Here he goes again. He’s sending 20,000 more over there. Congress may veto, but he’ll stomp on that. And then it’s unlikely Congress will have the 2/3 they need to counterstomp. So more Americans and innocent Iraqis will die. Because of one man’s hubris and greed.
Photographer Jean-Christian Bourcart is under the impression that Americans don’t care enough about Iraqi casualties. He’s absolutely right.
In a powerful series of photographs he’s called Collateral, he brings the reality of Iraqi casualties direct to you in the safety and comfort of your living rooms.
Here is Jean-Christian’s moving description of his project:
I projected photographs of mutilated and dead Iraqis on American houses, supermarkets, churches, and parking lots. I was thinking of this new generation of kids who will be traumatized for life by growing up during wartime. It was a desperate gesture: my personal protest for the lack of interest for the non-american victims.
I found the images on the web. Some American soldiers post their own pictures on a website. They would show a cut leg with the caption: “where’s da rest of my shit?” Or a blown up head with the caption: “need a hair cut” .
I could not help thinking of those images as some kind of restless ghosts that endlessly wander in the intermediate level of the web. I took care of them like a embalmer would; downloading, revamping, printing, rephotographiing, then projecting them as if I was looking for a place where they would rest in peace and at the same time haunt those who pretend not to know what was going on.
Americans give supporting the troops a lot of lip service. I fail to see how sending them to war in the first place is supporting them. Even the ones who make it home will be damaged for life; they will have lost part of their humanity forever, as you can see by the sadistic captions they add to the images they put online.
But they’re not the only ones we should care about. By re-electing George Bush, by allowing their representatives to vote in favor of the Iraq resolution, because of their criminal apathy, Americans bear responsibility not only for robbing their own sons and daughters of their lives, limbs, and humanity, but also for destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of regular people who were guilty of nothing more than living, loving, laughing… For what?
America, how dare you? Don’t you ever let this happen again. Wake up and start paying attention to what that psycopath who runs the country is saying about Iran. Get out of your La-Z-Boys and start making noise.
Blind spot: Before you start picking a presidential candidate, see which of your Democratic representatives voted in favor of the Iraq resolution. Then watch them work out; backpeddling can be really good exercise. Here are a few favorites who voted in favor of the Iraq resolution back when there was something they could have done about it: Hillary Clinton. John Kerry. Evan Bayh. Joe Biden. John Edwards.