Haiti/Japan: Similar Disaster, Different Pictures
When we look West to Japan we see something rather like ourselves. When we look South, however, we see something altogether different.
Continue Reading
America’s Afghan Crusade
To the extent that the War in Afghanistan is a war on terror its success or failure will turn on winning “hearts and minds” throughout the Muslim world. It is hard to imagine how displays such as this can serve a productive end.
Continue Reading
What Are Unions Good For?
As we debate the value of unions in the days ahead, we are well advised to recall the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and worker's needs to have for a collective voice in representing their interests, particularly in the face of efforts to castigate unions as little more than selfish,...
Continue Reading
I’d Stick to the Reindeer
Today, not even an army of ACLU lawyers could save Santa Claus from the indignities of being patted and probed by the uniform wearing the rubber blue glove.
Continue Reading
Treaties, Credit Taking and our So-Called Democratic Culture
The above photograph is nearly fifty years old and I doubt very many people have ever seen it before—or can identify the event that it marks. I couldn’t. Nevertheless, it is interesting for several reasons.
Continue Reading
Got a Tired Occupation on Your Hands? Feminize It.
In the end, female marines with guns are, well, simply marines with the guns.
Continue Reading
The Impossible Dream
This was not just a stunt pulled off by students that had nothing better to do with their Sunday afternoon; rather, it was a concerted effort borne of the recognition that they had no legitimate, recognized voice in a policy debate that directly implicated their future.
Continue Reading
DADT: Media Gaga Over Everything … Except What She Had to Say
Most of the reports on her rally are primarily, if not exclusively photographic, almost to the exclusion of what she actually had to say. The irony, of course, is that a quasi-faux rally cast as political spectacle received far more coverage than the presumably unintentional spectacle of actual Senators...
Continue Reading
Why There are So Few Pictures of the Attack on the Pentagon
After a recent class one of my students wrote with a question, wondering why it was that there are so many pictures of firefighters at ground zero and no pictures of “the Pennsylvania flight or the DC attack.” Of course, such pictures do exist and they have had...
Continue Reading
The First Guy to Die in "Post-Combat" Combat vs. the Last Guy to Die in Combat (And Other All-Too-Fine Distinctions)
No soldier wants to be the last casualty in a war, but that designation pales in comparison to being the first fataliyy in a combat mission that has already been declared “over.” One week after “turning the page” on Operation Freedom two unidentified U.S. soldiers were killed by Iraqi...
Continue Reading
Beyond "Compassion Fatigue": A Tale of Two Cities
Those who decry “compassion fatigue” have plenty to support their claims, but if we look closely we might see differences that warrant less knee jerk reactions. As a case in point, consider the difference between the floods in Pakistan and the mudslide in Zhouqu County, China.
Continue Reading
The Fog(ging) of War
The fact of the matter is that we have been shown evidence of virtually every one of these concerns over the past, long, ten years and we have chosen not to see them. Like the soldier in the photograph above, caught in the rotor wash of a MEDEVAC helicopter...
Continue Reading
Why a Penny Saved is Not Always a Penny Earned
In the days following 9/11 we were told that it was our civic duty to consume in order to keep the economy on its feet; the now prolonged recession makes even this limited civic responsibility impossible for many to honor; and for others, well, as the Times reporter notes,...
Continue Reading
An Economic Model of Greed (Or, The Legacy of Gordon Gekko)
The first and more obvious point concerns what this photograph (and others like it from the Texas City explosion and the leak in Alaska) actually shows. The evidence of the impending disaster of Deepwater Horizon was literally before our eyes at least as early as 2005, but we...
Continue Reading
Flag Fetish
There is of course nothing wrong in celebrating America’s heritage with displays of the flag, especially on the anniversary of our national “birth,” but notice here how the elongated flag (one of three in the photograph) is completely out of scale with its surroundings—both in size and dimension—as if...
Continue Reading
Fear and Self-Loathing in an Environmental Catastrophe
What we see in the photograph then is an image of ourselves. The disgust we experience in viewing it is a measure of self-loathing animated by the implicit recognition of own impurities and decrepitude.
Continue Reading
Big Oil's (Not So) Dirty Hands
We tend to think of oil as having relatively low viscosity, largely because most of us encounter it once it has been refined and readied for consumption. But here we see it as the sludge that it becomes after floating about in the gulf for several days – a...
Continue Reading
"Hearts and Minds" Forty Years Later
The photograph above shows a news story that doesn’t appear to have been told in the national media, notwithstanding a “sobering,” but little noted Pentagon report last week that indicated an active and growing insurgency and an Afghan government with “limited credibility.” On the other hand, it also notes...
Continue Reading