Dead Americans

Someone called Plutonium Page over at Daily Kos wants to see more dead and dying American soldiers in the media.

We all know that the true cost of the Iraq war is downplayed by the American media, both in print and in photos. Today, the LA Times reports their findings regarding photojournalism during the Iraq war.

The report claims, "A review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period found almost no pictures from the war zone of Americans killed in action. During that time, 559 Americans and Western allies died. The same publications ran 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during that same time."

She writes,

Obviously, the reasons are complex. The article mentions that some imbedded photojournalists have been censored by the military units with whom they are associated; they are often told to turn off their cameras. Also, many of the pictures can't be published due to privacy reasons, namely if the soldier's identity can be recognized. Also, some photos are deemed too graphic to publish.

But she offers no further comment, and doesn't even bothering to inform us whether she regards these as legitimate reasons or not -- and if they are legitimate, how she expects things to be otherwise in the press.

The cry for more American blood in the media goes back to the beginning of the war on terror. She doesn't say how many pictures of dead Americans would satisfy her thirst for them. Nor does she say how many pictures of rape victims -- or actual rapes -- she wants to see in her newspaper. (Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.) Nor does she say how many of the 42,000 or so annual highway fatalities in the U.S. she wants to see in bloody hunks of meat in the pages of her local newspapers.

But it's unfair of me to say she wants to see these dead and dying U.S. soldiers. Their point, to her, is to teach the unenlightened "the true cost of the Iraq war." But "we" (she and the other Kos Kids) already know that cost, according to her. So it's to enlighten the ignorant red-state booboisie, who somehow didn't get the message, even after Michael Moore's Cannes-approved juggernaut painted it all over their hometown screens.

The attitude reminds me of the people who want to put pictures of aborted fetuses on picket signs, billboards, and even in family newspapers, so the rest of us can be persuaded to their position on this issue by an exposure to the "true cost" of abortion. After all, a soldier in Iraq volunteers to enlist, and knows the risks. The abortion opponents will remind us the pill of flesh in his picture had no choice.

The job of a free press is to inform citizens and to tell as much of the truth as it can through authentic reporting, while minimizing the harm caused by truth-baring. It's a tight-rope act some days, and graphic photos present that challenge in its starkest form. Just because you're the media, doesn't mean you print everything. Hometown newspapers have standards. You don't print names of child rape victims, for instance. You deprive your public of that much of the truth for a greater good.

At least one of the photographers quoted in the L.A. Times story agrees with "Plutonium Page."

"There can be horrible images, but war is horrible and we need to understand that," said Chris Hondros, a veteran war photographer whose pictures are distributed by the Getty Images agency. "I think if we are going to start a war, we ought to be willing to show the consequences of that war."

Note, again, the odd pronomial shift of "we" to mean "you," a grammatical development that seems to be peculiar to the Michael Moore fringe of the anti-war left. Note, too, the twist in the moral certainty of his committment to gore. "If we are going to start a war ..." but what about the wars we didn't start? Do you not show the consequences of World War II, say? No Hiroshima pictures for Chris?

Some other aspects of the LA Times article Page omitted from her post were the fact that the papers it studied "have focused on covering memorial services for soldiers and stories about grieving families." Even to being excessive, in the judgement of some Americans, in playing up the dead and ignoring the living soldiers.

On more than a dozen occasions, the Washington Post opened full pages inside the newspaper to print "Faces of the Fallen," with hundreds of portraits of those killed. The New York Times packed similar images into a single edition when the U.S. death toll reached 1,000. Newsweek ran a large color spread on a tank soldier weeping over the death of a crewmate.

The pictures of smiling young men and women, alive in their uniforms, in the hands of blank-faced and sorrowing family members. The pictures of weeping widows holding the folded flag, with uncomprehending toddlers sitting beside them. These seem to me to drive home the price of a war, and to honor the sacrifice of the dead, far more than pictures of mangled bodies, which only make me angry at the editor who published them.

But it's not pathos that Page is after. It's not reinforced appreciation for the veterans and the slain. She wants death and dismemberment. Nobody's more bloodthirsty than a pacifist, when there's a point to be made.

The article also reports on an AP-sponsored survey of newspaper readers about pictures from the battlefield that showed that, even if "Page" gets her wish and forces all Bush-voters to stare at pictures of American casualties, not all of them will instantly swing around to her political ideology.

In the unscientific survey, 59% of the readers said they would have published the Babbitt photo [showing a mortally wounded American soldier in Iraq].

"This doesn't tell me we shouldn't be there," reader Rose Barnett of Jacksonville, Fla., said of the photo. "This tells me that this was a brave and kind man to lay his life down for the freedom of others. God rest his soul."

Which agrees nicely with another quote from the story: Fred Nelson, a photo editor at the Seattle Times, said, "[o]ur readers are incredibly intelligent. And I think they can figure it out without us sticking a photo of a bloody body in their face every time it happens."

But at Kos, they don't see us that way. And they wonder why we don't listen when they tell us how to vote.

Wishful Thinking

Strange experience of the week was checking the traffic on one of my Web sites and finding it drawing hits from left-of-left "Daily Kos" blog. Specifically this post, from someone called Armando, in which he further pushes his notion that the Democrats should base their game plan on Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign.

My sites are not particularly political (that is, they don't address the kind of current issues that usually absorb Kossites), but they do have a point of view. The link that was sending traffic my way was from the comments section, not the post.

[Also in the comments were deep thoughts like this:

Four decades ago the far right began killing off the leading lights of the Democratic party. JFK, RFK, MLK. That resulted in the disastrous 1968 election, and left us in disarray. I would argue that we haven't fully emerged from that devastation.

Phew. Reminds me why I tend to stay away from blogs like that. I want to keep my faith that most people who disagree with me on any political issue are essentially sane, coherent, and living, if not on the same planet I am, at least in the inner solar system.]

I did Armando the courtesy of reading and considering his argument. Even though he didn't give me a link, he indirectly opened one up, and I felt some small obligation.

It turns out to be a historical twist on the "focus on the progressive hard core, the hell with building bridges to Kansas" argument in the debate over the future of the Democrats.

Armando seems to know that Lincoln won the White House in 1860 with a mere 39 percent of the popular vote and without a single Southern electoral vote. That's a slightly worse showing than John Kerry made, and yet Lincoln won. So far, it's hopeful for the Democrats.

Armando invokes Lincoln on the modern question of "branding." He focuses on the Cooper Union Speech, and says the speech is "incendiary and divisive" and had a goal of "demonizing" the South. He says the modern Democrats ought to do what Lincoln did and reverse the charge of "extremism" and say to their opponents (in the presence of fence-sitters), "no, you're the extremists and we represent real values."

So we are left with these stark choices--abandon our values or build a winning strategy with those who can accept and embrace our values. I believe the only choice is to win with our values, to win without the South, as Lincoln did in 1860. And this does not mean a Civil War or even a civil war. We are not their choice, but neither are we so abhorrent [as they are? As Lincoln was to them? Who knows? --ed.]. And that is progress.

Well, good luck with that. But it goes right down the toilet the moment you wake up and realize it's not 1860 anymore. Someone's been staring too hard at that blue-red map from the last election, with the Union-CSA overlay, and hasn't bothered to check the numbers behind it.

Compare the electoral votes in the 33 states that then comprised the Union in Lincoln's first election to the modern map.

The enormous imbalance in (white) population between North and South allowed the 1860 Republicans to pursue a regional strategy. New York had 12 percent of the nation's electoral votes. Pennsylvania had another 9 percent and Ohio almost 8 percent. Three contiguous states with similar demographics ate up almost a third of the electoral votes.

Nowadays, only four states (California, New York, Florida, and Texas) have more than 5 percent of the electoral votes, and their demographics and pet issues, both within their boundaries and among one another, are far more scattered than were those of the key states of 1860.

But the biggest difference is the 303 total electoral votes Lincoln had to work with, compared to 538 today. The big gray space between Iowa and California on the 1860 map now is filled in with states, and votes.

And red. Of the seventeen stars that weren't on the flag in 1860, all but two of them (Washington and Hawaii) went Republican in 2004. The bulk of them are untouchably red -- states like Idaho and Utah and Kansas. That region of the country has inherited much of the orneriness of the old South, its gut-level preference for self-sufficiency (complicated by its dependence on certain government protections), and its reflexive suspicion of do-gooder social engineers from Northeastern college towns.

Lincoln wasn't chosen by his party because he was inflammatory. William H. Seward was the inflammatory Republican that year, as well as the most famous man in the party. He was the "base" candidate. But the Republicans -- not just the party bosses, but the rank and file -- had been studying this one hard since 1856, and they knew how many votes they needed to swing in three crucial Northern border states -- Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois -- that cared little for abolitionists.

Why did it work in 1860? Because the Republican party of 1860 had pored over election returns for six years, and it knew what it had to do to win. Lincoln counted on his abolitionist base in New England, wrote off the South, and appealed to local interests (textile tariff in Pennsylvania, railroads in the Midwest) in the few swing states he needed to win. His rhetoric was carefully anti-Southern, but not anti-slavery.

The Republicans of 1860 had a strategy to win the election by playing the electoral college numbers game. Modern Democrats like Armando who wish to take that as an inspiration are grasping at historical straws. They haven't done the math. Apparently, they haven't even looked at the map.

I read some more by Armando. I wasn't impressed. This longish excursion into Lincoln-land was atypical. More characteristic is his post in which he quotes three paragraphs of Thomas Friedman, and then writes, "Fuck you Friedman. Here we go again, you know what is right and we anti-Iraq Debacle folks are just naive. Fuck you." End of post.

Some Bush-backers no doubt will gleefully watch the Democrats hold the historical map upside down, misread it, and steer themselves right down the highway to oblivion (Lincoln would have called it "Salt River"). But I'm among those who genuinely like a choice in my elections, and I am sorry to see a party retreat into this hopeless minoritarian mentality.