Don't click to view this terribly upsetting photo unless you have your handkerchief ready. (Via CorrenteWire).
Yes, there is hope here as well as tragedy, but the tragedy was so unnecessary…
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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Ye who shout from the hilltops “not in my name!” then plunder the likenesses of Sgt. Peter Damon, Casey Shehan, and now this young man.
It is you, not he, who should face mirrors with disghust.
So let me see if I get et tu‘s point. It’s wrong to say “war is horrible, and has horrible consequences” and then to point out those actual consequences as they affect actual human beings. Those of us who opposed the decision to invade and occupy Iraq and opposed the current (entirely fact-free) decision to stay there are supposed to be limited to nice non-threatening critiques of some unspecified sort, but certainly of a sort that doesn’t really affect people in any meaningful way.
It’s apparently only the pro-killing, pro-occupation, pro-Bush side that gets to use live soldiers as campaign props, injured soldiers as morale-boosters, dead soldiers as martyrs, all to explain why we must fight on and create more dead, more maimed, more mourning families.
Hence the censorship of the coffins coming home, the refusal to acknowledge Iraqi casualty figures estimated by the same methods as every other epidemiology survey, the braying about showing what “wounded” really looks like.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
There is a courtesy and honor that human beings owe each other to self-censor. It is one thing to use images of anonymous coffins, quite another to use a specific private person’s image in a manner or forum invoking a principle antithetical to that person. In Peter Damon’s case, Michael Moore may not have acted illegally, but certainly disrepectfully and dishonorably. It is fine to raise public consciousness about maimed soldiers, but not use the images of a specific soldier for anti-war message that soldier opposes. There are other ways to do it without robbing a man of his image, and causing him to answer to friends who think he may have turned on them.
I know liberals only think of themselves, so let me rephrase it. Suppose someone like Michael was blown up by Pakistani terrorists on an airplane. It would be fine for a group favoring racial profiling in airports to use the incident generally as support for its cause. But to use specific pictures of Michael’s family and widow to illicit support would be disrespectful and dishonorable. The man puts earnest and heartfelt work into opposing racial profiling. His persona shouldn’t be exploited for a cause he doesn’t believe in, regardless of how strongly one believes in the underlying “rightness” of the cause.
This is not an argument against free speech or press. Its an argument in favor of courtesy and respect.
1) How does et_tu know that the person in question doesn’t want the war stopped?
2) In other words, you can’t actually show a *publicly available* picture as evidence of the kind of suffering that you want to stop, because in theory, it is disrespectful to the person who is suffering? Do I read that right? So one has to go looking for pictures of suffering and then check the ideological position of the relevant subject of the photo before one can point out that suffering? That the fact of human suffering has an ideological bias?
Finally et_tu, arguing the conservative position from “courtesy and respect” after 5 years of “liberals are traitors” from the conservatives, is utter crap. Witness the conservative attacks on the 9/11 widows who have spoken out against the Iraq war. Daniel Pearl was opposed to the war in Iraq by all accounts, but the right replayed his execution again and again. Certainly his family was. You have no credibility, and your smarmy little “liberals only think of themselves” smear is what I would expect from someone who is apparently with a straight face arguing for courtesy and respect.
et_tu — in case you didn’t notice, this was from a wire service. I’d be *very* surprised if they didn’t have a signed release from the bride and groom permitting the use of the picture.
Here are actual facts about the couple in that photo: Sunday Times (UK) and Parade Magazine (warning: 9MB pdf file).