Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 07:38:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Wolf Factory <wolf_factory-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: The hierarchy of death 


The hierarchy of death 

No living third world body ever had the sums lavished
on it that are being spent on DNA tests at Ground Zero

Anne Karpf
Guardian

Wednesday November 28, 2001


They say death is a great leveller. They're wrong.
Inequality pursues us after life too. Consider Ground
Zero. While international attention has shifted to
Afghanistan, the vast project of body-part retrieval
in Lower Manhattan is probably the most exorbitant
expenditure on the dead in our lifetime, and yet
remains almost entirely exempt from criticism or
debate. Ground Zero has been cordoned off, not only
physically, but also politically and financially,
though it's a provocative message to the rest of the
world, where death comes cheaper. 

This is the largest attempt to identify the dead
through DNA sampling. In the application of technology
to grief, up to a million tissue samples will be
examined by forensic pathologists, radiologists,
anthropologists and dentists trying to match DNA
material from victims' toothbrushes or relatives'
mouths with fragments recovered from the twin towers.
It's as if the scale of the operation has had to
mirror the heft and girth of those buildings. Since
this folly is in its early stages (projected
time-scale: two years), it's impossible to say what it
will cost. At some point a courageous person may call
a halt, but there may be further costs, as the many
professionals involved will need post-traumatic stress
counselling. 

The reasons for the project are to identify who died,
and to allow the families of victims to bury at least
a body part and achieve closure. Neither is
sustainable. 

No amount of DNA sampling will make the fluctuating
list of the dead definitive. A register of illegal
immigrants who may, or may not, have been in the WTC
won't materialise. Those whose loved ones worked there
and set off to work as usual know they're dead. And
while burying a body is an important therapeutic rite,
it's psycho-babble to suggest that it necessarily
ushers in closure. 

When death is sudden and a dead person's clothes still
bear their smell, and the moue of their lipstick
remains on a mug of coffee, it feels like they've only
just left and might just as immediately return. And
there's a particular pain to mourning without a body
or a grave, as Holocaust survivors know. But the idea
that the recovery of a small body-fragment can do more
than mildly assist grieving would be considered
shamanistic if expressed by an Afghan tribe. A
collection of cells doesn't constitute a body, and
after burial the bereaved still have disbelief, rage
and anguish to face. 

We've been rightly harrowed and sorrowed by the loss
of life in America, but the DNA sampling has confirmed
the lack of equivalence between deaths in the northern
and southern hemispheres. 

How does it feel to the rest of the world to see the
care lavished on the parings of American bodies in
death, such as no complete third world body ever
receives in life? What do they think in the Indian
town where 20,000 died in an earthquake earlier this
year? I couldn't remember Bhuj's name, perhaps because
it disappeared off our TV screens within a week. 

Here's a consumer's guide to our hierarchy of death.
If you want yours to signify in the media and public
debate, and your relatives to be decently compensated,
make sure you a) are white, and b) a westerner, c) die
quickly, dramatically, and spectacularly (not slowly
of a disease of poverty or occupational illness), and
that d) your death is witnessed by millions,
preferably on television; e) if possible, own a
mobile. 

Some say it's inevitable we don't mourn each death
similarly: people grieve instinctively for those most
like themselves. Our modern currency is empathy,
extended most freely to those with whom we can
identify. In the Washington Holocaust Memorial museum,
visitors are issued with the personal identity card of
someone like themselves in age, profession, and
gender, caught up in the Holocaust. It's as if our
capacity for empathy can only be kick-started
narcissistically, by turning everyone into versions of
ourselves. This is dangerous: those who wear the burka
can't play, veiled as they are in an empathy-barrier,
indelibly marked with otherness. 

The lack of equivalence between northern and southern
deaths is most graphic in compensation: $121m has been
paid out of the American Red Cross's Liberty Fund so
far, averaging a $25,000 payment to 25,000 families of
those bereaved or affected by the WTC attacks. 

Contrast this with the average $1,300 compensation a
head for the 14,824 Indians killed by toxic gas fumes
from the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant
in Bhopal, the site of the world's worst industrial
disaster in 1984. For several hundred thousand people
still disabled and diseased, the average payout has
been $580. Last week it was announced that those who
watched on television their relatives die in the twin
towers attack would receive $20,000 compensation. 

Ground Zero's DNA analysis is a meta-language. It says
America may have been grievously wounded but it's
still powerful and can mobilise fabulous resources to
restore its citizens' dead bodies. The shaming message
of Bhopal is that those unvalued in life are worth
just as little in death. 

===="All the wolves in the wolf factory paused at noon, 
for a moment of silence."
........from laughing Gravy by John Ashbery.
---------------------------------------------------------
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