There are things we want to watch, things we decide not to look at and things we should be forced to witness.
Did you see Mark Kavanagh, the trainer of Melbourne Cup winner, Shocking, as his stallion tore down towards the finish line?
On television, Kavanagh’s ecstasy was so complete it looked as though he was being electrocuted.
A lot of Australia was behind the camera trained on him. Even so he abandoned any form of control or awareness of anything except the sight of the giant horse thundering home. His euphoria was spectacular.
Two teenagers, and nine others, drowned this week when their boat sank trying to cross the Indian Ocean.
There is a sense that this news is being responded to in the exact opposite way to Kavanagh’s utter giving himself up to the moment. Our inbuilt net nannies take the story and strip it of truly-felt emotion. We recognise it is sad and terrible and yet those children were beyond the reach of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. And therefore their horror exists only as a rotten abstraction. We can eat toast, drink tea and listen to the newsreader all at the same time.
I tried to imagine if it was one of my children fighting for their life and I started to feel a little sick – no wonder we cover our eyes.
Also far out to sea an oil rig caught fire after it had spewed gas and crude for ten weeks.
It has been a disaster so out of sight out of mind that it has taken on ridiculous proportions. It was such calamities three decades ago that were manna from heaven when conservationists were trying to save the Great Barrier Reef. Today, however, the oil spill has been an uncomfortable, but scandalously inconsequential prologue to the fact that the Federal Government has signed a $50 billion gas deal in another relatively-invisible far north-west Australian seascape.
If oil had poured into the sea unchecked for ten weeks off Sydney or the Great Barrier Reef or near Lord Howe Island, in fact anywhere along the east coast, it would be a different story.
Kevin Rudd would be in stocks at the front gate to Kirribilli House right now and Peter Garrett would be back fronting a rock band.
And then there was a story in the New Yorker magazine about predator drones and the dangers associated with treating war like a video game. The operators of these drones can see exactly what is going on – sometimes sitting in sterile environments as far away as the other side of the world. America has now killed hundreds of people using weapons fired from these remote-controlled planes.
Reportedly, even though lives are at stake, seeing and feeling have been decoupled in some of these operators. In others, rates of post traumatic stress are as high or higher than actual combatants fighting in real warzones.
‘The seeming unreality of the Predator [drone] enterprise is also felt by the pilots,’ says the article in New Yorker. ‘Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone’s remote controls. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive home to have dinner with their families.’
This week some foals were born at a horse stud around the corner from where we live. My wife and three-year-old daughter went to see them. The foal was scared at first but curious.
It took ten minutes of patient stillness on behalf of my super-active child before the young horse finally came to the fence. Overwhelmed by curiosity it eventually let a human toddler pat its face.
It was an example of where stillness can be just as euphoric as Kavanagh’s crazy chicken dance.
What do we see? What don’t we see? And what does seeing mean?
The separations we allow to shield us from reality is entirely a social construct. It was once pointed out that when the killing in war moved from individuals confronting each other to a bow shot removed, this allowed more wiggle room for the the disconnect between the citizen and the king/government’s actions. By the time WWI it was so distant as to be the first industrial war – the nation with the most munitions (back home, beyond the Front) would be the victor. In the 50/60s it became the policy of “MAD” (Mutually Assured Destruction), when supposedly sane politicians seriously proposed wiping out entire cities & regions in single fission strikes.
And yet, and yet, we still go on, as a society, pretending that this is normal. The new remove, to drone pilots in Hogsfart, Iowa going home and taking the kids to Burger King is different in detail but not in essence.
Many connections, most apposite. That predator drone thing is bloody terrifying – although it’s interesting it is getting attention now. They’ve been doing similar things for a long time, but recently it’s hit the media more betterer.
Spot on James. The thing that strikes me is that whether it’s refugees drowning, oil spills or brutal new weapons, the reason we’re not interested is ultimately because we really would prefer not to know. It’s just easier to think of refugees as “illegals” and forget that they are people fleeing often unspeakable horrors and taking incredible risks. If we were to spend a day in one of their lives we would want to bend over backwards to give them help in some way. If we knew what our oil & natural gas profits cost the East Timorese, the Kimberley indigenous nations and the environment we would be uncomfortable. And if we knew the lives of the people that are so angry at the west, if we understood how much damage it does that for every dollar we give in aid we take $14 in unfair trade, we wouldn’t get so excited at seeing them “vaporised”. But knowing these things could cost the economy, so its better to stay ignorant.