Responding to the recent car-bombing of a Peshawar market, Secretary of State Clinton told the Pakistan press, and the world, that the attacks were, “cowardly,” which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Just Google the phrase cowardly act and see how many people have no idea what coward even means. For example, the first three hits are links to: an article about a hit and run murder in Toronto, an assault on an elderly man by a teenager with a baseball bat, and a man who attacked an Australian Constable with a flying head-butt to protect an elderly man from being tasered—all of which were described as “cowardly acts.”

With no disrespect to the victims intended, the perpetrators of these crimes are not cowards. Cowards do not look for trouble, they avoid trouble. And attacking people is trouble squared. Too much can go wrong. You could get hurt, maimed or killed. You could get caught and go to prison (the worst place on Earth for a coward). And a coward would never perpetrate a flying head-butt. Are you kidding? A coward avoids confrontation, especially with police, especially with their forehead, especially while flying through the air. It’s just too risky: will the head-butt connect incorrectly? Will my ankle twist when I land on the ground? What if I poop myself and there are no bathrooms nearby? As a part-time coward, I can tell you, delivering flying head-butts to on-duty policemen is a last resort.

I don’t know why people do this. It’s almost as if they have to invent reasons to hate the offender, but really, when a teenager beats an elderly man with a baseball bat, wouldn’t calling him a, “blood-thirsty, psychopathic scumbag ” pretty much cover it? Is coward really necessary, even if it were true? That’d be like complaining that Godzilla, aside from destroying your city and killing thousands, is also a bad tipper.

For some reason, people seem to confuse courage and cowardice with good and evil. But morality has nothing to do with it. The difference between courage and cowardice is the difference between action and inaction, respectively. Look at it this way. Imagine you are a coward and you are sitting at home watching TV when you are stricken with an urge to head-butt a policeman. As a coward, you would likely tell yourself, “But I might get hurt or caught. What if I catch cold? It is pretty nippy outside. I think I’ll just stay home and watch the flying head-butt channel instead.”

Another example on the Google results page of the misuse of the word coward came in the form of a message board post that asks, “Is suicide a cowardly act?”

How anyone has to ask that question just ruptures my gonads. All you have to do is imagine yourself at that last moment—shotgun barrel stuffed to the back of your mouth, finger on the trigger—to understand the ocean-load of courage it must take to commit suicide.

Some people say, “Well, suicidists are cowards for not coping with their problems.”

Bleh. Until you know what it’s like to have real problems—I mean skin-melting-off-your-bones and/or screeching-demons-in-your-brain kind of problems—you can’t say shit about coping. So, please, stick a staple gun in your ass and squeeze real hard if you’re the type of person who maligns these poor souls as cowards.

Speaking of suicide, I remember when I noticed this phenomenon. It was right after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001. I remember how (virtually) everyone seemed to be using “coward” to describe the 9-11 suicide hijackers. I remember thinking that, actually, you would have to be pretty balls-out brave to intentionally fly a plane into a building, no matter how many celestial virgins you believed were waiting for you. As for the incident in Pakistan, yes, believe it or not, it takes courage to detonate a car bomb in a Pakistan market place, or at least, a lack of cowardice.

But they were innocent people?! you might protest.

Yes it is true, innocent, but what does that have to do with it? To understand where I’m coming from all you have to do is recognize that terrorist is just another word for soldier, in this case, a soldier who uses a specific battle tactic in an agenda-specific war. Why is this relevant? Because scaredy-cats don’t fight wars.

“They are cowards,” Clinton said to the Pakistan press. “They know they are on the losing side of history, but they are determined to take as many lives with them,” which is true, except, isn’t the fact that they are losing, and resorting to desperate tactics, a testament to their courage, not cowardice?

In the second best episode of The Simpsons ever, TV news anchorman, Kent Brockman, mistakenly reports that giant, killer ants are taking over the world. At the end of the report he adds, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords,” which is exactly what a coward does in the face of a hostile takeover, he welcomes the ants—something a terrorist would never do.

So why does any of this matter? It matters because language matters. It matters for the same reason honesty and truth matter. It matters because, the fact that we must erroneously pad the list of reasons to hate our enemies is a symptom of the all-too human truth of how eager we are to deceive ourselves; especially if that deception will justify our own atrocities, such as, say, the lies we told ourselves about Iraq before we bombed the all-fuck out of it. Trust me, it matters.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 1:46 am and is filed under (language), The Best of Sordid Tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.