The Victim of Marginal Worthiness

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky showed in their classic of news media criticism Manufacturing Consent, a single critical detail can crash the supposed worthiness of a victim--with their examples showing how the mainstream media's regard for the life of a Catholic priest murdered by state forces plummets 99 percent if the state forces responsible for the murder were Anti-Communist rather than Communist, all as a great many victims of a great many contemporary evils would be considered even less "worthy" than even the priest killed by a right-wing death squad.

There are an enormous number of angles to the matter of this long spectrum extending from absolute and extreme worthiness to the kind of absolute unworthiness that represents not a 99 percent+ drop in attention from one end of the spectrum to the other, but a 100 percent drop--because their sufferings rate no acknowledgment whatsoever (as is, arguably, the lot of the vast majority of categories of people on this planet, and their causes of death). One that may escape the notice it ought to have is the situation of the victim who is not totally dismissed as unworthy, but perhaps enjoying a very marginal worthiness, and straining to hold on to that and improve on that--and the standard of behavior expected of them even by those who are prepared to say in public that they are not totally unworthy.

It seems to me that one can think about the difference between those who are treated as unquestionably worthy and those who are treated as only marginally worthy in this way: Who is allowed to show anger, even rage, over how they have been mistreated, and who is required at all times to display the utmost restraint in the face of the severest insults and provocations rather than responding to their tormentors the same way they have spoken to them, ever taking the "high road" as others snipe at them from the "low?" While no one argues for hatred as a healthy or constructive emotion, who is allowed to admit that the abused are apt to feel hatred toward those who have abused them, that one can bear such feeling even when they are fighting justly for their rights, and that others must show some understanding of that--and who destroys whatever sympathy others had for them with the least hint that they may harbor any impure feeling whatsoever? In short, when the victim in question lapses in "right" thought, speech and action, whom do we make excuses for as we continue to insist on their worthiness, and whom do we subject to cold, sanctimonious moralizing when they show themselves an ordinary mortal rather than the saint we require them to be if we are to show them any consideration at all?

It is those who are deemed unquestionably worthy who get all the understanding, while those on the edge of worthiness and trying not to get further away from that edge of whom the adherents of conventional wisdom make a non-negotiable demand for impeccable conduct, while forgiving no failures to adhere to the standard whatsoever--perhaps because they are looking for any excuse to not care, or perhaps simply be frank about their not caring, and getting others to not care, and very well aware that holding the victim to an impossible double standard must inevitably provide them with that excuse they so obviously want, indeed can even seem desperate to have? Because they have an agenda that open indifference, or opposition, and promotion of the same in others, will serve? And indeed, in their relentless search after excuses to condemn, not only act like a bearer of hatred, but actually hate them, another enemy of the victims differing from those who openly attack them in that openness (with the feeling likely to be less well-hidden than they think it is)? Yet those in that position of "marginal worthiness" are very likely to feel that they have no practical alternative to playing a cruel game rigged against them as well as they can--in this way as in so many others "choice" really "dilemma," and least-worst the best they can hope for from the selection of options available to them.