Posthuman Blues

Named and identified victims of the war on Iraq

"This table lists the names of 3,029 civilians killed as a result of the US-led military intervention in Iraq up to September 12th 2004. This collection was compiled by members of the Iraq Body Count project (IBC), using a wide range of sources, primarily press and media reports."

I thought I had the wrong URL at first; then I realized that the list was simply taking a long time to download. Oh, my.

I've adopted a somewhat Carlin-esque view of our species: I think we're circling the drain of extinction, and one of the only releases left to us is the ability to laugh at our collective psychopathologies. But the wholesale slaughter in Iraq is hard to press into the usual list of humanity's deadly failures. The deaths in Iraq aren't due to some lofty collective psychosis -- they're the direct result of a morbidly solipsistic political regime that somehow managed to take root in a country we once hoped -- intuited, even -- was somehow above such things.

As such, I can't accept the civilian casualties in Iraq (or the wanton poisoning of the region with depleted uranium) with anything approaching black humor. This stuff makes me sick to the bone; it makes me feel comically futile and ineffectual.

I'd sincerely love to throw my head back and laugh and attribute the nightmare this planet is becoming to some ineradicable Jungian death-wish. But I can't, because the people responsible have names.

This is how it ends.