In the Valley of Elah…

skyscraped — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:32:18 +0000

I watched In the Valley of Elah last night, and at first I was skeptical that it was going to be good. It seemed like a typical murder mystery: soldier comes home from Iraq, goes AWOL, they find his body cut up and burned, and think it’s linked to drugs. You know, because they don’t drug test in Iraq and those Mexican gangs selling Meth just pray on returning soldiers. Which does happen. But what really happened was WAY more fucked up. WAY more. Can I stress how WAY MORE FUCKED UP what really happened was than a soldier who’s got a drug problem, tries to score on his first weekend back, and ends up getting fucked over and brutally murdered by a dealer? Yeah, that’s fucked up. But the plot reveals no stereotypical Hollywood ending. So if you haven’t seen the movie, watch it. Because when it’s all said and done, and you’re shivering in your blanket, eyes wide and tears brimming, there’s a moment when it all sinks in: it really happened.

Let me make this clear: I believe it’s important to defend yourself. Sometimes that means killing people. If anyone ever tried to hurt my dog, or my niece, or one of my friends, or my parents, and I was physically there and could physically stop it, even if it meant killing them with whatever tools available, if they weren’t going to stop, I’d kill them. I’ve killed a water moccasin with a hoe because he was nesting next to my horse and almost struck my mom. I felt bad, because he was just doing what any old snake would do, but it was necessary. Killing him made me feel sick to my stomach. It was just a snake, you say. Well, it was life. It was blood and flesh and fangs bared. Death is a part of life, though, and sometimes life needs death to continue. I’m a relatively strict vegetarian, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to lay my head on the tracks while my rights or the rights of those I love are railroaded over.

What I’m opposed to is violent, spiritual, tortured death. It happens when you’re raped. It happens when you’re tortured. It happens to factory-farmed animals in a slaughterhouse. It happens when “preemptive war” becomes synonymous with “Patriotism.” It happens when you come home from a cesspool of atrocity and can’t deal with the shallow materialistic hologram of reality that is American culture, and you blow your own brains out. It happens when you’re a 21 year old boy given a gun and told to shoot brown people, and then told it’s okay to laugh, it’s how you deal. And it happens so frequently and with such fervor in war that I have no doubt that there is some cyclical need, not by all people, but by the few who manipulate the many, to keep the heart of a blood thirsty god pumping by gorging itself on a feast of human suffering. It’s a cult of death, people. Plain and simple, dark and furious.

So that’s where I stand. It’s a lonely little place that’s got a few supporters, but our numbers are growing. When people talk about the casualties of this war, and how there are so few in comparison to every other war we’ve had (none of which, by the way, have been formally declared since World War II), I just want to scream. It doesn’t matter if it’s one person or thousands. I don’t think people realize the effects of torture, either. It doesn’t just affect the person being tortured. It’s the torturer who has to keep on living with her or himself, and it’s the taxpayers on the other side of the ocean who go to sleep every night with nary a thought that their money is funding systematic soul-killing.

That’s it. That’s where I stand. I don’t want a child to grow up in this world. I want to change it. And it’s cold over here, but it’s getting warmer.

-skyscraped

Children of the Wasteland » Torture

In the Valley of Elah…