Suddenly, Two Waves of Death

By Roger Rosenblatt

There is a breathless scene in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust when the hero is caught in a street riot and is carried every way the mob heaves: "He was the spearhead of a flying wedge when it collided with a mass going in the opposite direction. The impact turned him around. As the two forces ground against each other, he was turned again and again, like a grain between millstones. This didn't stop until he became part of the opposing force."

Last week revived West's scene. Suddenly, there were two freakish disasters overseas, connected at first only by the fact that death was involved in each: thousands killed in a cyclone in Bangladesh, 38 by a flood of Liverpool fans at a soccer match in Belgium. It was not the casualty count alone that was stunning nor even, in the case of the soccer match, the display of what amounted to mass murder in the context of a game. What the world saw in Bangladesh and Belgium was nature out of control -- external nature in one place, human nature in the other. One ought to be used to such sights by now. Yet a peculiar terror rises in the age of progress from seeing people carried backward, haplessly becoming the forces that oppose them.

So one immediately tries to make an orderly sense of things. There is no way to explain away cyclones, of course, but experts may be called in to analyze violence in sports or to invent measures guaranteeing that such a horror will never take place again. Not that rational activity is unwelcome after watching tapes of the boys from Liverpool publicly assaulting -- and killing -- the boys from Turin because the Italians were rooting for the wrong team. How does the mind begin to understand this? Bring out Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power and learn that mobs love destroying things, that "in the crowd the individual feels a . . . sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in."

Or take the poor-old-England line of analysis. England lost her empire, so she gets frustrated from time to time, which filters down to the working classes, who vent the national rage by beating up on people. Or the unemployment argument: more than a million young Britons out of work, cruising for a battle they can win. In more general terms, these soccer riots might even be pinned on politics: the European Cup seen as Europe's latest intramural war. Or sex: Could the scene in Brussels be the re-enactment of the rape of Italy by a frothing, snorting herd? Or chance: if you cannot control the outcome of a game, at least you can control the fight. Who, in such a discussion, would omit mention of the nuclear threat: people are scared to death by tension; therefore they stomp on others.

If all these explanations sound farfetched, none is wholly dismissable, since each requires a leap of faith from some assumed normal cause to an abnormal horrendous effect. In the gap between cause and effect sits gasping human will, flailing about in an effort to rationalize events that, in the end, cannot be rationalized. In 1969 a full-scale war broke out between Honduras and El Salvador that began with soccer fans clashing during the elimination round of the 1970 World Cup and concluded with bombing raids, troop movements and, eventually, 2,000 dead. Where does the historian search for the onset of that war: in the stadium or in the genes?

"Nature will lay buried a great time," said Bacon, "and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation." Evidently, though, nature is more palatable to the conscience in the form of a cyclone than dressed as human savagery. Better to suffer the weather than to be the weather. Yet the mystery is the same. The people of Bangladesh will puzzle over a universe that periodically marks them for annihilation, but perhaps they will puzzle no less than the fellow from Liverpool who, sober, asks simply, "What got into me?" The abiding fear for everyone is that nothing got in that was not already there, that people are brimming with cyclones ready to spin into fury. That may be why it is possible to witness a week like the last with equal shocks of incredulity and recognition.

In a way, the most unsettling aspect of such events is how quickly they come and go. People are borne backward in air and then are suddenly dropped on their seats. The ground is dry again, the stadium walls are cemented, the dead have been carted away. Were it not for the holes in the census, one would never know that a disaster took place, so smoothly does the earth seal its fissures. Even memory, which honors and cherishes the dead, recalls nothing of the rage except that it existed, that it was awful feeling like paper in a storm, even of one's own manufacture, yet the experience was also like some ancient dream, the survivors hoping feebly that from now on the gods will be kind. So has the world advanced to its current state of grace.