June 5, 2015
Gone and Forgotten: The Need to Flip the Paradigm
By the close of Serial’s sixth episode, Sarah Koenig’s audience beholds a disarray of competing verisimilitudes. Quite unlike the dramatic “Shakespearean” arc it initially seemed to complete “on paper”, the case has become a dynamic stasis of prosaic tedium and false leads.[i] With the focus now on all the ways that Adnan may or may not be guilty, “Serial” has become a fragmentary compendium of everything serving that purpose. In a narrative that has become about the interminable search for justice amidst the spin, one voice has become altogether silenced: the victim’s. Save for when she factors into pieces of potential evidence, Hae Min Lee has become absent from the story. Though Hae’s death is what sparked this spitting bonfire into which we listeners intently stare, she is all too common in this phenomenological desertion of a crime’s victim. In all the fascination surrounding sensational crimes, the victim’s identities, who they were, and what they meant to the people who loved them, are reduced to nothing more than the greater impact of their untimely termination. In examining other examples of this, we may, as observers of these events, recognize the importance of stopping to remember the voices eternally silenced in all the sensation.
In the chilling case of the 2012 movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, the shooter, James Holmes, voices this unrecognition of victims, in the extreme, by recounting that he saw his victims as “value units.” [ii] Dryly explaining, during his 2015 trial, that he acquired a “value unit” for each human he successfully killed, he goes on to say that, after the massacre, “[he] was worth [twelve] more people than [he] was before [it],” and that the seventy people he non-fatally wounded didn’t count because they didn’t uincrease his personal value (Gurman). Objectifying his victims in the extreme, he strips them of identities in his self-centered value system, in which each death accrued him a sense of personal accomplishment. Claiming to have been on a mission of relief from the shortcomings that “biology” burdened him with, he reduced the totality of the human lives he took to lifeless units of currency. With the distinct objective of giving a public voice to his mental anguish, he proceeded to permanently take the voices of twelve innocents. Those twelve lives were nothing but objects to him, and, by throwing his name all over the news, the media only gave him the gratification of the notoriety he sought. One survivor, Christine Blache, evoked the importance of denying him that selfish exploitation of his victims: “I was shaking because I was trying to hold composure [when seeing him in the courtroom]. I didn’t want to let him see any kind of emotion, anything he could feed off of.”[iii] As observers of such crimes, all of us can choose to honor the victims, who had no choice in their involvement, by resisting the inclination to let the atrocity take precedent. In checking the facts on this massacre, I was stopped in my tracks at the photograph of Jonathan Blunk, a 26-year-old father and Navy engineer who was killed. [iv] The picture of this individual human, with a life yet left to live and dreams yet to fulfill, jolted me out of a sort of morbid fascination with the killer’s pathology, and struck me as truly deserving of remembrance. Though James Holmes opposes the death penalty for himself because his passing would sadden his family, I felt compelled to read an Associated Press article describing each of the twelve people taken from their families . [v] As I learned of these victims and the kin they left behind, I was somberly grateful for the opportunity to focus on the ones who didn’t get any such say in how they wanted to perish.
On a national scale, the vital need for a victim’s kin to have their loved one individually remembered is exemplified at The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. The lethal war, though not a straightforward crime, represents a large-scale loss of lives. Moreover, it was one in which the individual identities of the dead were conflated into one long list of casualties of an event remembered more for its overall impact. Called by media “a black gash of shame and sorrow”, the starkly unceremonious design of the monument reflected the woeful legacy of the conflict it memorialized.[vi] As politicians, and pundits alike, still debate about the controversies surrounding this deadly American war, it’d be a good wager that they don’t mention a single name of a fallen soldier, save perhaps a decorated general or an eminent politician. On this “black gash” however, the full name of every single fallen soldier is etched, in the order of the day he or she died. As veterans’ families come by the tens of thousands to the memorial, many describe the stirring effects of seeing their loved one permanently remembered as an individual. As several customarily rub a graphite-on-paper copy of a loved one’s single name, they are reassured that their family member was, indeed, an individual amidst the 58,000 American soldiers killed (“Opinion”). He had a name as he fought, as he still undoubtedly has a name to them. By permanently etching those nominal letters on stone, the nation acknowledged that this historically momentous event involved the sacrifice of each and every human named. With this cathartic recognition, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial illustrates the importance of honoring the oft-forgotten lives lost in a momentous event.
So easily, the vacuum left by the death of a crime victim is filled by drama and sensationalism. Tuning into Serial, episode after episode, to feast upon the next smorgasbord of intrigue, I see it may be apt to periodically stop and remind myself of Hae Min Lee. I obviously will never know her, but she was and is more than just a recurring factor in Sarah Koenig’s quest for truth; she was a human who played multiple roles to multiple people, and she still is these things in the hearts of those who knew her personally. Just as families of war veterans leave flowers or other tributes at memorials, or as survivors of the Aurora massacre struggle to maintain dignity during their shooter’s trial, consumers of such news can be mindful to remember the victims behind sensational atrocities. Those flowers, that struggle for dignity, and such consumer discretion, after all, are small ways these victims can be as decorated as the Generals that led them into war, or as dignified as their violator was not. Though most humans do yearn to be a part of something greater that will last beyond the duration of our own lives, most also wish to be remembered personally. In a world filled with untimely death, we may not be able to ignore the fascination it invites, but that fascination need not entirely drown out the very real human price of our entertainment.
[i] Koenig, Sarah. “Episode 1” Serial. Audible, 3 Oct. 2014. Web. 4 June. 2015.
[ii] Gurman, Sadie. ” On Video, Theater Gunman Says Killings Got Him ‘Value Units’.” ABC News Online, 1 Jun. 2015. Web. 4 June 2015.
[iii] Gurman, Sadie. “Colorado theatre shooting victims relive terror in courtroom.” ABC 9 WTVM News Online, 27 May 2015. Web. 4 Jun. 2015.
[iv]. “Nevada man killed in Aurora shootings mourned.” KVVU Broadcasting Coorporation, 22 Jul. 2012. Web. 4 Jun. 2015.
[v] Flaccus, Gillian., and Wyatt, Kristen. “A look at the lives of Colorado shooting victims.” Yahoo News, 23 Jul. 2012. Web. 4 Jun. 2015.
[vi] “Opinion: The Black Gash of Shame.” The New York Times Online, 14 Apr. 1985. Web. 4 Jun. 2015.
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