Outside the Spectrum

    This is the image Republicans don’t want you to see.

    You might be asking yourself, as I was, “What’s wrong with flag-draped coffins? There’s no nudity. The bodies are clearly being treated with reverence and care.”

    The answer, of course, is that Republicans don’t like powerful images like this that show the results of war. They kicked and screamed and have convinced every major newspaper in the country that I have read (New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, USA Today) not to show pictures of the mutilated bodies in Iraq, or those hundreds now in Gaza or Lebanon. It’s not “appropriate.” It’s appropriate to kill the people we (or Israel) have killed, but not to have the public see the bodies. As Noam Chomsky once said, “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”

    Aside from a once every six months or so we just don’t see the human cost of our war. It is even “inappropriate” to see the coffins of our soldiers who have given their lives for their country.

    This is part of an effort to run a war and keep its costs distant and invisible. There is no draft, even when the administration has been forced to extend tens of thousands of soldiers’ tours of duty. The price of the war massively contributes to the national debt, but the US simply runs with a deficit year after year and postpones paying the debt into the indeterminate future. The US military has insisted it won’t keep body counts of slain Iraqis, and so that cost is invisible to Americans.

    There is a price for war, however, and it is duplicitous and vile in the extreme to conceal the costs of war from the public that is paying for it.