An obscene statement

I haven't read or seen most of the 11 September 2001 remembrances; there are so many, who could? Unfortunately, I had the misfortune of running across Esquire's reposting of "The Falling Man", an article by Tom Junod accompanying a famous, or infamous, photograph of a man who leapt from one of the World Trade Center towers.

The photo is shocking, but one can accept it intellectually as a moment inadvertently frozen in time: the photographer didn't stage it, he just happened to capture it. The picture's terrible impact was not by design.

This accompanying text, originally from the September 2003 issue, was not inadvertent.

Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion.

Junod goes on in the same vein for a long, long paragraph. I cannot bring myself to quote the rest. I could not even bring myself to read the rest of the piece.

To wax so lyrical about a human being's last, terrible moments of life is obscene.

How can any thinking, feeling person find joy in that image?

How inured to suffering and devoid of empathy must you be to see "comfort" in a fatal fall?

The passage in question is nothing more (or less) than the most degraded kind of exploitation of an innocent man.

I can't convey the depth of my disgust for Junod and the editorial hierarchy that permitted this grotesque rape in prose form. Even worse, they call the article of which that appalling paragraph forms a part one of the "greatest Esquire stories ever published".

If so, I shudder to contemplate what Esquire's editorial board rejected.