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This is a photo of
the web promo for the
Minnesota History Center's
Pulitzer-
prize-winning-photo retrospective. They
were wise to choose one of the few upbeat
images in the exhibit. Most of the winners
since they started in 1942 portray violence,
disaster, and "man's inhumanity to man."
This
one has a violent [unseen] context (POW
returns
from Viet Nam after 6 years in captivity), but
the
emotion in the frozen motion is all joy and
love--
which is what most people want.
When my sister Margaret
commented how so many
of the photos were sad, her
9-year-old son David said,
"But they're important." He
was really into it and read
all the somewhat lengthy
captions of the photos.
Several of the most recent
winners depicted scenes
involving the rape of Iraq,
but unlike prior images
of US military actions
(napalmed
child in Viet Nam
or dead American dragged
through streets of Moga-
dishu), the recent images
presented a more heroic,
sanitized, and romantic
depiction of war--an
unmistakably righteous
portrayal of the USA.
Well, that's the trend.
Politics, propa-
ganda and the
press....
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