The Civil War was the first war to be extensively chronicled with photography. One would think that just that fact alone would have caused humanity to have chosen other ways to settle disputes. Looking at the dead Civil War soldier in this photograph, we can see no glory. In the picture we don’t see the vainglorious portraits that painters had portrayed war to be for centuries before. This photograph shows war as it is in all its finality, all its brutality, all of its reality.

You see, there is absolutely nothing glamorous about war. Somehow, after the honesty of the photographs of the Civil War, the new medium became the vehicle of obfuscation. From the Spanish-American War, through both World Wars, the powers that were decided that war must be romantic. Soldiers were all good-looking and brave. (We did have Willie and Joe by Bill Maudlin during WW II, but those were drawings and meant to be humorous). Photography, the ultimate truth-teller, was used to lie, to pervert, and to propagandise.

Then, along came the Vietnam War. One day a photographer caught the instant when a South Vietnamese officer blew the brains out of a suspected Viet Cong. The suspect’s hands are tied behind his back. He’s wearing a plaid shirt. It’s not the black pyjamas we were told the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong wore. It’s a very western shirt. To the left of the officer, there’s a South Vietnamese soldier in camies and a helmet. He’s looking at the head of the prisoner and smiling as the bullet finds its target. The officer looks scruffy. His uniform is dishevelled as is his hair. His right arm, the one holding the gun, is strong and his muscles are flexing as he pulls the trigger. We can’t see the bullet, but we know that it’s found its target. The prisoner’s face is twisted in a grimace and the hair on the right side of his head, the side were the bullet has entered, is blown sideways. We are witnessing a man at the instant of his death.

This is war. No niceties here. No civil rights. No attorney. No judge. No jury. Rough justice means a bullet to the brain and you’re dead. This was not John Wayne in the “The Green Berets,” a movie that came out that same year of 1968. Wayne was, of course, playing a caricature of himself by then. But real war and its photographs bore no resemble to Wayne in any of his World War II movies, either. This is the war that ‘they’ talk about when they say is that it’s hell.

This photograph started our 1968. That would be the year that the whole world went mad. Rough justice would be played out on the streets of every country in the industrialised west. There was another photograph, however, that also became emblematic of the war in Viet Nam: it was the image of a naked Vietnamese girl, burning from napalm, running down a country road screaming with other children from her village. Soldiers stand in the background. No one is attempting to help her, to cover her up. She is innocence laid bare to the world, stripped of all dignity in the name of war.

So, the truth could be told with photographs. Since then, no matter how hard the military and various administrations try to suppress it; the truth would manage to get out. At the end of the first Gulf War, we saw a photograph of a highway of death where fleeing Iraqis had been killed in their vehicles. One could almost smell the stench as we looked at the burnt corpses caught in mid-action trying to get out of their burning vehicles. Yes, there were some military vehicles, but there were many more Toyotas, Hondas, etc. These may have been commandeered by the Iraqi military. We’ll never know. Because this is war. This is what war is about. No niceties, no civil rights, no attorney, no judge, no jury.

On this Memorial Day, the 5th since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln: let’s keep our volunteer soldiers in our thoughts and in our hearts. Let’s work to bring them home. Safe. Let’s also keep the Iraqi and Afghan civilians in our hearts and let’s work to be sure that they came get home. Safe.

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And, of course

Some days there’s nothing more to say.
Could it get any worse? Oh, yes.
Will it get any worse? Probably.
Will we survive the Bush administration? Hope so.
Is this the end of life as we know it? Who knows?

But, we do need to take our collective heads out of the sand and face up to what is going on.

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And, of course

Well, go figure the French. They stand in defiance of everything ‘Bush,’ and then turn around elect a man who states frankly that he plans on licking Bush’s boots. If only Ségolène Royal had been willing to say what the French electorate wanted to hear on policy issues . . . But, she wasn’t willing to do that. Yes, she moved to the middle, but she wanted a kinder, gentler France. The French wanted a more modern and productive France.

Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, presented himself as the very essence of a very a very modern American of the western variety. He even posed for photos riding his white horse on a ranch in southern France. He promised to forge closer relations with Washington. Ah Madame France, où est vous?

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Tony “the poodle” Blair is on his way out. The closer Blair got to Bush, the more he was reviled by the British. Now, what will Blair do for the rest of his days? What can he possibly do to change history? The short of it is he can’t and he’s too intelligent to deny that history will write his epitaph.

And yet, intelligence seems to fall by the wayside when hubris corrupts the soul. Hubris has the power to turn intelligent human beings into idiots who have lost the ability to be self-critical. It’s the only thing that can explain how normally reasoning people get caught up in the most egregious kinds of scandals we’ve seen during the Bush administration.

So, now we can only wait to see if M. Sarkozy loses his way. Will he fall prey to the beast called hubris? He appears to have already taken on the role of the new French poodle. However, not even Nicolas Sarkozy will follow the “loyal Bushies” to the chasm, I suspect. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we can hope that he will refrain from calling the French of foreign descent, “scum.”

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and support Kiva.

And, of course

*Mais c’est dur à supporter,
Un salaud préfabriqué
Qu’on habille de votre peau
Et qui porte vos chapeaux.

But it is hard to support,
a prefabricated bastard
Whom one equips with your skin
And which wears your hats.