A Permanent Accusation

 

Take note of these two images. They both depict naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib being stacked on top of each other, being tortured by the hands of American soldiers in power. But do we react differently to one or the other? Does torture, graphic and horrific, translate from an objective photograph to a subjective painting? What does this say about how we view art? Can something this horrific be made into ethical, acceptable art? What is exaggerated in the painting? What is captured truthfully in the photograph?

In 2004, the Taguba Report investigated the 320th Military Police Battalion occupying Abu Ghraib prison and accounts began to surface of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of the prisoners held at the Iraqi prison at the hands of American Army soldiers.

Fernando Botero, a Colombian artist famous for his pudgy, warmly-nostalgic, folkloric paintings, was living in Paris when he saw the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners at the American-occupied Abu Ghraib.

He began to paint. He painted a series inspired by the Abu Ghraib photographs which is on display at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. 

A majority of the initial photographs depict a woman with cropped-cut brown hair giving a thumbs up or beaming proudly over the naked, cowering (and sometimes dead) prisoners. Her name is Lynndie England, former United States Army reservist with the 372nd Military Police Company. Since the investigation she was convicted along with eleven other military personnel by Army courts-martial for the abuse of prisoners of war. Why anyone might accept such an order from a superior officer is beyond the scope of anyone's understanding, but what is important to note about the paintings by Bolero and the photographs is the absence of perpetrators. Our focus is solely fixated on the tortured prisoners: their gaping mouths in agony, their wide, frightened eyes, their exaggerated poses, blood spatter.

In her online article regarding the art series, Mia Fineman says, "Yet Botero, by tackling this imagery in a focused and extended series, has demonstrated not only that such things can be represented in art but also that a figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity." 

Its true, cartoons and graphic novels have evolved into a new media form of modern-day literature and art. But where does art cross the line from being journalistic to expressive, from objective to subjective? I don't think the lines are always so distinct anymore. Photographs can be staged and paintings can attempt to portray accuracy. Botero calls art "a permanent accusation," so you could make the stretch that art is akin to journalistic reporting since his art is meant to portray something real. Botero's paintings relates to the falling man of 9/11 also in the sense that there is at times a fine line between art and journalism. As an aspiring journalist, I feel conflicted when I see art like this.

It's sort of scary and eerie to me, that Lynndie England was a 20 -year-old (like me) when she entered the prison of Abu Ghraib where they were committing these tortures. I think it's always a little eerily unsettling when we uncover something we share (like an age) with an individual we would otherwise loathe to be compared to. Since serving her jail time, she has returned to her hometown in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. I think we have yet to see the full consequences of her actions and the actions of those other Americans who have tarnished the reputation of their fellow officers and who have made military goals in Iraq that much harder.

Meanwhile the rest of us at home, American families, politicians, and artists like Fernando Botero, will be scanning the headlines on our t.v. screens, watching.

The 9/11 Generation

 Everyone has a 9/11 story.




Where were you on 9/11? What were you doing? When did you hear the news? Did you stop and watch the T.V. screen? Did you tune into the radio? Did you ask your neighbors? Did you look up to the clear blue September sky? Did you listen for airplanes? What were you feeling under that heavy weight of silence?

For some, their lives ended on 9/11. And for some, life went on. People moved on. The date changed. Soon after that, the headlines changed. And New York worked to rebuild itself.

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, follows the lives of those Americans who were forced to pick themselves up from the rubble and move on: Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, their son Justin and their friends and family. At first, for me, this book was hard to get into. It’s disjointed and disorienting. It switches through time and space. It’s erratic. It’s surreal. It’s dreamlike. It’s walking through someone else’s dream.

I didn't understand it. I didn't feel like I could relate to it. All of the characters and their experiences seemed so far-off and inaccessible to me. Then it hit me at chapter five of part one (p.71-73):
 

"He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings'. Any idea why?"

"They're searching the skies."

"For what?"

"Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl."

...

"Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?"

"Just once. He wasn't supposed to tell anyone."

"What was he hearing?"

"He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying Bin Laden."

"The kid slipped. He let the name slip. He told me the planes were a secret. I'm not supposed to tell anyone the three of them are up there on the twenty-seventh floor."

It took the kids in this book to bring into a vague sense of understanding for me. We talked about it in class on Tuesday: that the novel, in its disjunctive structure is only imitating the mentality of a nation under attack. Its hard to make sense of an act so tragically senseless. Especially for young minds.

And it rings true through all Americans. All of us, metaphorically, had to pick ourselves up from the rubble and move on. When I read that passage, I thought of myself nine years ago: I was eleven years old. Entering the sixth grade. School closed. The atmosphere in my neighborhood was oddly silent. No planes overhead. My mom was fixated on the television screen and we watched it together in the semi-darkness of the basement: those stark, grim images. I've heard that we've been dubbed the 9/11 Generation. Funny to think that our lives could be defined by that one day. Sitting there on the couch, none of it made sense to eleven-year-old me. I'm twenty years old and I still don't have all the answers. Probably, not much more than the questions that I started out with.

And that is what DeLillo is trying to do is not so much provide us answers, but relate to us through our unanswered questions.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003215,00.html

Newsflash, Jerk: You're not Funny.

Look at these two images. Which one is funny? Are either one of them funny?

It's a touchy subject: making light of or even flat out making fun of an event or situation that was clearly never funny. In class, we talked about this subject in terms of Hurricane Katrina and The Boondocks episode "Invasion of the Katrinians" (the comic strip equivalent depicted to the left) and the attacks on 9/11 and this demotivational poster (depicted to the right).

In The Boondocks episode, originally aired two years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Grandad's second-cousin Jericho and his family from New Orleans take up residence in the Freeman house, having been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Freeman's hospitality quickly runs out as the N'awleaneans take over the house: racking up their bills, eating their food, breaking their possessions, and using the tragedy as a guilt-trip over the Freemans. Jericho reassures them that he is to receive a check from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), money that mysteriously never seems to appear.

The episode is pretty funny, but as the series typically does, it raises underlying questions of racial stereotyping and humor. How far is too far to be funny? "The Invasion of the Katrinians" episode depicts the Katrina refugees as lazy, manipulative moochers. They use the tragedy and the inherent racism in the event to perpetuate themselves as victims needing of taking care of. We can laugh at it up here in New England five years later, but I can't imagine Katrina refugees finding that episode very funny three years ago.

Now, alternatively, we also discussed as a class the controversial significance of the "Falling Man" photograph. The photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, depicts a man of falling from the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41:15 a.m. on 9/11. Why do we shy away from these suicides? Can they even be labeled as suicides considering the circumstances? And if not, why do we as a society still yet to this day associate them with the negative connotations of a typical suicide? What is it about a real death immortalized on film that raises such emotions?

If the raw photograph wasn't controversial enough, images on the Internet (colloquially referred to as demotivational posters) have started surfacing very blatantly making fun of the jumpers off the World Trade Center. Classy, guy.

Someone in the class tried to justify these images, saying, "Well, the person who made this image, they come from a younger generation- so its harder for them to fully comprehend the ramifications of their actions."

So? I didn't live to see the Holocaust, but an anonymously-posted internet comic turning the phrase into "LOLocaust" doesn't exactly tickle my funny bone. Its like saying idiots should get a free pass because they're young, a preteen, maybe twelve or eleven years old. When I was eleven years old, I saw the World Trade Center topple into dust before my eyes, before I even knew what the World Trade Center was. So maybe they should know, if they don't already. 9/11 isn't funny.

I'm not suggesting we subject another generation to the same thing -it was a traumatic day for us all- but what I'm saying is that children are more resilient than we realize at times. They don't need to know the nitty-gritty. They don't need to know the details. They don't need to see the falling man to know that 9/11 was a big deal and that its impacted our daily lives and the way we look at the world. But maybe they should know the 9/11 happened. When they are asked what day it is, they should be able to say, "Its September 11th. Its a day to remember and memorialize the people that died."

So think about it. Think about these two instances. Why is The Boondocks episode funny? Why is the falling man not funny? Do you agree? Can we ever move far enough from these tragedies to laugh about them? Can these events ever be funny?

"As God is my witness… they’re not gonna lick me!"

I picked up 1 Dead in Attic on my backyard porch at my family’s house over Labor Day Weekend and I was struck by irony at the first date chronologically in the book.

9/6/2005.

I had forgotten that five years ago on this date, New Orleans had been wiped out to rank-smelling flooded streets by Hurricane Katrina. How so suddenly, in a matter of hours, the city was swarmed with controversial governmental (in)actions, racism, crime and tragedy.

And ongoing tragedy. We saw our television screens swarmed with image after despondent image of toppled buildings, keeled over streetlights, looters and families alike wading through waist-high water. Cars, appliances, toys, living breathing bodies, dead unmoving bodies, people, their homes and everything they ever owned carried down the hurricane current.

Over 1300 miles away in dry, stable New Hampshire, we could turn the television set off and I think that’s what made the difference. Those images: the mourning people, the destroyed places, the loss, were detached from the rest of America. Sure, we empathized with New Orleaneans, shook our heads at an inadequate federal government, and sighed at the homeless hundreds huddled outside the Superdome, but we could turn those images off. And in the end, the t.v. always got turned off at my house. For the most of us, everyday life moved on uninterrupted.

Five years later, I’m sitting on my backyard porch on Labor Day weekend, the smell of charcoal barbecues, and warm, balmy sun and the post-Katrina devastation seems worlds away as it did in 2005.

Chris Rose brings a post-Katrina New Orleans to readers of his book in a strong, startling way. His memoir, a collection of columns from the Times-Picayune local newspaper, he depicts post-Katrina life in and outside of New Orleans. While his off-kilter humor and accessible down-to-earth personality, makes his columns easy reading even when the material he deals with isn’t, I’m interested in Chris Rose’s frame as a writer.

Frame and fact is something we’ve been talking about in class the question I raised for debate on the class blackboard is this: What is Chris Rose’s frame? How does his life in Uptown versus the more devastated parts of New Orleans? His family is safe and secure in upscale suburban Maryland, his house is intact, his journalist job is still there, and the tragedies of post-Katrina life in the Gulf leave him seemingly unscathed for the most part. How would a man who lost his wife and children, his home, his job, feel about these columns?

How would Thomas Coleman at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in the 8^th Ward feel? It seems to me, Chris Rose had it easy.

Two columns that alternatively caught my breath and made me laugh were “Despair” dated 12/6/05 and “The Cat Lady” dated 9/29/05.

“Despair” follows the unfortunate/tragic events of an unnamed New Orleanean girl displaced from home. “She had a nice house in Old Metairie, a nice car, a great job, a good man who loved her, and a wedding date in October. A good life.” The girl fled to Atlanta with her fiancé when the hurricane hit, but came back to rebuild her life in the devastated city. She had lost everything and she eventually lost her fiancé when he committed suicide. I gasped aloud when I read about their suicide pact. But she stayed and willed on. I think it speaks a lot to the resilience of the city and its people. Having lost everything, all anyone would be expected to do is leave the pieces and move on. But not this girl, certainly not a New Orleanean girl.

The column “The Cat Lady” …well, I think the title pretty is self-explanatory. It follows the kooky character Ellen Montgomery and her “babies”: that is, 34 cats. She paints abstracts and floral landscapes. She reads The Journal of Beatrix Potter. She drinks coffee in the morning. Her house is falling into disarray and her 30-something cats were prowling around her house. She has been hiding out from the National Guard for weeks. “I felt like a Confederate spy in enemy territory,” she says. A “Gone-With-the-Wind” belle if I ever heard of one.

I think these two women really embody the resilience we talked about in class. The resilience of the city and it’s people. Scarlett O’Hara ain’t got nothing on these ladies.