If somehow we could quantify the brutality and horrors of war beyond mere death tolls and newspapers used those statistics to determine which stories went onto their front pages, most of the news of the Middle East would be so deeply buried as to never attract America's attention.
Instead we would be reading every day of places like San Fernando, Mexico where during the past several days a series of mass graves have revealed the corpses of 177, mostly innocents, perhaps as many as 122 snatched from buses taking them to the United States, scores bludgeoned to death by a sledge hammer. San Fernando is 90 miles from Texas border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It's an average Mexican town of 60,000 people that, thanks to the drug wars, has become known for grotesque violence that suggests it has been over-run not by mere criminals but by some kind of supernatural evil. In one instance, a man's son was kidnapped and $10,000 in ransom was sought. When the man raised every penny he could and sent the kidnappers $5,000, they sent him back just half of his son.
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