The Coroner’s Report as Sacrament

The public wants to be told, by an authority of sufficiently grave accent, that what happened in Sudan was wicked. That is precisely why the telling will be mistaken for the remedy. The BBC has concluded that the Rapid Support Forces deliberately aimed their violence at hospitals. Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, has said the attacks may amount to war crimes. Across the comfortable latitudes, a great many readers will accept both statements over coffee and feel that something has been accomplished. The vanity at work is the democratic conviction that knowing is a form of doing: that a citizen who has been correctly informed has thereby discharged his moral debt, and may proceed to the sports pages with a clear conscience.

Consider the machinery. A broadcaster spends money and nerve establishing a fact that the doctors in Sudan already knew with their hands. The finding travels outward to people who can do nothing about it, and they reward it with their attention, which is the only currency the broadcaster deals in. The UN official supplies a verdict, carefully held in the conditional, because “may amount to” is the strongest phrase an international civil servant can utter without committing anyone to anything. Both men, I infer, are doing their jobs honestly, and that is the trouble. The system works as designed. It produces a document, the document produces a feeling, and the feeling is the end of the line.

The strongest objection deserves its hearing, for it is a good one. Records matter. The prosecutors who came after the great wars of the last century built their cases out of exactly this sort of patient documentation, and a militia commander who reads that his conduct is now catalogued in London may, conceivably, behave a shade more carefully. On this view the BBC is laying bricks for a courthouse not yet built, and to sneer at bricklaying is to sneer at justice itself. I grant all of it. Evidence is the raw stuff of any reckoning, and the reporters who gathered it under fire are worth more than the whole editorial page that will cluck over them. But the argument proves less than it claims. The courthouse gets built only when some government with power and an interest decides to build it, and the public’s satisfaction at the report removes the pressure that might have made the government decide. A citizen who has felt the proper horror has no residual horror left to spend on his member of parliament. The record is real. The audience’s relationship to it is liturgical.

Note, too, what the word “deliberately” does to the reader. Accidental carnage is a tragedy, which is depressing. Deliberate carnage is a crime, which is thrilling, because a crime has a villain, and a villain lets the onlooker stand on the right side of a line. The RSF, whatever its men in fact intended in each instance, has been cast in the role, and the role is gratefully received. Nobody is required to ask which governments have armed whom, or which capitals found the RSF a useful partner when it was convenient, or why a war that has emptied hospitals for so long needed a broadcaster’s investigation before it could be said aloud in polite company. One villain is a story. A web of patrons and suppliers is homework.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Sudan, a nurse is sweeping glass from a ward floor with a piece of cardboard because the broom went with the last looting. She does not need the BBC to tell her the attack was on purpose; the purpose is written in the shell holes above the beds. She will not read Mr. Turk’s statement, and if she did she would find in its subjunctive mood a precise description of how much help is coming. For her the finding is not news. It is a receipt for a transaction in which she paid everything and the purchaser took delivery elsewhere.

The man of the comfortable latitudes, having finished the article, will fold the paper and pronounce it shocking, which it is. He will feel informed, which he is. He will feel, a little, that he has visited the wounded. He has not left his kitchen, and the nurse is still sweeping, and the cardboard is wearing through.