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Another Halloween has gone by, a holiday that's used
to be for us to enjoy when we were kids, but has increasingly
being taken over by the adults and the marketers –
just like Xmas. But beyond the fireworks, supposedly
illegal down south but that went on all afternoon
and night (“This is like Baghdad is like”
said my Russian neighbour” – I could have
added 'that’s like Chechnya is like' but I didn’t!),
parties, silly costumes, and overpriced bits of sweets,
Halloween has its roots as a pagan holiday. One that
is celebrated by peasant cultures in a variety of
ways to mark the fall harvest, the midpoint between
fall equinox and winter solstice, the onset of the
year's darkest days. In pagan traditions it is considered
the day when the veil between the living and dead
is at its thinnest.
And
the following day, Nov. 1, is celebrated in many parts
of South America and, particularly in Mexico as the
Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Greeks, Spaniards
and Italians around the Med have a similar custom
and, most likely, All Souls Day derives from that
tradition.
On
this day, people living on the land celebrate -- often
by creating commemorative altars -- the lives and
living spirits of all those who've passed on in the
previous year. It's a holiday for our times. If you
don't believe it, check out the Washington Post's
web
gallery of photos of American soldiers killed
this year in Iraq. ‘Faces of the Fallen’
it is called.
The
all-American young stare out at you, full of promise
and hope and life: portraits, probably obtained from
the families rather than the Pentagon (which would
rather not dwell on how well the occupation isn't
going). They show young adults in dress uniform, or
in high school graduation gear. One is of a young
couple hiking. Taken collectively, they're painful
to look at. Don’t know why but it brought in
focus the faces in the posters of our own H=Block
dead back, when was it? What was I thinking?
As
the dates get more recent, more and more of the listed
names have no photos, the portraits having not yet
been obtained. The page is only updated weekly, and
it's getting hard to keep up. Two days ago, 16 more
U.S. soldiers getting ready to return back home suffered
what Donald Rumsfeld promptly, and cruelly, called
their necessary deaths. Yesterday another one
was blown to bits near Tikrit.
Tell
the families and their loved ones that those deaths
were necessary. Tell the Iraqis that didn't want them
there in the first place, and that warned of the danger
that would result. Tell their fellow squaddies, lying
shitless in bed at night, listening to the endless
rounds of errant homemade mortars attacking the U.S.
bases.
Dia
de los Muertos memorializes everybody -- the one in
75 or so human lives that left our world in the past
365 days. As usual this year, the list includes various
celebrities and notables – in my memory live
Edward Said, Johnny Cash, John Ritter, Captain Kelly
and Samarakis – that stylish poet from Alexandria.
But
far more of us simply lose people close to us - notable
in our own lives, but not widely among the public.
And this year, seemingly more than ever, Halloween,
at least in the US, belonged to the portraits that
are missing. The ones not yet in place, the ones still
to come, and the ones we don't even know about.
In
this latter category, it's hard not to notice that
while American and Irish media scrambles to memorialise
dead U.S. soldiers (and CIA mercenaries), few are
trying to count the much larger number of Iraqi deaths.
A handful of web sites are attempting to provide estimated
ranges of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the
U.S.-led invasion and occupation, but it's an imprecise
count at best. The best-known of these sites,
iraqbodycount.org, has documented somewhere between
7800 and 9600 reported Iraqi deaths, but their efforts
are hampered by the complete absence of information
from America's occupying army and provisional
government. Washington simply doesn't tally the Iraqis
it kills, whether resistance fighters or innocent
bystanders. Reporters in the field have frequently
noted instances of U.S. soldiers firing on crowds
or civilians that weren't even reported to local commanders
-- let alone the brass back home. It's a grim new
version of don't ask - don't tell.
Dia
de los Muertos is a useful holiday, one intended to
help us grieve, memorialise, and move on, an acknowledgement
that dying is an inevitable part of living. It's a
holiday based far more in peoples' emotional needs
than in multinational marketing strategies.
But
this year, stories continue to mount of ordinary Iraqis
ambushed by hidden checkpoints, or shot to death for
not obeying an order they didn't hear in a language
they didn't understand. Anonymous deaths, noted in
their home villages, unknown to us halfway around
the world. Meanwhile, we have the likes of Rumsfeld,
calling the resulting U.S. deaths necessary
while not calling the far larger number of Iraqi deaths
anything at all; and Bush insisting all is wonderful;
and all his apologists and sycophants blasting the
media for not reporting more "good news"
from Iraq.
It's
a recipe for many more dead in Iraq in the next days,
weeks, months, year. And don’t let them tell
us what Saddam might have done. There is no doubt
as to who the political leader is, and who his cronies
are, that set these events in motion, and who are
those who continue to issue the killing orders today
– and will do so tomorrow. There is no question
as to where the responsibility rests for the loss
of all those faces once full of hope, and the far
larger number of murdered Iraqi or other Arab faces
we'll never see, in death as in life.
For
once, oddly, a day meant to memorialise instead has
become a call to action: to demand that Iraq's imperial
rulers in Washington, London, Rome and Madrid, stop
inflicting so many needless, anonymous, and utterly
unnecessary deaths. Unless Bush and his cabal reverse
their policies, and quickly, there will be many more
dead to memorialise Halloween next year.
What
we are all living through these days, as the occupation
and the war in Iraq continues, is a horrific spectacle
of triumphant capitalism. What I hope for is that
the resistance to that spectacle is communicated and
applied in each new context, be it Palestine, Venezuela,
or resistance of bus workers, people working in the
airlines or postal workers closer home. Just as in
an earlier era, merchant ships carried the news of
slave revolt from island to island in the Carribean,
igniting a stubborn ring of local fires that could
not be quenched.
That
communication has, of course, to be translated. And
'The Blanket' is helping there. It's helping
to build a link in the chain I would have said ten
years ago. It's communicating like a virus that modulates
its form to find in each context an adequate host
I say today.
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