The Absent Violence :

by Carlo Cielo

It's not the gash and wounds that repel; it's the contempt in the infarction.

There is this misconception about violence, that it is unacceptable to show it, because it's always gory, that it is always messy and blatant, with the blood splatters and spurts, and the membranes pried out like fruit pulp and such like. In the same way that sex is all in the copulation of the organs, so it is for that. And its not.

Basic communication is enough of an act of violence. When a neuron fires electronic signals on the nano level, and the nearest neurons is simultaneously threatened and responds, there's your brutality already there. Then, this gets replicated on a macro level, between two organisms with their own complex neural systems, in interpersonal affect. Man starts of singular and fends off for his own. Any outside stimuli is provocation. Whether it's unwelcome suggestion or transmitted message, it all does the same thing; it jolts, it starts off flight or flight albeit in small doses. Either you call these assaults premeditated or deem these accidental, it's up to you. It's what even keeps humans in a daily regimen of survival and persistence : the muscles suffer micro-tears so that its fibers can produce new striations to fortify, and it would be due to natures that hit these on a daily basis.

Sometimes, it would be simply encoded in the words that one speaks, in all the wide range of effects. So in terms of broadcast, how do you draw the line ? And where do you draw it ?

Well, someone tried. In Maguindanao. It led to the inexplicable deaths of 56 journalists. Deaths the rest of our elite, self-interest driven media can only honor, not in the lost lives per se, but in the magnanity of such type of reprisal; and its threat to go on under the terms of their common Yellow Banner - in all its feudalism.

It's not the gash and wounds that repel; it's the contempt in the infarction.