Jimmy Chen declares DQ on War
[ by Charles Cameron — juxtaposition offers us a potent way to connect “equal but opposite” dots ]
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Jimmy Chen at HTMLGiant captures the griefs and joyful reliefs of war by juxtaposing two war photos that had separately become iconic — and their joint impact is precisely the kind I’m reaching for with my DoubleQuotes. I’ve re-framed them accordingly and slipped them into my DQ format, and here they are:
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In Chen’s own words:
Time may be a sedative, for it’s always harder to know who exactly the bad people were, yet so easy to tell — in the incessant now from which we cannot run — who the bad people are. Either moral clarity diminishes with time, or we simply stop caring, the euphemism being humility. Prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, about a year after Phan Thi Kim Phuc, aged 9, was photographed running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on their own land after it had been occupied by the North.
The specifics of those two photographs may be slowly eroding in memory, as Chen suggests — but I don’t believe their power to evoke joy or grief will fade — and I am grateful to Jimmy Chen for reminding me, once again.
Beautifully.
April 25th, 2013 at 6:14 pm
I noticed Infowars.com had been added to the blogroll (not that a br = endorsement of all views expressed therein, much like a retweet). I predict this site’s comment threads to be swarmed with pro-Establishment sock puppets denouncing the hated Becks and Jones in the not so distant future as a consequence.
April 25th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Alex Jones is an entertainer. Some of what he offers is pure lunacy or trolling for traffic and others are factual exposure of thuggish behavior by TSA and other government operatives. As he can force the USG and MSM to periodically respond to his charges, he’s worth noting along with ppl like Sy Hersh and Yossef Bodansky who are also not very credible yet periodically find something important, so you stop and read them
April 25th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Like the Curate’s Egg?
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So glad to have a decent excuse to use this!
April 26th, 2013 at 9:59 am
That’s a fair and balanced description of Brother Alex, I’ll take it.
On the topic of alternate if not fringe media, I personally thought DoD choosing Colorado for a visit of Russian paratroopers last year was pure, deliberate trolling of the fringes i.e. give them the location where “Red Dawn” was set and watch heads explode predicting the imminent Russian/blue helmet invasion. Would be just like BigSis to do that!
Of course the Russians went on their way but the point remains it could’ve as easily been Ft. Bragg or a number of other huge bases but they had to choose an Army base in Colorado — maybe for the ‘similarities’ to Afghanistan’s mountains?
April 26th, 2013 at 10:00 am
It seems Brother Beck got aspects of the Saudi kid’s story wrong but the virulence of the Christian Science Monitor denouncing his story seems out of character for them. And they had to downplay this kid’s Saudi royal ties or alleged Gitmo inmate cousins cuz there were pics of the First Lady meeting him in the hospital.