Worthy & Unworthy Victims

Media coverage of the massacre at Virginia Tech, by the U.S. mainstream media (CNN, FOX etc.), that is being broadcast throughout the globe these days, brings to our attention the use of the construct of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims by this media. Cultural technicians of the present, force upon the world an idea of hierarchy of value (of human life) based on the victim’s degrees of separation from the U.S. power elite. The range runs from ‘completely worthless’ (reserved for enemies and those they consider ‘inferior’ races) to ‘worthy’ based on congruence with the policies and ‘social type’ of the U.S elite. Closeness to the image of the U.S power elite and being in tune with their agenda determines the level of mourning and sorrow granted to victims of events, both within the U.S, and around the world.

Coinciding with the massacre of the 30 in Virginia, were the deaths of the over 200 in Iraq, yet no comparable coverage, or mourning or empathy was expressed towards the Iraqi victims. The fact that Iraqis are dying in larger numbers every single day, while receiving less than a casual mention reveals the “unworthiness” of those victims to the U.S. media. This hypocrisy of these current day ‘moral entrepreneurs’ is not without purpose, it serves a latent function of legitimizing a global system that generates atrocities on a daily basis at scales that would exceed the carnage of a thousand Virginia Tech shooters.

Mourning over the Iraqi victims of violence, which has as its cause the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, or mourning over the 40,000 that are killed every single day in the world due to distributional deprivation of an unjust World System is distasteful to this media because it would delegitimze a system whose very purpose of existence is the benefit of the few through the deprivation of the many. How does the media fit into this equation one might ask? The media functions as the glue that keeps this system together even as potentialities for breakdown occur at its every tenuous joint. If individuals can be made to accept their problems as their own creation, even though most suffer from them, then the system is absolved of responsibility. On the flip side, attributing human emotionality and care to an impersonal and dehumanizing system, while attributing deviance to the individuals and their personal flaws keeps the system intact. Coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre with the accompanying ‘impression management’ of reporters crying, of flags and national symbolism and speeches by the president and others, seeks to associate all that is positive with a system that puts millions at risk of early death through violence, deprivation and inadequate healthcare.

On the international level, such coverage seeks to put a human face on the oppressors (the U.S. elite) as they try to convince the oppressed (the “Third World”) that they are being oppressed (or ‘globalized’, or ‘civilized’ or ‘modernized’) for their own benefit. It reinforces the superior/subordinate relationship that the U.S. elite want to perpetuate. Worthy victims are the ones most like the U.S. elite in objective features (like race) as well as subjective outlook (like worldview), they are mostly American and most preferably white, while the murderers resemble the unworthy (mostly Muslims and Arabs or others considered ‘inferior’ by this media). In the case of the Oklahoma city bombing incident, the automatic default position of this media was that some ‘outsider’ (Arab terrorist) had done it, while in the current case of the Virginia Tech shooter, it was done by someone who was described by this media (with particular reference to Fox News) more in terms of his immigration status rather than his act.

Another equally important function that this media performs with its round-the-clock, emotionally charged coverage is to “prove” to the domestic population in the U.S. that their decision makers are just like them, and share in their sorrows and joys while being highly responsive to their needs. This effective contouring of public opinion is happening in a society even as the decisions of these elite have denied tens of millions health insurance and adequate nutrition, a kind of absolute (distributional) deprivation that puts at risk the survival of a large percentage of the U.S. population. Yet the crocodile tears these elite shed over incidents like the VT massacre, absolves them quite effectively, in the eyes of the public, of their much larger scale mass-murders around the world and in their own society.

The U.S mainstream media is a major tool in the hands of the power elite; it constructs images of reality that are subsequently widely believed in by the masses, images whose definitions ensure that inequality will continue without revolt or redress. A mythology, garbed in master symbols that contours perceptions of available life-chances regardless of objective fact, it determines relationships between races, ethnicities and nationalities; it makes people chase dreams that most can never attain. So powerful are its effects (as are often revealed by polls after major events about which most people’s only source of information is this media), that realities of people’s own lives, the objective facts that confront them on a daily basis, become subordinate to its contrived images. The mainstream media owned by a handful of corporations, is part of the apparatus employed by the U.S elite to convince the masses that deviance and crime are committed by ‘outsiders’: described as ‘outsiders’ both by their act (“How could anyone of us have possible done it?”) and immigration status (“The perpetrator was a resident alien’)). Further, this media tries to ‘prove’ that such acts are due to the perpetrators own personal problems and character defects and not due to any shortcomings in the system itself within which, and surrounded by which, individual lives are lived. In short, crime according to this media is presented as a ‘personal trouble’ of individual character traits and not as a ‘public issue’ involving social structure.

Such efforts by the media are to control what are in fact the effects of an unjust social system, rife with inequality and racism, the alienating effects of which reduces everything human to its dollar equivalent in the “market”, for sale to the highest bidder. In such a society, "little men (and women)" trapped as cogs in the machinery of capital, strive for, yet never attain goals that are themselves externally determined for them, the means to achieve which are unavailable, but the motivation to keep those goals alive are continually pushed as ‘opium’. Having only ‘use value’ and not ‘human value’, people lost in worlds they have not made, where leisure as well as work is rationalized to benefit others, living narrow lives that attain meaning only vicariously through the world of movies and entertainment (that is when they are not attempting to escape it through intoxication), all human relationships are thus setup for manipulation. The cause of such episodes as the VT massacre is just such a social system, a society of people that are mentally homeless in the present, geared towards future dreams, living in an alien world that imposes itself on them for the purpose of domination, where the personality is saturated by distraction (through the media) making it blasé’ and impersonal, uncaring and numb to the pain of others. Hence, human life acquires meaning and worth only in death, a perverse form of the ‘worship of the dead’ exists, but only if the dead happen to be “worthy” victims, whose worth is determined by an elite that considers human life, other than their own, of little worth (as is empirically display in their countless wars and deprivation generating policies, at home and around the globe).

For most in such a system, there exists a fleeting life with narrow memories of a bureaucratically circumscribed existence, which ensures a life lived for the corporation for which one works that best years of his or her life and for which one’s leisure activities are rationalized and for whom one’s kids are nurtured and educated. Under these circumstances it is inevitable that episodes like the Virginia Tech massacre would occur. In searching for its causes we need to look not at the labeled criminal, nor at the act but at the social system that produces such acts and the elite whose decisions (or lack thereof) maintain such a system. We also need to look at the “higher immorality” of these elite as revealed by their policies around the globe and at home, an immorality that sets the standards on the worth of human life, which is then emulated by the “little men (and women)”.

Muhammed Asadi (www.asadi.org) can be reached at masadi@aol.com.