April, 2004

Sean Hannity on Fox News at 12.27 p.m. Sydney time on the third of April 2004 said he wanted 'capital punishment' for those who rejoiced round the burning car and the dismembered bodies of the security guards who were killed in Fellujah the previous Tuesday. 'We know their faces,' he said, 'and we should track 'em down.' This is a brave new notion, that people should be killed for smiling, but if it's a sample of the 'freedom' America has brought to Iraq, it may not go down as well in Arab Street, or in Elm Street, Middle America, as Hannity thinks.

For if you follow its logic it means, for instance, that the Texas schoolchildren who cheered at the news of JFK's assassination should be now killed too (it's never too late for justice), along with the white Alabamans overjoyed when Martin Luther King was shot, and --- I guess, to be fair -- the Texas Governor George Bush who sniggerered while sentencing poor, mad Mrs Tucker to death by lethal injection.

This is no small matter. It goes to the heart of what freedom is made of, which is the freedom to disagree, and laugh at whatever fact you think funny. Freedom includes the freedom of North Shore Liberals to rejoice when Geoff Clark is gaoled, or Cheryl Kernot defeated at election, or Mark Latham run over by a bus, without fear that one of Hannity's goons, or a brisk platoon of his private army, will suddenly, noisily arrive by helicopter gunship and blow them all to pieces; then bulldoze their houses, and shoot their children for having cheered along, as they stumble wailing from the wreckage of their Pymble and Warrawee bungalows.

The weariness I feel when writing about something as basic as this --- you do not kill children for cheering the wrong football team, you do not do that --- is one of the effects (disgust, ennui) that Hannity is paid to achieve in my side of the barricades, I guess. Get in the enemy's liver. Make him lose sleep. Make him hate the world, and the democratic process, so much that he wants to leave it. And when he is gone let vengeance loose on the children of Fellujah: arrest and torture, kill and bomb and burn. Win their hearts and minds that way.

It would be okay, or less horrible, if Fox News also argued on its airwaves the countervailing view that killing people doesn't help much anymore, if it ever did. Not the three million killed in Vietnam. Nor the eight hundred thousand hacked to death in Rwanda. Nor the hundred thousand burnt in one night in Tokyo. Not the twenty thousand killed at Gallipoli. Not the three thousand killed on 9/11. Not the two hundred killed in Bali. Not the 190 killed in Madrid. Not the 120 dead by mischance in the Moscow theatre. Not the 120 killed by Governor's order in Bush's Texas.

Killing people makes Hannitys of us all. It makes the seven Iraqi siblings of each Iraqi corpse, and the 28 aunties and uncles, and the 98 cousins keen to kill us back. It causes vendetta, skirmish, tribal battle, incursion, crackdown, insurgency, reprisal, pogrom, holocaust and war; war sometimes for centuries.

It would be okay too if Hannity's Christian upbringing got a look-in now and then. Forty eyes for an eye is not a well-known verse in our Saviour's doctrine, which is love your enemies mostly, do good to them that hate you, forgive and love them as you would be loved and forgiven. Hannity's doctrine of blood revenge is as old as Moloch, and as execrated lately in even America as cannibalism --- and, as far as I can see, a breaking of the law.

Charlie Manson for instance killed no-one, but he asked others to do it, and for this he got about fifty years. Sean Hannity by urging the murder without due process of about a hundred people -- no trial, no jury, no sentencing judge -- has probably breached the same law, and if the ICC decides he has, and it has a similar law he can be put away for this for the rest of his life.

It would be foolish of me, probably, to rejoice if such a thing happens, lest I then draw down on myself the random capital punishment that Sean and his fellow Americans are currently spreading around the planet, eagerly, loudly and lawlessly, with no-one to tell them lynching is wrong.

It's not a new thought, but it seems to me that a lot of Americans are crazy. Not to have put in context what's happened in Fellujah --- the killing a few weeks back of twenty innocent Fellujans by Americans, the bombing twelve years back of a Fellujan marketplace by other Americans, with many children dead -- is crazy. The idea that people risk their lives, or sacrifice their lives, and do so in their thousands, for no accessible historical reason, is crazy. To believe that shooting exuberant bystanders while forgiving and embracing Colonel Ghaddaffi, a genuine sponsor of genuine terror, of the Lockerbie bombing, for heaven's sake, does not look hypocritical, is crazy.

To kill with mortars and rockets and bullets fifty thousand Iraqis and expect Iraqis to welcome you with champagne and flowers and kisses is crazy. To kill before that with a decade of bombing and sanctions half a million -- or even a quarter of a million -- children, and expect their parents to be fond of you, is crazy. To ask young soldiers to die in a quest for things that are not there, or to die for Fellujah, a town whose people mostly want to kill them, and spit on their corpses, is crazy. And to ask the same young soldiers, or their widows or their mothers, to vote for you in November after what you did to them, is really, really mad.

But there it is; it's called America, and it's running the world. And Sean Hannity, its mad prophet of the airwaves, is calling for blood, more blood, because killing is a good way to settle things, he knows that, he's certain of it. It's the American way.

Does anyone else believe this any more? Well, Fox News does, and many of its viewers, it seems. Kill, kill, burn, maim, and never apologise. Look, there's more of them over there. If they're twelve years old and you catch them inappropriately smiling, shoot them down. In freedom's name.