channel vision
Robert Kirby
There can never be adequate description of the events last week in New York. Anyone with a television set will have seen the devastation as it occurred, watched the terrified people, heard the first witnesses. This was not second-hand, not a recording of some engagement of the day before. It was the front line as it was happening. Immediate. Live war. With it, imagery of such apocalyptic proportions as to make the thing almost incomprehensible.
Portable video cameras have brought some terrible visions into our homes these recent years. Those shocking pictures of the burning Concorde; that awful film of soldiers in the Congo pushing a man over the edge of a high bridge; shots of missiles being launched in their thousands in the Gulf War; the mass graves of Kosovo; Chechnya; Chinese soldiers executing dissidents. Television news seems at times to be reporting the death of hope.
To these displays of what are now quotidian horrors we have become largely immune. It is only a matter of scale. Battered with the enormities of today’s political and corporate greed, we have learned to shrug, to twitch the remote control when the scenes of carnage or poverty provoke something in us that we prefer to leave undisturbed. We simply get too much of it. We are sated with violence and catastrophe, both real and depicted. We’ve looked at so many Godzillas, so many Towering Infernos our emotions have to be encouraged to recognise this one as anything all that out of the ordinary.
This was apparent in the almost detached tenor of the television commentators and analysts who have clustered to the cameras last week, but stayed at safe arm’s length from what they described. I could not but think back to that famous radio commentary: Herb Morrison describing the destruction by fire of the Hindenburg airship as it tried to land in New Jersey in 1937. Morrison was so shocked by what he witnessed he literally broke down, wept, was almost unable to continue. Last Tuesday there was nothing like that. The commentary was all cool and collected.
Man’s abasement of his world occurs at all levels. It fits all sizes. In heartbreaking counterpoint to the New York scenes came a small, untrumpeted programme, transmitted late last Sunday afternoon on SABC3 titled Voices of the Forest, part of the Africa series. It told of the sudden and unexpected devastation visited on deep-forest dwellers in Cameroon. In this case it was not political extremism that brought panic and chaos to this small community, but rather a bitter and focused terrorism of a different sort: the arrival in their edenic lives of monstrous machines, the cable and fire, the mechanical brutality of French loggers.
Within its own dimensions this was a tragedy of the same intensity as New York’s. It had been planned, launched and executed with as much pitiless indifference to its appalling cost as were the missions of the suicide pilots. It caused as disabling a punishment of a human community, and with them, of a numberless and intricate natural society of animals, birds, insects and vegetation that had formed, evolved and prevailed for far longer than New York. The forests of the Congo basin are the oldest of the world’s ecosystems.
The causes and inspirations of the current logging onslaughts on Africa are as foul a degradation of human impulse as those of last Tuesday. Religious and capitalist intolerance fight it out in Ghaza and New York. In the cathedralled forests of Cameroon, shrieking chainsaws announce a more profane devastation. As was the stun and terror of New Yorkers, so was it etched on the faces of the forest people as they watched trees, which they had always believed were theirs, being sawn up and dragged away.
Yet you will hear no United Nations Security Council resolutions condemn the French government for its eager and continuing desecration of African forests. To the north of Cameroon the natural forests have all but disappeared, their rich pillage paid into the bank accounts of local politicians.
Yet the United Nations secretary general will not take himself and his slavish press corps to the humble forest dwellings of Cameroon. He does not see their calamities as worthy of his bale. Instead he will be elsewhere, basking in the synthetic adulation he seems to attract. Any word of complaint about this other wickedness will go unheard in the hypocritical yawl and fury of Mr Anan’s precious international racism conference.
In obscene fashion the New York attacks established a new benchmark for the beast. We have only to wait to see what will transcend this latest horror. Between the toppling of giant trees in Cameroon and the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers in New York flares a dreadful symbiosis. The crimes of last week were not new but in their signatures.
Our wait, I fear, will not be too long.