Unknown perpetrators plant bombs
in pressure cookers in Boston (42 degrees North, 71 degrees West).
They go off at the finish line of that great city's annual marathon,
killing and maiming people in a cruel act of vicious violence.
In a crime against humanity.
President Obama, in a BBC TV
report, calls it an act of terrorism, saying that any use of bombs to
kill innocent civilians is an act of terrorism. The truth of his
remark is self-evident.
There is terror on the faces of
people in Boston interviewed by the BBC, following the horrific
incident. Also shock and awe. The marathon bombs are specific
manifestations of a global phenomenon. Violence, as war and in many
other forms, reaches everywhere, killing and maiming with impunity.
All this violence is
self-evidently wrong.
The wonderful modern spectacle
and sporting event called 'The Marathon' originates in a war story, a
story of great violence. A huge conflagration engulfs the region of
the eastern Mediterranean as Athenian and Persian armies immolate
populations and devastate territories. A messenger runs from the
battlefield at Marathon, the field of fennel, to tell the leaders of
a victory. He dies as he crosses the white line.
The pressure is too much and
blows him up.
The BBC coverage of the killings
in Boston is lengthy. The news report is followed by analysis in
interviews with victims, witnesses, doctors, security experts and
politicians. The treatment of the violent incident is extensive and
forensic.
It is not comprehensive.
There are omissions, lacunae,
ghosts hovering in the media mist. The ghosts of all the detailed
coverage the BBC does not make of similar and greater incidents of
violence in territories where the people are not 'us'.
Such is the play of geo-politics
and the limits – itself a form of violence - it sets on human
empathy. It is a noxious gas, seen in the miasma of battlefields and
in the mists of media omissions.
A woman is buried today, with
funeral pomp and military ceremony, in London (51 degrees North, 7 degrees
West). Much of her public life is associated with violence: the
direct violence of war and overseas military campaigns; the direct
violence of economic and social dislocation; the indirect violence of
poverty and inequality and the cultural violence of discrimination on
the grounds of sexual orientation.
Violence is possible at the
woman's funeral. This is self-evident.
The pressure cooker is always
bubbling. When it blows, it is cruel and devastating.
Lord Carrington, in a BBC TV
interview, directs citizens, who hold different opinions from the
dead woman and her supporters, to stay away. He takes a
self-evidently aggressive stance. He is, after all, a Lord and thus a
manifestation of a particular social organisation, a particular way
of arranging and running a kingdom. He says: if you don't like it,
you'd best lump it.
For clarification purposes, Lord
Carrington does not live in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the
Sultanate of Brunei, the kleptocracy of Burma or the autocracy of
North Korea. He lives in the homeland of the BBC.
Gas, isn't it?
Fennel
is a digestive aid and a carminative, or
agent capable of diminishing gas.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/tv
http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/natural-medicine/herbal-remedies/fennel-herbal-remedies.htm
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