“Our message to you, Mr. President:
It’s wrong to politicize 9/11 and the War on Terror. Politicizing the death of Americans is both cynical and immoral. Politicizing the War on Terror is a slap in the face to the families of its victims.
How dare you, Mr. President.”
Yeah, that two-second snippet of 9/11 symbolism in the context of the challenges the Bush admin has faced sure was craven cynicism. That, that was ugly.
Imagine asking these soldiers the following the day before they died. Hey guys, would you mind being used as poison for the well?
Or, for all the outrage they tried to manufacture from some of the 9/11 families, do you think any of these guys went to any of the soldier’s families and asked them if they could use a picture of the deceased in a collage that implied it was the President who killed their loved ones? I think fewer than a handful would have said, “Yeah, that’s a fitting memorial.”
The guy responsible for this wrote a long apologia about posting it, included in which is the mini-narrative about how he struggled with the decision to do so, but the Truth needed to be told blah blah blah. I tried linking to it, but his anchors aren’t working, so the link just takes you to the top of the page. Here’s the URL (scroll down to April 7).
In The Poor Man thread, joe (the creator) talks about how he used pictures of soldiers more than once. There are 1,410 cells in the picture, which is obviously more than the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.
“Anyway I could have made the grid smaller but it didn’t look as good. No picture is used more than three times. I could have gotten it down to two times by tweaking some things but I lost interest in the project and I thought this version looks pretty good.”
Thanks for the link.
From the guy’s post: “‘War President’ is meant to be a satirical commentary, informed by the whole project of using the dead as political props.”
A few thoughts:
Money isn’t the only “crass motive”. Hit counters and spreading a meme are plenty for many, this guy included.
“Art takes risks” is a dodge. It does but the individual artist of a piece is still the author and creator. This piece is what it is, not a macroscopic entity. When I write a piece of fiction, it is my fiction, it wasn’t created by the the collective of “Art”.
His statement of the nature of visual images is false. The fact that he made a picture of GWB out of the pictures of the dead is clearly the point. Only pure photography could be argued to be empty and then only if the camera took pictures at random. The proof of this is that every single one of his commenters knew exactly what he was saying. That’s some pretty remarkable agreement on an empty image. Imagine a Rorshach that resulted in everyone who viewed it saying, “That’s a Hungarian man doing math equation on a chalkboard.” Further his statement that a parallel of Washington and his dead soldiers would be viewed differently is plainly false by the fact that I support GWB (as his strawman, Washington was generally supported) and I didn’t view this as a “a monument to the dead and a celebration of a great leader.” Your post shows you didn’t either. We could go for a more scientific head-count but it really isn’t necessary because this line of argument is pure BS.
All in all, it comes back to that first quote I typed: “…using the dead as political props.”
The bar opened three hours early here in Austin after reading this one. Sheesh.
The only way I think I’ll be able to bounce back from this and salvage my Saturday joie de vie is re-reading choice sections of Vince Flynn’s “Transfer of Power”—those prose which dwell on Islamic Jihadists being stabbed, bombed, shot, and decapitated.
Wish he’d write a novel where politcal artists, liberal bloggers and, of course, those creepy puppet people got their just rewards.
Cheers!