Monday, April 07, 2003
Here's a little something I wanted to pass on from James Lileks' Bleat, which has transmuted recently into a rather sane, pointed and thoughtful warblog:
On showing the carnage of war on television: "One shell, four men, eight parents, 20 siblings, a hundred friends, a thousand details lost for good. One second in war echoes for a decade. Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. I feel the same way about the 9/11 footage. Show it. Don’t presume we can’t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I’m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those [who] experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?"Otherwise, as Lileks points out, the war in Iraq risks becoming a bloodless "video-game" war to those of us on this side of the desert without family, neighbors or friends in battle.
Only, there's no "restart game" button.
