As is my weekly practice, I checked in on The Daley Times-Post
http://users.adelphia.net/... to see what was what. For those of you who do not know, the Daily Times-Post is a rather conservative website. It has the various columnists who write about God, country, immigration, communist progressive Democrats, an idiotic discussion of speaking English or--and the threat is palpable--"else" and the like. It is mostly unreadable. However, it can be instructive.
Today was just such a day. The lead story is a brief review of the 80 Taliban who were killed in Afghanistan, included in this brief blurb was the troubling news that 16 civilians died. Underneath this blurb, Ed Daley who runs the site, posts a pithy comment about the news. Today, under a blurb concerning the possible death of 16 civilians we have this razor like analysis: "Kicking ass and taking down names." Is life so meaningless that we can trivialize it with some trite slogan, that obscures the facts that 1) we didn't kick ass, we killed people and 2) we more than likely did not take names. Civilians who die in Iraq or Afghanistan are forgotten, ignored, and hidden. As a country, our administration seems unconcerned with the loss of non-American lives. This is instructive, because it gives voice to the lie that we are in anyway in either Afghanistan or Iraq for the people who live there. To Ed Daley this all appears to be a game. He trivializes the loss of life.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his 1995 book "Silencing the Past" (Boston: Beacon Press), argues that there are two ways when can "silence the past." First, one can erase it. Trouillot discusses the Haitian Revolution as an example of an event--since it does not align with Western ideological narratives concerning "slaves"--has been largely erased from history texts. By hiding the caskets of American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, this administration is practicing erasure. It removes them from our consciousness. Another example is the lack of data collection on the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of sight, out of mind. The second way concerns making the event banal or trivial. Ed Daley has, with his brief commentary, made the deaths of those civilians trivial. He has reduced them to a trite phrase that obscures what is really happening. Another example of this, is to argue that things are not as bad now as they were before we invaded. Even if this were true, and I am unsure it is, it trivializes the on-the-ground lived experiences of Iraqis and Afghanis.
We should, I think, keep an eye on such historiographical alchemy. We are not "kicking ass and taking down names." We are, as a country, killing people and obscuring their fate.