Connections: Cruel World
This week, we learned it was likely that Jamal Khashoggi, a 59-year-old journalist for The Washington Post and a Saudi dissident who lived in the United States, was not only murdered by the Saudi government, but, according to Turkish authorities, tortured first, his fingers cut off while he was alive, his body dismembered entirely — with a bone saw — once he was dead. A bone saw. Dismembered.
The history of Western civilization speaks of beheadings — execution by guillotine or sword as a swift and efficient method. Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England, was among the most famous monarchs to be beheaded. You would think that the guillotine would suffice among today’s despots, but apparently not.
My daughter reports that one of my grandchildren heard the headlines somewhere and asked what her mom did for a living: “Are you a journalist? Are they chopping up journalists?” Her mother, making light at first, replied, “They don’t chop up journalists like me, who write for fashion magazines.” Later, however, it was time for a discussion, on an 11-year-old level, of the role of news reporters in defending liberty by being the watchdogs of democracy.
No one is drawing and quartering news reporters in this country — yet — although our president, the very week Mr. Khashoggi went missing, seemed to find it mighty funny to joke about beating them up. The audience at the rally at which he spoke joined in the comedy and chuckled along. That the president, if he could get away with it, would be happy to jail journalists who point out his failings seems patently obvious at this point. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days when our worst parenting worry was that our kids might be influenced negatively by the violence in video games and rock-music lyrics.
The current big man in the White House has already demonstrated a breathtaking capacity for cruelty, seeming to glory in separating children from parents at borders, and cheering when refugees fleeing from persecution and violence are sent home to face prison or death. Here in the First Congressional District, our own zealous congressman, Representative Lee Zeldin, gets into the spirit in a television commercial currently in rotation in which he promises with relish not just to stop but to crush and destroy MS-13, the dangerous street gang.
I have never believed the average American has a taste for blood, or would enjoy physically punishing political enemies — dissidents, dissenters, investigative journalists, and other “enemies of the people” — but unless and until the majority of citizens in this country stands up to firmly and finally put a stop to all this, the jury is apparently still out.
We have to keep listening. We cannot just plug our ears and wish it would go away. Listen for red flags. It is a red flag when you hear a leader speak of those he doesn’t like in terms that dehumanize them: It isn’t just ugly talk when a leader calls immigrants “bad hombres” with “dangerous criminals among them,” or calls some women “dogs” and “fat pigs.” Such words are rhetorical devices for degrading human beings and making them seem less deserving of fair or decent treatment.