My tirade against Michele Mcphee and the bin Laden death photos yesterday got me thinking. Maybe part of my rage was coming from an uncomfortable truth about myself.
Mood music:
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I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about blood-and-guts images. I’m nothing special there. A lot of people share that trait. That’s why you see so much spam posing as pictures of a dead bin Laden. The spam pushers know they’ll always hook in enough suckers to make some money.
I remember the first time I read “Helter Skelter” and saw crime scene photos where the bodies where whited out. I wanted to see the full photos so badly. It was the same thing when I read about the Amityville murders. Seeing those images became an obsession, and, eventually, the Internet would feed that obsession.
I felt pretty gross after seeing the Manson photos, especially the autopsy pictures. I felt evil for even wanting to see them. I’m grateful I had that reaction. Enjoying what I was seeing would have revealed something a lot darker about me.
Morbid curiosity for such photos is, in my opinion, no different than the curiosity someone has to see pornography.
It’s a dark temptation that was coded into our brains back when we were granted free will.
So when a talk radio host suggests that bin Laden’s death photos should be released to the public and that not doing so is an insult to the memories of 9-11 victims, I bristle.
Would I look at the death photos if they were released? Absolutely. The obsession never really goes away.
But I’d be ashamed afterward for looking.
If that makes me a wishy-washy left-wing tree-hugging type in the eyes of some people, so be it.
Mcphee made me think about an unpleasant side of myself, and I guess that’s a good thing. We should always be taking personal inventory because we could always do better.
But her motive wasn’t to make people like me think about how I could do better.
It was to incite more anger among the right-wing extremists that make up her audience.
It’s an interesting and honest approach to the topic of the photos. I, myself, am probably considered a “flaming conservative” by some, but I would probably feel sick after seeing the photos as well. Even though I’m curious about such things, I have found that the more darkness I allow my eyes too see (real or fiction), the more dark my thoughts are…so I consciously refrain from graphic crime shows/novels/blah, blah, blah. As far as the decision to not release the photos, I can see reasons for both, which is why I have no anger/emotional response to that decision.