Thanatos unchained

As of January 1, 2007, 3,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq.* Here's what that "symbolic marker" looks like in graphic form:

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822 Americans were killed in Iraq, and another 5,676 wounded, during 2006.

All of this is good enough reason to join the French in protesting the New Year, as they did last night in Nantes. Several hundred demonstrators carried signs saying "No to 2007" and "Now is Better." After midnight, they started chanting "No to 2008."

This reminds me of a story about the huge demonstration in Paris following the death of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1980. When one of the 50,000 demonstrators was asked what they were protesting, he offered a simple answer: "Death."

Admittedly, this new blog has started on a morbid note. But wars can't be ignored, not by anyone with a vestige of moral sensibility, and their chief products are death and suffering.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos personified death. He was the son of Nyx (night) and Erebus, and the twin of Hypnos (sleep). After Sisyphus was condemned to Hades by Zeus, he tricked Thanatos into shackling himself, rather than Sisyphus, to a rock. Sisyphus escaped, and mortals were abruptly liberated from death. Ares, the god of war, found that mortal warriors could no longer die in battle. Outraged, he hastened to release Thanatos, who went back to his grim business.

Can the clever Sisyphus deliver the world from death in war during the coming year?

More likely, 2007 will again see the other, and more familiar**, side of the Sisyphus myth. In the end, of course, Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to see it roll to the bottom again, in a cycle he was condemned to endlessly repeat.

Nowadays we call this "staying the course."

NOTES

*The New York Times has assembled photographs of each.

**Mainly thanks to Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).

Graphic: Thanatos (left) and Hypnos (right) carrying Sarpedon, a victim of the Trojan war, into the Underworld. Hermes, who escorted the dead into the afterlife, stands in the middle.