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December 05, 2004
"emotional truth"
Comparing a military PR PowerPoint to a visual poliblog, the Washington Post concludes with a quotation from an academic expert on Iraqi affairs: "What the two presentations show us is that the U.S. military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds." The PowerPoint (available at Soldiers for the Truth) endeavors to explain what the U.S. military is accomplishing in Iraq and why. Unlike the military PPT, the visual blog has no accompanying text, except to provide identifying (and sometimes emotionally charged, even angry) titles for each picture. Iraq in Pictures simply publishes wire service photographs that were not published in MSM. The blogger, who used the pseudonym "Hugh Upton" in an interview with the Post, referred to an "emotional truth" conveyed by these pictures and otherwise unavailable in the U.S.: "The world sees these images and we do not." One can draw a range of conclusions from the Post story and its links—conclusions about, for example, PowerPoint, politics, war, the visual, pathos, and the circulation of information.
One can also accept a responsibility to visit Iraq in Pictures regularly, because everyone in the U.S., regardless of how s/he voted on November 2, is a "beneficiary" of the violence being committed on the other side of the world. It's kind of like the good white folks who say that they shouldn't have to pay reparations to African Americans and Native Americans, because they weren't the agents of historical violence against those peoples. Well, they may not have themselves done it, and they might not, in a similar situation, make the choices that European Americans in the nineteenth century made. But they are nevertheless today the beneficiaries of those choices. The same is true with regard to the invasion and ongoing destruction of Iraq: just because an individual may not support this U.S. president does not mean that s/he is not benefitting (economically, whatever) from his actions. And that carries certain responsibilities, including the responsibility not only to engage the words about Iraq but also the pictures of it. In our self-justifying, self-satisfied political dissent, we mustn't allow ourselves to create a comfortable distance from what's happening over there. The November 19 entry in Iraq in Pictures begins with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: "There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world."
Posted by senioritis at December 5, 2004 08:35 AM