A Swiftian harvest - Flip Side - war dead

Progressive, The, May, 2003 by Barbara Ehrenreich

The philosophically minded--from St. Augustine to Michael Walzer have struggled manfully through the ages to define a "just war," but without convincing results. Is it a war that's primarily defensive in nature? Maybe, but almost every aggressor claims to be acting in self-defense, even in the absence of a discernible threat. Does it lead to a minimum of casualties, especially of the civilian kind? Sure, but the bombers of Dresden and Hiroshima believed they were saving lives in the long run. So it would be far simpler to apply the same moral criterion to war that we customarily apply to that other form of legal killing--hunting--and declare that war is "just" when and if the parties agree to eat what they kill.

Think about it: The chief and immediate product of war is corpses, which are currently regarded as a kind of waste matter. What would be our judgment of a mountain lion that ran around ripping fawns to bits and leaving them. lying around to rot untasted? We would think it was one sick kitty cat. There's no reason the same judgment should not apply to any fighting unit that generates an impressive harvest of corpses and then furtively buries them in the sand.

There will be objections, of course, from vegetarians, advocates of a high-carb diet, and the hardcore anti-cannibalists amongst us. Some soldiers, no matter how repulsed by their MREs, will still balk at a Baghdad Burger or Saddam Stew, and more elegant recipes for human meat are vexingly hard to find. But our species has a proud and ancient tradition of consuming the enemy dead. The Aztecs, for example, ripped the hearts out of their POWs with great ceremony, then rolled the bodies down the temple steps, where they were chopped up and distributed to the protein-starved crowd.

Luckily for the squeamish, modern medical technology offers a dazzling array of alternative uses for what we might call "pre-owned" human flesh. Organs and tissues can be consumed, in a manner of speaking, as transplants to the needy. The New York Times Magazine, with stunningly good timing, has just run a brief article on the many uses of used skin, tendons, and bones. It disclosed that these ingredients of a single individual can be sold to hospitals for $36,700. Throw in the eyes, kidneys, liver, and heart--and subtract for burnt, crushed, or otherwise damaged areas--and you might get at least $100,000 per body. At this rate it would take only one million Iraqi casualties to finance the entire American-British war, estimated at $100 billion in costs: a small price to pay, our leaders will argue, for so brazenly annoying George W. Bush.

Not that the medical uses of the war dead are entirely free of moral objections, either. The New York Times article reports that the tissue transplant industry' "has been battered by tales of donated skin being used for lip plumping or penis enlargement." But why "battered"? Those penis extensions--advertisements for which cram our e-mail in-boxes every day--have to come from somewhere, don't they? And there's no fundamental, universally established bioethical reason why an American movie star or socialite shouldn't speak through the mouth of a deceased Iraqi teenager.

More daunting, to American sensibilities anyway, will be the possible use of fetal stem cells harvested from the pregnant dead. As in Gulf War I, even the smartest bombs are as yet incapable of performing mid-air pregnancy tests and thus sparing precious fetal life. Congress will agonize at length over this issue, with the dedicated pro-life Christian members no doubt arguing that the unborn dead be extracted from their Muslim moms and properly buried under tiny crosses. With luck, though, the waste of good fetal stem cells will be the issue that finally rallies the Democrats to take a stand, and insist on a more pragmatic, medically productive approach.

All of these potential uses of the war dead will demand some additions to military personnel if the organs, tissues, filets, and so forth are to be collected in a timely fashion. Beyond the journalists and other camp followers already embedded in our fighting units, there will be a need for surgeons, lab technicians, mobile battlefield laboratories, and refrigerated trucks, plus who can fathom the tastes of our generals?--possibly a taxidermist or two. We may come to speak not only of "supply lines" but of "demand lines" composed of would-be organ recipients and stumpypenised men on stretchers.

But without speedy harvesting, the dead will quickly degenerate from tissue source to biohazard, which, in turn, will undoubtedly be interpreted as evidence of biological warfare on the enemy's part. The American high command, in particular, will be outraged that the other side keeps littering the countryside with such dangerous haz-mat, and insist on ever more furious bombing of an enemy who wantonly persists in dying. Which is one more good reason to start viewing war in a more upbeat way, as a life-giving industry instead of tragedy, and be prepared to process the enemy dead with all due efficiency and speed.