I'm sure you've seen it by now -- the Marlboro Man of Iraq. Naomi Klein has written about it in The Nation. It's been in more than one hundred U.S. papers, and I'm sure hundreds of folks are blogging on it. I saw it first in the paper on Wednesday morning and thought, "that's a striking picture." As Klein suggests, I felt like I'd seen it before. I'm sure that my mother's The Best of Life has Vietnam and WW II pictures just like it. Of course, that book also has pictures from Normandy and the bodies on the beach, and pictures of flag-drapped caskets returning from Vietnam, and pictures of napalmed civilians running from burning villages. Those pictures seem remarkably absent from the coverage of this war -- at least in the print media. (I must confess to an aversion so strong to TV news that I never watch it, so if U.S. networks have been showing the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner or shots of dead civilians in the streets of Falluja I've missed it.) The tired Marine is certainly part of the story of America at war, but so are the dead. We seem to be getting only one trope this time. It's not quite deja vu.
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You are right. Let us focus on something of substance, not to a man smoking a cigarrette. People drive me crazy! "Oh! What is that showing our children"???!!! Well, what does it show our children to murder people and shoot civilians and solve all our problems with war???? Do they think about that??? No, they think about someone smoking and how that can corrupt our pure children. Wow! I sound cynical.
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