In Pleasantville - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sylvia Lawson
"We don't get it"
Meanwhile, certain images of Iraqi victims did appear, by accident, from the Abu Ghraib prison. Those, Sontag had written in The New York Times, would be the images most likely to be retained from America's war. She assaulted the authorities for trying to dodge the charge of torture, to blot out the word; she foretold that:
... the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans ...
and foretold also that, from mid-2004 on, the authorities would be making great efforts to ensure that other, similar photographs from Iraq wouldn't get around, since:
After all, we're at war. [But]... In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words.
There she turned back on her own tracks. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she had both affirmed and questioned the power of the photographic image, arguing with her own earlier essay "On Photography". Yes, memory is visual; yes, photography has brought the realities of war closer, ever since its first employment in the American Civil War; but no, photographs can't tell you what it's really like. "We don't get it. Can't tell, can't imagine."
The later essay, published in The New York Times seven months before her death, was headed "Regarding the Torture of Others". Here, whatever the acknowledged limits of photography, there was no evading the stark evidence. The pictures from Abu Ghraib were taken with the soldiers' own digital cameras; for the young men and women on duty in the jail, capturing the prisoners' humiliation was part of the fun – a major part, Sontag thought; it was all horseplay. They were brutally ignorant of their victims' culture, and seemingly quite uninstructed on issues of human rights.
The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush Administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions ...
In the same way, the Australian Government's active complicity is not an aberration. In the country of broken promises, it's simple: there's the tight circle of people who matter, and then there are the vast, faceless populations who don't.
The heat in the kitchen
One of my friends got up to mischief. Having done her duty, making a modest donation to the tsunami appeal through the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, she asked the person on the phone desk how she could donate to a fund for the survivors of bombing in Iraq. She was told they'd ring her back. After a few days, the message came through: she must ring the Red Cross. She then rang round the other principal agencies to find that donations to the tsunami victims could be put through. Donations to the war victims in Iraq? I'm sorry, I'm not sure about that; we'll have to get back to you.
Fired up, she chased around the websites and found that a bit of Australian public money does find its way to Iraq. There are funds channelled through the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the World Food Programme, UNHCR and UNICEF. Humanitarian work goes on. "But," she said, "people are so dim about it. You'd think we'd all forgotten that we tried to stop the war."
Two hundred thousand marched through Sydney, hundreds of thousands more around Australia; ten million or more round the world. It was a good day, February 16, 2003, the biggest turnout since Vietnam, one of those times of which people will say that they saw just about everyone they'd ever known.
Then, somehow, our world became docile and forgot. Energy drained away; this is Pleasantville where, as the little man notoriously said, we should be relaxed and comfortable.
We were back in that kitchen, all talking about nothing very much, when the household's visiting cousin joined us, here on holiday from the US. She, as a guest making friends, had brought some really classy wine – several bottles – and we were cheerfully into it; tongues loosened, cautious politeness dissolved. That was the awful thing, we said later, it was her wine.
The TV news came on, and there was Bush again talking democracy and freedom. One of us had the latest from the costofwar and iraqbodycount websites, and we got into a rave about hypocrisy, about who really had the WMDs in monster stockpiles, about children dying under coalition bombs, about ...
I turned to the guest, to make sure she felt included. As we drew breath she cut in, quiet, precise and angry: "What I hate about all this is that you sit there just assuming that I'm with you, you assume my agreement, and you don't bother to find out where I'm coming from at all."
There was a beat. OK, we said, so tell us.
She did. She said there was no equivalence between the victims of 9/11 and those of the coalition's bombing in Iraq. She said that if that was what it took to get rid of Saddam then that was it, it was war, like the German citizens who got killed while the Allies defeated Hitler and Nazism. Saddam was every bit as evil. She had the stats on the Shi'ite villages he'd mown down, the numbers of the Kurds he'd gassed, the surveillance of ordinary citizens.
One mouth opened then to remind her that all this was done with Western backing and Western hardware. Another opened to say that while Saddam was undoubtedly an evil tyrant, he wasn't the author of 9/11. Both closed helplessly as the guest – speaking with a gentle, lucid control that was scary enough in itself – gave none of us a nanosecond's chance.
She wound up: "I'm married to an American. I live there. Nine-eleven happened, it really happened, do you understand? And you talk as though there should be no damn consequences. And you insult me, talking as though I'd just fall into line with damn ignorant Australian peaceniks.
"Excuse me," she said to her cousin. "I want out of here. I'll be back." Without a blink toward the rest of us, she left.
We sat silent, ignominious, craven, the half-bottles of pinot noir standing round. We said sorry to her cousin, our friend, who shrugged, and waved the whole event gently aside; her body language said: this is the world, all this has happened before.
She saw us out: "Reality check, huh?"
Check. Each of us, silently, mulled over what she wished she could have said, and thought: but who'd be listening? ♦