On Watching Strangers Die
Two days ago, I was sitting down to lunch at a restaurant with a student whose parents had flown to Thailand for a short vacation a few days earlier. Before our food arrived, my wife phoned to ask, pointedly, when our young friend’s parents were due to fly home, and to inform me that a Korean passenger jet traveling to Korea from Thailand had just crashed due to birds in the engine. After hanging up the phone, I immediately asked, with a certain discomfort, “When are your parents coming back from Thailand?” I sighed with relief upon hearing that their flight was schedule for the next day. But in that brief moment between hearing the news from my wife and hearing my friend’s answer, “Tomorrow — and I heard about the accident,” my imagination formed a vague notion of what kind of feelings and conversation would have ensued had her reply been something like, “This morning — why?”
In hindsight, I reflected on the fact that during the moments when I had that little exchange, with its minor shudder of “What if?,” hundreds of people living within a few hours of me were living out the horrifying realization of my imaginary experience, putting two and two together after receiving their own worried phone calls, and immediately descending into a day of sudden alarm, growing dread, overwhelming pain, and then the onset of either hours of uncontrollable weeping and impossible conversations, or the dull, helpless emptiness of shock. (I describe what they must have gone through, but I note, apropos of this post’s theme, that few things repulse me more than the publication and universal dissemination of photographs of such weeping or shocked family members, as has become the nauseating norm after every such event.)
Yesterday, the day after the accident, I turned on my computer and found among the day’s headlines a title promising me video footage of the ill-fated airliner skidding unstoppably without its landing gear along a runway, immediately before it crashed into a building and burst into flames. I choose the verb “promising” deliberately. The “news” here, you see, was not the mere fact that a plane had crashed in a freak accident, killing over a hundred and seventy people. The big news — the main attraction, the purpose of the headline — was that the intrepid truth-seekers of democracy’s indispensable protector class, the press, were going to let us all enjoy (another deliberately chosen verb) actual film showing us, in detailed close-up, the last moment of life before those hundred and seventy-nine human beings were incinerated in a ball of flaming jet fuel. I chose not to watch.
What does that video presentation add to our understanding of what happened? What does it add to our appreciation of the information (the actual “news”) about the crash? What does it add to our thoughts about mortality and the fragility of life? Nothing, I suspect. Nor, if we are being honest, is it being presented for any such reason. It is being presented because it is inherently spectacular, titillating, exciting, and therefore highly tempting to every living man or woman with eyes, to watch a plane full of real live people — though preferably people we do not know, in whose lives we have no vested interest — racing to its doom in a moment that we can all easily imagine to be rife with terror and anguish. In short, there is a certain thrill in watching strangers die in this way.
And then we all say, “Oh my God, that’s so horrible!” It’s the audience’s right to say so, isn’t it? I cannot help thinking of how I would feel if I were at the moment of final agony or terror before the great unknown, and had a stranger (or a millions strangers) staring in fascination, not at me, per se, but at my suffering. I think of the death hospital in Brave New World, where children are paraded through the wards and given chocolate treats as they undergo death conditioning — that is, learn not to care about the dying. And think of the final words of Joseph K. in The Trial, as his two brutish assailants, after stabbing him fatally, stand right in front of him, blankly watching him die: “Like a dog.”
Our news media, summarized in its essence with images from two literary classics on the theme of modern inhumanity.
