editors to the brilliance of our idea, and the need to pay us for putting it all in a nice cohesive shape, but of course a prophet is without profit in his own country, and our pitch was pitched.

Now here's the WP, Sunday: What Counts
The Death Toll Is Far Less Than Feared. Can We Accept That? by Peter Freundlich.

This is the graf that makes his point - or rather points his question. And remember, kids, the question mark is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for tragedy. Which is why newspapers really hate it -they prefer their tragedies to be car accidents.

"Is it that we need the higher number, to shore up our fury? Is it that the sight of those sinking skyscrapers, in which, God knows, 10 times as many people might just as well have died, opened a hole in us that simply won't close? Does it somehow seem a betrayal of the dead to reduce their number? Or is this perhaps American grandiosity -- a desire to dwarf other tragedies the way the Trade Center towers for a short time dwarfed all other buildings in the world?

As if 3,000 people weren't enough. Or as if the intent weren't clear."

Revenge feeds on numbers. Elias Canetti was not the first to notice this, but was the most thorough explorer of the dark side of crowd psychology. We wonder how all the people we know were in there got out. The escape story still needs to be told, in some bold and beautiful way.

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