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The implications of death extend well beyond the scope of hospital and home. The media of mass communication deluge us daily with reports of politically motivated violence, kidnappings, murders, massacres, assassinations, and blood baths. Death as a consequence of killing is a central element of political conflict. The contemporary imagination is haunted by the compulsive repetition of political terror and retaliation. Two recent examples of the political communication of death should make the point clear and help to circumscribe the field of inquiry:
Washington (AP)—Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has declined to rule out the possibility that the United States would use military force against Mideast oil producers “to prevent strangulation of the industrialized world.”
Cordoba, Argentina (AP)—Left-wing kidnappers murdered honorary U.S. Consul John Patrick Egan Friday night and left his bloodied body on a dirt road wrapped in a guerrilla banner.
Kissinger's statement is clearly a thinly veiled threat to kill if necessary. It is formulated in terms of the law of talion, a response to “strangulation” or an intentional attempt to kill the “industrialized world.” Death serves a rhetorical function. The killing of the United States consul is formulated in terms that are loaded with implicit symbolic values. The juxtaposition of “blood” and “dirt” involves the reader in a hidden value judgment: the murdered consul is honorable and pure, the “left-wing” murderers dishonorable and impure. The manipulation of death in these statements is a form of symbolic action with potentially lethal consequences.