by Roy Scranton
This is a story about many things, but it begins with a body. Maybe that means it’s a mystery, because mysteries always start with a body. But then so do wars, gospels, sacrifices, and autopsies—all stories that begin with a body and end with truth. This story doesn’t end with truth, though, so it’s probably not a mystery, or a war, or a gospel, a sacrifice, or an autopsy. Capitalism starts with a body, too, the laboring human body, and ends with profit—or revolution. This story doesn’t end with profit or revolution, though, but with sorrow and loss. So it’s probably not capitalism, either. I suppose if this story is anything, it might be philosophy, because it starts with a body and moves toward spirit. It starts with particulars and moves toward abstractions. It starts with confusion and moves toward understanding. I can’t claim it ever gets there—or anywhere near there, for that matter—but it struggles, moves, works, thinks, and tries, even if it moves in circles, even if it thinks in fragments and mistakes, even if it struggles in bits and pieces and gestures and failures.
So, without further ado: the bodies.
On August 19, 2014, an eighteen-year-old man was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His name was Michael Brown. He had, with a friend, shoplifted some Swisher Sweets from a corner store. The clerk at the store called the police and the police dispatcher sent out a description. Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, already in the neighborhood, stopped Brown and his friend on the street. Something happened between Wilson and Brown, some kind of scuffle that ended with Wilson drawing his pistol in his police SUV and firing two shots, one of which grazed Brown’s hand. Brown ran and Wilson followed, then Brown stopped and turned. Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson then pulled the trigger of his Sig Sauer P229 .40-caliber service automatic ten times. Six bullets hit Michael Brown, in the face, neck, chest, and right arm, killing him. Michael Brown may have had his hands up and he may have been saying “Don’t shoot.” He may have been moving toward Darren Wilson in a threatening manner. Eyewitness evidence is ambiguous. We do know that Michael Brown was unarmed, that he was more than thirty yards away from Wilson, and that he had just graduated high school. The police let his body bleed in the street for hours.
On Monday, November 24, 2014, a Ferguson grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, a decision that provoked widespread outrage and days of protests throughout the United States.
About ten days later, on December 3, 2014, a New York grand jury decided not to indict New York Police Department officers in the death of Eric Garner, a grandfather and retired New York Parks & Recreation employee with diabetes and asthma. On July 17, Garner had been approached by two police officers for allegedly selling loosies, individual cigarettes, which is illegal in New York, though loosies are sold in many corner markets. I used to buy them sometimes when I lived in Crown Heights. Eric Garner told the police to stop harassing him, and in response they grabbed him and tried to handcuff him. Garner, a big man, brushed them off, so Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo wrapped his arm around Garner’s neck in an illegal hold, and, after a short struggle in which three other police helped take Garner down, choked him to death. Pantaleo’s supervisor stood by watching. We’ve all seen the video. We’ve all heard Eric Garner saying “I can’t breathe” while the police were killing him; we’ve all heard him begging for air. Another death, another body left lying in the street, surrounded by police. More outrage and protests.
In both cases the evidence clearly showed that excessive police force resulted in the death of a citizen, yet both ruling municipal grand juries declined to indict. These two egregiously unjust grand jury decisions in rapid succession refreshed recent memories of the Trayvon Martin case, in which a vigilante named George Zimmerman murdered a seventeen-year-old boy in cold blood, yet was acquitted by a Florida jury under Old West–style self-defense laws. The two unjust grand jury decisions tore open a wound in the American body politic, brought to national attention a systemic problem of murderously aggressive policing, and catalyzed an atmosphere of outrage, fear, and struggle. Something was happening. A profound, pain-stricken anger had been awakened. Protesting in the streets or watching Twitter, you could see it, you could feel it.
On a cold January morning a few weeks later, while protestors’ shouts of “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace” still echoed in the streets of American cities, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and started shooting. They found their way to the second-floor conference room, where the editors of the magazine were holding a meeting. Saïd and Chérif first sprayed indiscriminately, then executed deliberately. The two brothers killed twelve people that day: maintenance worker Frédéric Boisseau, psychoanalyst and columnist Elsa Cayat, editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, editor Bernard Maris, copy editor Mustapha Ourrad, cartoonists Philippe Honoré, Jean Cabut, Bernard Verlhac, and Georges Wolinski, festival organizer Michel Renaud, and police officers Ahmed Merabet and Franck Brinsolaro. That same morning, a man named Amedy Coulibaly, suspected of working in collusion with the brothers, shot a jogger in a Paris suburb. The next day he shot and killed police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe and wounded a street sweeper. On January 9, two days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, police killed Saïd and Chérif Kouachi after a nine-hour siege. Elsewhere in Paris that day, Amedy Coulibaly entered a supermarket, killed four people, and took several others hostage. He was later killed by police when they stormed the grocery.
In Shakespeare the bodies tend to all pile up at the end. Think of Hamlet, King Lear, or Othello. A good tragedy builds inexorably toward a moment of spectacular violence, when all the ratcheting tension is finally discharged in bloody havoc. People often describe real deaths as tragic, real events as tragedies, including the many deaths just discussed, but at the risk of being pedantic I have to say that’s not quite right, though it is illustrative of something important that we’ll come back to later, the easy confusion in the human mind between fact and fiction, our tendency to rely unreflectively and even unconsciously on certain archetypical structures of narrative. But my point here is that, to be precise, tragedy is a genre of dramatic art, a communal ritual, a narrative form.
Tragedy is a kind of play, inherently artificial because it is made. When a typhoon hits the Philippines, destroys thousands of homes, and kills hundreds of people, that’s not a tragedy because it’s not a communal ritual but a natural event. When a lone psychotic goes into a suburban school and shoots a bunch of children, that’s not a tragedy either, for the same reason. It may be dramatic, theatrical, sorrowful, and horrific, which are some of what we often mean when we use the word tragic, but when we call such an event a tragedy we’re confusing an event with a kind of narrative form. We mistake history for aesthetics.
Tragedy, as any high school student knows, has its roots in ancient Greece. It began in the annual rituals celebrating the death and rebirth of the god of wine, Dionysus. A community would come together to drink and sing and watch a drama unfold. The drama usually ended with a body.
The word itself, tragōidia, or “goat song,” gives a clue to the deeper roots of this genre in collective ritual sacrifice. Tragedy is the song of the scapegoat, the sacrificial animal that bears the sins of the community and thereby, in its death or expulsion, expunges them. In coming together to witness, celebrate, and participate in collective bloodshed, the members of a community purge themselves of sin and avow their collective identity—a process Aristotle called catharsis. The story of Dionysus, the god in whose name the celebration was held, hints at even deeper, darker roots: the god’s dismemberment and rebirth suggests that the origins of tragedy lie not in animal sacrifice, but in human sacrifice—a body on an altar, a body torn to pieces. The body of a sacred offering. Whether the sacrifice is a scapegoat or a martyr turns out to be ambiguous. Both are totemic, both heroic, but one is expelled and the other raised up. Interpretation depends upon the specific social gro
up and their values. Whether the story is a goat-song or a gospel depends on whether they see the sacrificial victim as different from them or the same. It all comes down to a question of identity.
This very aspect of the tragic sacrifice, the cathartic affirmation of collective identity, may be what the voices on the television or in the newspaper mean to imply when they describe an event as a tragedy. What they want to say is that we all come together over the dead. We are unified in their blood. But who are we? What collective is this? Are we the white police standing over Michael Brown and Eric Garner? Are we the black protestors marching in Ferguson, New York, Oakland, and Baltimore, shouting “Black lives matter”? Are we the European and American intellectuals and politicians avowing “Je suis Charlie”? Are we the French Algerians struggling every day against racism and Islamophobia, honoring the memory of those who died resisting more than 130 years of brutal colonial rule?
We are the world. But is there any we here at all?
2. Russian Reversal
Moscow is a low, wide city expanding in a series of rings out from the Kremlin and Red Square, spreading over some nine hundred square miles of land cleared in a cold northern forest, near where Arctic taiga blends into Sarmatic mixed forests. It’s a mistake to think Moscow is part of Europe: the city looks more like Saskatoon than it looks like Berlin, all monstrous boxes built up out of nothing as if to compensate for the puniness of the human animal in the immensity of so much space, and it feels and sounds like something else yet again. To visit Europe is to tour a giant mausoleum dedicated to centuries of war, rich with the booty of global empire: a cemetery turned into a shopping mall. Going to Moscow is like visiting a Turkish moon base built in the 1950s. Cyrillic script and Slavic phonemes mesh in the air with so many oo’s, shch’s, and ve’s, uncannily similar enough to a Latin alphabet to look both familiar and wrong, unbroken by any tourist-friendly English. Like its script, Moscow is at once familiar and strange. Russia and America are siblings in many ways, both countries of the twentieth century, both conquerors of vast spaces, both abstract and callous and massive and dangerous.
How much do we see each other, and how much do we just see negative mirror images of ourselves? The classic late–Cold War American joke about Russia, endlessly variable, was based on a simple reversal of subject and object: “In America, everyone watches television. In Soviet Russia, television watches you!” “In America, everyone drives a car. In Soviet Russia, a car drives you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the police call you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the party finds you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the law breaks you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the war wins you!”
My trip to Moscow seemed to be an exercise in such a reversal: I was going to give a paper at an American Studies conference at the Russian State University for the Humanities, which conference was on the topic “War in American Culture.” My paper would be about Wallace Stevens, James Jones, and the problem of the hero in American World War II literature, and it just so happened that the conference was scheduled the week after Victory Day, May 9, the holiday celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, perhaps the most important anniversary in modern Russian history.
The coincidence was serendipitous, as it seemed likely that the celebration would mark a historical footnote: leaders from Britain, France, and the US refused to attend the anniversary, rebuking President Vladimir Putin (and insulting the Russian people) for Russian military intervention in Ukraine, while NATO staged military exercises in Latvia and Estonia and the US deployed paratroopers to Kiev to train soldiers in Ukraine. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only Western leader to break the boycott, though she skipped Victory Day proper and came a day late, to lay a wreath at Moscow’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While Barack Obama and David Cameron turned their backs on Putin, India’s President Pranab Mukherjee and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping did not, meeting the Russian president in Moscow on May 9 with open arms, standing with him to watch the traditional parade of Russian soldiers, tanks, and missile launchers. Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, Russian and Chinese sailors trained together in a joint military exercise.
On May 7, 2015, two days before the big parade, I went to the State Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which is what Russians call World War II. The museum sits on the vast grounds of Park Pobedy (Victory Park), across the Moskva River from the old Arbat and the new business district with its hypermodern skyscrapers. A long promenade leads to a towering spire topped with a horn-blowing angel, who hovers high over a plaza framed on the west by the massive colonnaded arc of the museum proper, capped by a great dome. At the base of the spire there is a statue of Saint George slaying a dragon. As with most of Moscow, the scale is gargantuan and theatrical, at once imposing and absurd.
Halfway down the promenade, a line of old women and families shuffled through security checkpoints to wind into a small chapel dedicated to Saint George. Down the hill, a path leads to an outdoor museum of military hardware from the war, everything from T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers to the torn tail of a wrecked German Messerschmitt. Among the birches and lawns of the park around the museum, sculptures stand honoring the dead. There is a sculpture for the Allies, one for the Spanish Civil War, one for those missing in action. The most remarkable is Zurab Tsereteli’s sculpture dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, called Tragedy of Peoples: enormous naked men, women, and children, bald and emaciated, rise up out of or sink back into a falling line of stones. On one side is a pile of personal goods, shoes, a stuffed rabbit, eyeglasses, and so on.
It was a bright, clear, blue-skied sunny day. The park and the museum were packed, full of families, children in miniature World War II–era Soviet military uniforms, and old women, everyone wearing a black and orange Saint George’s ribbon commemorating the war, celebrating their collective unity and patriotism. Groups of students on field trips were led through the Museum’s dioramas illustrating the major battles of the war—the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Kursk, the Siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Fall of Berlin. They stood in the Hall of Memory and Sorrow, where 2.6 million bronze pendants hang from the ceiling symbolizing the 20 to 40 million Russian dead. They looked carefully at the exhibits of weaponry, uniforms, and memorabilia from the war.
Over the next few days of celebration, I would see the same crowds all over the city, with the same enthusiasm, wearing the same orange-and-black Saint George’s ribbons. I stood in a surging, endless crowd near the Byelorusskiy train station watching the state military parade thunder down Tverskaya Street, swept up in the crowd’s ebullient cheering as armored personnel carriers and tanks rolled by. In the crowd, the red, white, and blue of the Russian flag flew alongside the red and gold Soviet banner. Families carried framed pictures of their dead grandfathers and grandmothers through the streets of the city.
In June 1941 German Panzers crossed the Brest-Litovsk line that had divided Poland in two since 1939, engaging ill-prepared Russian troops and advancing through them at an astonishing pace, replicating the speed and ferocity of Germany’s victories the previous year in the Battle of France. By the time winter hit, the German Army had rolled the Russians back more than six hundred miles along a thousand-mile-wide front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the outskirts of Moscow, barely twenty miles from the Kremlin. Leningrad was under a siege that would last nine hundred days. Kiev, Odessa, Sevastopol, Kursk, Kharkov, Minsk, Smolensk, and Riga had all fallen to the Nazis, who now controlled the Slavic heartlands of Byelorussia and Ukraine. Over the winter the Russians counterattacked and took back small pockets of land here and there along the front, but when the 1942 spring thaw came, the Germans launched a new offensive, in the south, driving another three hundred miles to Stalingrad while simultaneously pushing southeast toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. That winter the tide turned, and Russian reinforcements began to push the Germans back. Over the
next two years, the Russian Army killed its way back across the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine and Byelorussia, destroying the German Army and eventually sacking Berlin.
The scale of devastation on the Eastern Front boggles the mind. The Battle for Kursk, for example, was and remains the largest armored battle in history: 940,000 Germans with more than 3,000 tanks and supported by more than 2,000 aircraft faced 2.5 million Russians with more than 7,000 tanks supported by around 3,000 aircraft, in an area about the same size as West Virginia. In that battle alone, the Germans suffered 198,000 casualties (including wounded and MIA); the Russians, 863,000. By May 9, 1945, when the fighting was over, more than 30 million people had died on the Eastern Front, around 26 million of them citizens of the USSR, including around 15 million civilians. Russia suffered more, lost more, and killed more than any other nation in World War II. All told, the USSR had seen between 13 and 14 percent of its population killed—more than one person in ten.
How could anyone make sense of 26 million bodies? Is it a tragedy or a gospel?
To understand what those numbers mean, imagine a conquering army killing more than 43 million Americans as it burned its way across Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, and Missouri. By way of contrast, only 750,000 Americans died on both sides of the Civil War, out of a total US population of, at the time, some 31 million: a death rate of about 2 percent, which is very high but nowhere near Russia’s in World War II. Most Russians living today had at least one relative within two generations die in the war. To Russians, the war represents incalculable horror and destruction, and the Russian people’s greatest moment on the world stage: their stalwart defense of the Russian homeland. The Soviet Union was the primary force responsible for defeating Nazi Germany: without the Russians in the East butchering German soldiers by the thousands, D-Day would have been impossible. As a living memory of suffering, terror, and victory, World War II is for Russians a personal, visceral historical event—both tragedy and gospel—unlike any other.
