You’re sitting in your apartment in a midsized Syrian city, or maybe you’re relaxing in your farmhouse just outside of Mosul, in Iraq.
And a plane, high up, but down low enough so you can hear the noise, drops a bomb on you. The bomb hits the corner of your apartment building or the edge of your farmhouse roof.
Fragments of structural steel go flying through the air or, in the case of the farmhouse, a roof beam with one jagged edge goes flying through the air.
The steel fragment/wooden beam tears the head off your youngest child, a big-eyed little girl who, in America, would probably be named “Kayla.” Odd how the all-American name “Kayla” sounds rather Middle Eastern.
As a father, you are sad to see the torn ragdoll body of your youngest. You cry and scream. In the coming weeks, your grief may cause you to kill yourself.
Still, in the face of your grinding grief, it is important to remember that, headless as your baby girl may now be, she was not beheaded.
To paraphrase the National Rifle Association, “Bombs don’t behead people. Knives behead people.”
We’ve seen a few Americans and others beheaded in that part of the world recently. That’s one of the reasons we’re dropping bombs.
What we know is beheading consists of forcing a grown man to his knees, bending his head forward and then cutting his head off with a knife or sword.
That, my friends, is beheading.
Bombing is not beheading. Never was, never will be. Bombing doesn’t have the forcing to the knees, the bending forward of the head or the cutting off of the head with knife or sword.
Beheading is “barbaric,” a natural outgrowth of Islam, which is an “evil” religion, if it’s a religion at all.
Bombing is not barbaric. It’s sophisticated, like one of those dance clubs where they don’t have a metal detector at the door. It’s elegant, like the curly tail graffiti artists put on the tail of the letter “S.”
It’s like “dismembering.” To dismember someone, you have to take a knife or an ax and cut their arms and legs off. If you drop a big, big bomb on someone and it blows their arms and legs off, that’s not dismembering, that’s “reshuffling” or maybe “explosive-assisted limb removal.”
People say truth is the first casualty in a war, but language, while it may survive, is usually mangled pretty badly. Death itself is relatively standardized. Headless American journalist equals headless Iraqi two-year-old. The equation balances.
Once you add language, however, the equation goes all out of whack and we are left contemplating, not the neck stumps of former people, but the victims of “savage beheadings” and “pinpoint bombing raids.”
The language of death is open to revision.
Marc Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. Read more of Dion columns in his new ebook, “Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America”