April 09, 2004

I'm curious to know...

what the readers of this blog think of this image. (It actually originated here, but I'm linking to Moore because he has greater bandwidth.)

I've posted it on two message boards and opinion is mixed, with about half of the respondents agreeing with me and the other half being wrong.

I loathe George W. Bush and have mixed views on the war in Iraq, but I think the photomosaic is tasteless agitprop and incredibly disrespectful to the families of the American dead (particularly in light of the number of liberals who raised 15 kinds of hell [with reason] over Bush using images of 9-11 in his campaign ads). It makes no arguments about the merits of the war other than "Dubya" caused 648 soldiers to die (some of them two and three times judging by the image) while not combatting the fact that you could make a billboard sized photomosaic of FDR (who led us into war with a dictatorship that had never attacked us and would have done backflips to sign a peace treaty with us in December '41) or Abraham Lincoln (who could easily have let the south secede bloodlessly after Ft. Sumter [as was, at least arguably, their constitutional right] yet embarked upon a war that cost 600,000 American lives and a century of ill will), and yet Lincoln and FDR are adjudicated heroes (and rightly so). Then there's the issue of the Mt. Rushmore sized portrait you could make of Saddam using portraits of his victims.

This isn't to say that the war in Iraq is just (a good argue can be made either way) but that no case is made either way while the images of the dead, none of them public figures, are exploited for sensationalism.

And I might have marginally more respect for Moore if a left-click on the image didn't lead to an advertisement for his latest (much debunked by left, right and neutral sources) book.