Perhaps one of the most distressing moments in my life as a self-centered white male in self-centered America came late in the afternoon on Sept. 11, 2001. It was my friend’s birthday. I remember thinking that saying “happy birthday” to her would be completely inappropriate. I remember feeling like her birthday, and the million other Sept. 11 birthdays, had been forever tainted. That’s when I knew the terrorists had done their job.
This feeling has been further compounded by what transpired on my last birthday, Dec. 26 — the date the swift series of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean struck, killing over 150,000 people. Unfortunately I don’t think many Americans know, or will remember, the exact date of the disaster. Instead our media coverage and own experience of the event has been driven by the same macabre obsession with numbers that characterized the nation’s post-9/11 sentiment: How many have died?
Irish director Terry George’s new film “Hotel Rwanda” features a random and seemingly out-of-place cameo by Joaquin Phoenix as an American cameraman covering the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Phoenix notes to a group of Rwandans that the horror of their lives is nothing more than a nightly news update American families will watch, turn off and return to their dinners.
By positing a celebrity figure in such a role George creates an alternate media reality: Americans prefer to see beautiful people doing minimal work, like Joaquin Phoenix holding a camera for five minutes, rather than deal with the implications of something as massive and impossible to understand as the ritualistic killing of nearly one million Tutsis by militant Hutus in 1994. Having Phoenix convey this message further heightens America’s own distance from international tragedies in favor of fluff and gossip.
When I met Paul Rusesabagina, the man played by Don Cheadle in “Hotel Rwanda,” I was, as the tired clich