What you're about to see isn't pleasant.
When I first posted this diary, many commenters pointed out that I wasn't showing the requisite amount of respect for the people depicted below.
They were right.
In an effort to snark about what Bill O'Reilly considers disgusting and shameful - a Photoshopped picture of Lieberman schtumping Bush - and what I find disgusting and shameful - real pictures of misery created by Bush and abetted by Lieberman - I used these people to make a political point. A valid, but crass and lazy point nevertheless.
And perhaps I'm about to do it again. I should let it lie, but screwing it up once and leaving it seems itself vaguely cowardly. As if I've avoided something.
It isn't right to use the misery of others. I don't want to. I don't have the blessings of this soldier to do so. And yet to hide it, to shy away from it, seems equally wrong. If it is impossible to let each moment stand as a memorial to someone's misery, it is untenable to let no moment do so.
The mourner does not want to be looked at and so he covers his face. We didn't really want to see him awyway. Everything here is inappropriate. It is disgusting - literally not tasteful - and this is a visceral reaction we would rather not have. But we are trapped between seeing what we shouldn't and avoiding what we can't.
Without imagination we could have no sympathy. And yet the real thing seems only to distance us from reality. Look! There they are! What are you feeling? Not enough, I guarantee. How could it be? Your grief is never adequate to the disaster, no matter how close to home it hits.
And we cover the faces of the dead. We cover them, we cover ourselves. And when the voices turn away to "cover" some other tidbit of silly non-news or the next non-controversy, the occultation is complete.
I'm using this man's pain to make a point. There's no way I can justify it. And yet to not use it is unjustifiable. And so when I said, and say, that these pictures are disgusting, I mean because there is no way we can confront them for any purpose - the low one of getting one up on Bill O'Reilly, or some higher, better one - without our stomachs' churning. So yep, this is a hate site, Bill. Because I hate every goddamn thing I'm posting here. And that's as snarky as I can get.
I see at last that all the knowledge
I wrung from the darkness - that the darkness flung me-
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain. - Randall Jarrell