The Decade in Politics
1994
As the new year began in 1994, one man dominated television news
coverage:
John Wayne Bobbit.
At the end of 1993, he was dismembered by his allegedly battered wife,
Lorena, who then drove through Virginia streets with the flaccid fruit
of
her rage.
As one might hope, 1994's most tragic event — the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda —
eventually overshadowed the Bobbit emasculation. In fact, Web searches
for
"Rwanda genocide" turn up about 14 times more sites than a search for
"Lorena Bobbit."
However, the math indicates that the media impact of Lorena Bobbit's
zesty
and impulsive knifework is worth about 36,000 Rwandan lives.
36,000 brown African people, stabbed, shot and bludgeoned to death —
worth
one white American man's severed dong. A crude comparison, perhaps.
Different search engines find different ratios (the ones I tried varied
from 1:9 to 1:16), and it's fair to say that the Bobbit incident has a
tremendous amount of "human interest" to it. There's personal drama,
you
might argue, and a bizarre violent and sexual twist to it.
Rwanda, on the other hand, was the abstract suffering of a distant,
alien
people. Sure, it was important — the United States even thought about doing
something,
at one point — but not as important as keeping up with American
newsmakers.
Sure, 500,000 people died, but Joseph Stalin had it right: One death is
a
tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
But the really tragic thing is this: Rwanda actually was overflowing
with
human interest. Rwanda was a seething kettle of brutal violence, sexual
or
otherwise, that would've made a thousand amazing, heartbreaking
stories,
had it only been covered like something we could care about. If
Rwanda's
human disaster had received half the TV time it merited, it would now
be
widely viewed as a pivotal world event — not a minor, tragic footnote
to
the few who can even remember it.
The Holocaust is amazingly popular. Washington's Holocaust museum is
choked
with visitors, and films like Schindler's List regularly pack
'em
in. But, somehow, Rwanda has largely, if not completely, slipped from
the
public conciousness.
French weapons and American indifference fed the flames of genocide
while
we watched Jay Leno launch into salvo after comedic salvo on the
hilarity
of one man's mutiliation. 1994 was a pretty bad year.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
