Scraps: Bodies

Every night there are more dead bodies on TV. Bodies that have been beaten, bludgeoned, mangled, bodies in various states of decay. And we call this macomb display entertainment. The pictures make it real. The video lets us believe what we are seeing. There is always a good cop and a deviant, a noble defense with psychoses and trauma. We believe in justice, but not in the abstract. We need the real body, the maggots in the belly, the dried blood on the scalp. We see these signs of evil in the world and we wait for justice, delivered at the 55 minute mark, with a revelation and a showdown. We click off the television set after the hero makes his witty quip and squints into the nearest camera. We sleep better at night—knowing there is brutality in the world, but that it will be contained. There is a dead body, but it is not ours. The dead come home from Iraq under the cloak of darkness and there are no cameras, no video-recorders, no documentation of these real sacrifices our county makes so that we might sit at home and watch tv.