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Given this image's inflammatory nature, I posted it with a great deal of trepidation. I had a hard time deciding if it was the right thing to do and I am still not sure. No, I didn't have the consent of the families of those pictured, and I apologize for any additional pain that this image causes them. That said, I must say that it is my belief that one distinguishing characteristic between art and other forms of speech is that art takes risks, and if we, as a society, value art we must allow it more leeway than other modes of expression to incite or offend.
'War President' is meant to be a satirical commentary, informed by the whole project of using the dead as political props. I'm not making a dime off the image, and never will attempt to do so. Given this lack of financial or other crass motives, other recent instances of the politicization of the dead strike me as more morally questionable: the coffins of the victims of 9/11 showing up in a political advertisement, the continued suppression of images of the funerals of those lost in Iraq from the mainstream American media, and images of the 9/11 disaster in a campaign ad. A certain party stands to benefit greatly from all three of those instances of politicization.
I'd also like to point out that 'War President' is an image. It is not a textual statement or rhetorical argument. An image is like an empty room and any message that one reads in that room necessarily came in the baggage one carried when one walked in the door. If I made a mosaic of George Washington composed of images of the American dead from the revolution, would viewers likely take that image as an indictment of Washington? I submit that they would not. It would be viewed as a monument to the dead and a celebration of a great leader, a somewhat maudlin monument maybe but surely not offensive. The fact that 'War President' is not viewed such a manner is not due to any intrinsic property of 'War President' but lies somewhere else.
Very true. Something like "War President" could have been auctioned off on EBAY to drooling freepi in the wake of the "Mission Accomplished" journey by flightsuit boy. The only reason people have a problem with Nightline and with something like "War President" is because they recognize that things in Iraq are a mess. Sadly, they'd rather be right than see any recognition of the sacrifices they themselves are not making (except Andrew Sullivan, who truly believes that his late night blogging was a noble sacrifice which made all of this possible.). I was against this war, but I was always happy to be wrong.
Both the Afghanistan conflict and the war in Iraq had moments when I knew that the administration was far more concerned about appearing to do something useful than actually doing it. In Afghanistan, it was the "have schoolchildren send a dollar to the White House" program, with the money donated being used for Afghan humanitarian aid. I always wondered what happened to that money, and in the wake of the Anthrax attacks when all mail to Congress and the White House is getting blasted until it's brittle who the hell thought encouraging people to send mail like that was a good idea. Of course it was total bullshit - PR, nothing more.
In Iraq it was "the schools! the schools!" I'm all for schools, of course, but I assume that schools weren't part of the vital public infrastructure that we blew up. Slapping on a new coat of paint so we can say "4 trillion schools have been rebuilt!" was, again, nothing more than a PR ploy to insert a line into every NPR report and every Bush speech. I'd rather hear about "the electricity! the electricity!" Oh well.
At this point I don't really know what the hell they went into Iraq for. I did ask Christopher Albritton of Back-to-Iraq what, one year later, he thought about it and he said something along the lines that whatever grand geopolitical plans they once had were no longer operative. I think that's probably true - they no longer know what the hell they hope to achieve there.