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March 22, 2005
None So Blind
After two years and more than 1,500 U.S. casualties in a war that has been perhaps the best documented in history, no single photograph from the hostilities in Iraq has emerged as iconic.
This was from a by a Washington Post staff writer, Philip Kennicott. Normally, I would have moved on from that piece after hopefully remembering to close my precipitously dropped jaw, but Kennicott has been a strikingly incisive voice at times, so I kept reading. No, he isn't blind as one might first be tempted to conclude. Nor is he unaware of what is surely the iconic image of this occupation for the rest of the world:
What Kennicott means is that we have not accepted, have not come to a national consensus, about the war:
Despite heroic efforts of photojournalists to document the challenges and successes of the long grind of occupation, no one has captured a picture that has anything like the power of Nick Ut's photograph of a naked girl fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam (could it be published in a "family" newspaper today?) or Joe Rosenthal's image of the flag raised on Iwo Jima. Those images captured -- or helped crystallize -- a consensus about the wars they represented, a consensus that has yet to emerge about the war in Iraq.
In other words, we remain in denial.
Posted by zeynep at March 22, 2005 11:05 AM
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Comments
Check out the photo Left I On The News displays on top. I think we do have the napalm-burned-girl photo already.
Posted by: DoDo at March 23, 2005 05:21 AM
Damn, Blogger killed the link - verbatim: http://lefti.blogspot.com
Posted by: DoDo at March 23, 2005 05:23 AM
I do agree with you. Its so sad because if you ask someone how Terri became brain dead someone will answer her heart stopped. Few people are aware of her bulimia. Even fewer people are aware of the actual intensity that bulimia put on your body. I am a recovering bulimic, and the idea that that could me one day scares me. But no one seems to know or care about the gracity of this issue. People are more concerned about keeping her in a vegtable type state than even acknowleding how she came to be there in the first place.
Posted by: Briana at March 24, 2005 04:54 PM
>I find it hard to believe her husband is not culpable in her bulimia....
It's actually quite easy to hide this habit from all, and in some kinds of marriages ...it is especially easy to hide it from one's husband.
...much harder to hide it from one's mother/parents when in one's teens....not impossible,tho.
These are parents who reportedly were willing to amputate her limbs to keep her alive.
And, would ignore her wishes to let her die.
http://tinyurl.com/4lut3
YR>
Posted by: YR at March 28, 2005 05:19 PM