Burnt Alive vs. Shock and Awe

Most Americans have responded to the recent burning alive in a cage of a Jordanian jet fighter pilot shot down by ISIS with SHOCK. FOX News added to that shock by showing extended coverage of the actual burning to its viewers. This done by FOX despite its denunciation of such coverage during the Bush Administration of the carnage of American weaponry upon the lives of once living, breathing Afghanis and Iraqis, men, women, and children.

Do some Americans wonder as I do why SHOCK for this act of brutality when almost all Americans sat by their televisions in the opening days of the so-called Iraq War (American War would have been a more appropriate moniker) and patriotically and gleefully cheered on SHOCK & AWE?

Did those armchair patriots pretend that missiles launched from destroyers were antiseptic killing machines that only targeted big burly terrorists and not women, children, and grandparents?

Did they believe that buildings blown up by these angels of death didn't cause fires that incinerated hundreds maybe even thousands who came within its path.

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Hell fire missiles, fired from jet fighters and Apache helicopters, doesn't even the name conjure up the reality behind the armament to American television stupefied coach potatoes of their country's butchery of whomever or whatever gets in the way of one, innocent or not innocent?

Are the prolific viewers of video games and action films so inured to animated violence that anything presented on their television screens becomes just an extension of that unreality? Blood, maimed bodies, burnt and charred bodies, and people writhing in agony staring at their own mutilated bodies, where does this fit into the picture?

Hellfire missiles are meant to vaporize trucks. Is that done so surgically that one can find no comparison between a Jordanian pilot in a cage and an Iraqi man caged in the steel framework of a truck parked adjacent to a school yard? And the ensuing incendiary flames magically are self contained and don't affect the surrounding innocent victims of American superior technology?

What have we become? Conscience-less monsters lost in our games, incapable of discerning the difference between them and reality?

Does a movie like American Sniper depicting the cold blooded, calculated murder of brown-skinned people really make us feel proud and cathartic when we leave the theater?

And now our dishonest politicians, beginning with Obama, the Nobel Peace prize recipient and John Kerry, the hollowed out core of a moral man who decried as a Winter Soldier, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" are pouring gasoline on a nuclear fire in Ukraine, irresponsibly toying, adolescently, with a Third World War.

Seriously, for a FOX news female anchor to call the ISIS perpetrators "savages" for this heinous crime of burning a man alive and not, at least, at the same time, self-reflect upon American Military Savagery, is the height of hypocrisy.

Someone needs to call it out and attempt to cut through this armored wall of blind and delusional American Exceptionalism_Everyone except US.