Dear Editor,

The KN picture tells it all.  It is, perhaps, the most visible of horrendous actions that succeeded in stopping the nation for a moment.  But, sadly, life will continue forward soon enough, as if nothing of any significance occurred.  For this boy and his scars represent not a culmination of the nefarious, but a continuum.  A continuum where the unacceptable and unthinkable become ordinary, even acceptable.

All of the powerful people have become the personification of righteous wrath and condemnation.  I see only hypocrites of the most transparent order; damage control at full throttle.  Remember: these were the same people who not too long ago were hailing phantom killers as crime fighters; who described the murder of a government opponent as “unfortunate;” who have used every subterfuge and artifice to delay or dilute reasonable inquiry into specific and general instances of the state run amok.

Public hand wringing included, this boy’s story is not a problem.  Rather, it is an inconvenient bother.  Just like questions about extrajudicial activities, suspicious killings, and even more suspicious connections.  And this current incident of “bother” will soon enough find a place on the periphery of the nation’s consciousness where it will dissipate into the widening oblivion of what went before.

The all encompassing, fear inspiring, and impressive sounding complex of “national security” was the then justification.  Today, it is the pointed and limiting “rogue elements.”  Already, the distance of deniability-and of an aberration-grows with each passing day; and with every official pronouncement, regardless of source or height.  The well oiled machinery is in full gear, but there is no credibility; not when desperate political expediency rules the day, and has done so for a long time.

When law enforcement is outsourced; when private killings undergo easy conversion to crime fighting success; and when the crime fighters are initially mythologized, then of what consequence is this lad?  A prisoner whose scars now represent (to take liberties with Solzhenitsyn)) the incarceration of the nation’s memory, and the scorching of its mind and body.

In the interim, the set protocol will be followed, as alluded to by other commentators.  It goes like this: lots of noise; lots of finger pointing away from the real sources; and lots of promises.  There will be the circus of compensatory heads to be fully displayed, as a symbol of intent, action, and result.  Just like the Romans used bread and circus to calm the restive natives, so, too, local Emperors have perfected the art of the circus to quiet the howling mob.  All the while, the real architects of this brutalization of society’s conscience will elude any and all responsibility for what they have created and foisted upon the nation.

Soon, it will be back to business as usual. Until the next suspicious death or torture or whatever else is in store makes it way to full public view.

Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall