(Photo: Barry Guttierez)Can't stop looking at, or thinking about this picture. It's absolutely stunning. Stunningly beautiful, stunningly poignant, stunningly sad- and maddening. And I'm certainly not about to go into the technique and aesthetics as to why and how. It's everything that war is, and every reason it shouldn't.
I'm not going to get all political here, for respect of the subject matter at hand, suffice to say I'm old enough to remember another war in a far off country that was also supposed to make us freer and safer by killing a people who never did us any harm whatsoever. And I recall someone recently asking where all the "iconic war imagery" was this time around. Well, you got one for the ages here- in any case, it was the wrong question to ask.
2 comments:
Why didn't this make the front page of the fucking NY Times or the Washington Post? Well, that wouldn't've been humanistic as much as subversive or controversial.
We're not supposed to be reminded that war has consequences, that it involves dead, shattered bodies and living, shattered families. This is why the coffins are not allowed to be photographed as they stream off the transports at Dover, why Bush and Cheney never go to a funeral for a single one of them.
Why Barbara Bush's beautiful mind can't be allowed to contemplate ugly images such as body bags, why the 1000th, 2000th, 3000th and 4000th deaths were just numbers.
That's why this picture never made the front page of a major newspaper and never will. We as a nation desperately are trying to put Iraq behind us and we never seem capable of realizing this absurdly simple fact- We can't put it behind us without leaving 155,000 troops behind. We can't put behind us a war that's still silently raging from 6000 miles away.
Amen, Amen, Amen!
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