Wednesday, June 01, 2005

What are you going to do with that?

When we arrived with our cameras a few moments later, we found a dark swamp of blood and broken bodies and, staggering about in it, the bereaved, shrieking and wailing amid a sickening stench of cordite. Two men, standing in rubber boots knee-deep in a thick black lake, had already begun to toss body parts into the back of a truck. Slipping about on the wet pavement, I tried my best to count the bodies and the parts of them, but the job was impossible: fifty? sixty? When all the painstaking matching had been done, sixty-eight had died there.

As it happened, I had a lunch date with their killer the following day.

from Mark Danner's 15 May commencement address at Berkeley, quoted by Tom Dispatch on 30 May here.

As an English major myself, still failing after more than twenty years, and about to enter another period of economic uncertainty, Mark Danner remains an inspiration.

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