Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
ONE | What Is Life?
TWO | When Death Died
THREE | A Couple of Sarahs Later
FOUR | No One’s Dead
FIVE | There Is Only Life
SIX | Coney Island and the Mind
SEVEN | The Draculated Cat
ENDNOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copyright Page
For two dear friends,
Lew Ellenhorn and Al Schwartz
INTRODUCTION | Pictures at a Deposition
God himself, who has disappeared . . . has left us his judgment that still hovers over us like the grin of
the famous Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
—JEAN BAUDRILLARD, EXILES FROM DIALOGUE
EDGAR ALLAN POE and Arthur Conan Doyle created two of history’s most
memorable detectives: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Detectives so
captured the imagination in the nineteenth century that writers borrowed the
word sleuth, which originally referred to the dog that did all the nose work, the
bloodhound, for that new superhuman, the detective. Those two nineteenth-
century sleuths, Dupin and Holmes, came up with solutions for the most
intricately plotted crimes—mostly acts of grisly murder. But the greatest crime
of the century took place, over a period of time, right under their highly
calibrated noses: the slow and deliberate disappearance of the human being.
The clues were shockingly evident. At the very outset of the century, the
scaffolding of religious belief that held human beings in their elevated position
collapsed. People no longer knew who they were, or what they were. Over the
course of the century, the idea of the human being changed radically, and took
with it traditional human sensibilities. Science and philosophy tried to resuscitate
the human being, but to no avail. And then, the rising corporations—oil and
railroads—took charge of everyday life. Armies of professionals followed,
defining our lives for us and telling us what would make us happy and healthy
and handsome.
This book examines the radical transformation of the matrices of living. The
story of the resurrection of Christ redirected people’s attention in the most
fundamental ways, collapsing the two extremes of birth and death through the
power of theology and imagery—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No longer could
ordinary people imagine those two events in the same way. From its inception,
the Church defined the human experience. Then, just after the middle of the
nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, the Church lost its grip. And the human being
underwent a new and radical redefinition, evident once again at the fundamental
levels of birth and death. The coming of Christ gave way to the coming of
science.
In the end, the human being that history had known for so many centuries
simply disappeared. Such a profound loss makes any horror not just possible, but
plausible. It alone does not produce holocausts, but it makes thinkable and
thereby doable wholesale human slaughter and extermination.
Niall Ferguson opens his book The War of the World by pointing out that the
“hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in
modern history.” But the victims, in particular eleven million Jews and Romani
and homosexual men in Germany and Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis reduced
to mere numbers in the wholesale and systematic operation of death called the
“Final Solution,” died, for the most part, out of sight. What remains are various
Holocaust museums, an assortment of documentary photographs, relics, and a
raft of films. Periodically, the names and stories of actual victims or survivors
will surface in the news. For a brief moment or two, the general public will
applaud their fortitude and even their heroism. Elie Wiesel will periodically step
forward to receive another award, while a few nuts hang in the back screaming
that the Holocaust was a hoax. But what persists, above all else, is a number:
eleven million. As a stand-in for monumental horror, the world focuses on that
staggering number, eleven million. It has become a catchword—shorthand for
the attempted extermination of an entire people.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, human beings do not die. The
Nazis did not see humans when they looked at Jews, but rather vermin and
cockroaches. They saw a multitude of pests in desperate need of wholesale
extermination. Following that same tradition, in the more recent past, we read of
entire villages of Vietnamese “pacified”; Tutsis and Serbs “ethnically cleansed”;
men, women, and the youngest of children in Darfur and Chad “lost to religious
strife.” On September 11, 2001, Muslim extremists flew their airplanes into the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon, their intense hatred of those symbols of
American might forcing them to convert the human beings inside the buildings
into mere incidental objects—into poor and benighted “capitalist dupes.” We
read about entire Iraqi neighborhoods of insurgents “eliminated with all
deliberate speed,” and of suspected al-Qaeda members whisked off in the middle
of the night in black helicopters to destinations unknown, in a program with a
name intended to hide its brutality and terrifying finality: “extreme rendition.”
In that shadow world—and the word shadow runs through this entire book—
death leaves its mark through body counts, body bags, collateral damage,
friendly fire, fragging, benchmark numbers—and, most recently, through the
rising scores on video games with names like Operation Desert Storm and
Enduring Freedom. How did we arrive at a state of affairs so catastrophic that
fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters, lovers, and friends—the rag and bone
of human existence—could have collapsed so conclusively into images, pixels,
ciphers, ghosts, gross numbers, into the palatable euphemisms of death? Why
does virtually every loss of human life now resemble that frightening model of
anonymity from the inner city, the drive-by random assassination, where, once
again, victims do not die but get “dusted,” “wasted,” “popped,” or “blown
away,” and nobody is responsible? Under every hoodie, we have begun to
believe, lurks a hoodlum: a case of our own fear turning us into racial profilers at
the level of the street.
We walk our neighborhoods unarmed, most of us, but still feeling trigger-
happy. We drive the streets feeling somewhat safe, but still shaking in our shoes.
Ghosts haunt us in the airport and at the supermarket; they stalk us on the
sidewalks and in the shadows. Just past the edges of our well-tended lawns, a
clash of civilizations, a war of terror, rages endlessly. We live in fear, and come
alive in anger. How did we lose our substance and our identities so
immaculately? Where have all the human beings gone? In short, when did we
stop caring?
A good many historians say that most of the world, and especially Americans,
move through history suffering from a case of “historical amnesia.” People too
easily forget the last disaster and lose track of the last atrocity. But we do not
forget because of some bout of amnesia—because of some blow on the head or
because of too much alcohol. Something deeper and more radical eats away at
us. In a sense, we have been programmed to experience “amnesia.” Despite the
insistence from Freud that the pleasure principle drives people’s behavior,
everything around us encourages turning aside from tragedy to just have a good
time.
Some critics argue, Well, the numbers are just too overwhelming, the scale
just too huge, for anyone to even begin to feel the pain and shock of death. Forty
thousand die in a mudslide in Central America, another sixty thousand in a
