May 22, 2007
That Curious New Yorker Cover Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Some disconcerting cover art made me reconsider the Star Wars blog I posted last night, which deprecated the power of visual over verbal material. The May 28 New Yorker arrived yesterday, its cover (which you can see here) a painted cartoon of U.S. soldiers hoisting an American flag over what seems to be the chassis of a burnt-out vehicle; I puzzled over this image a bit, and then decided that the flag was being raised over the remains of an Iraqi car bomb, or perhaps a U.S. soft-skinned vehicle destroyed by an IED. The flag is at half staff, which is the symbol of respect for (and mourning of) the dead. The image recalls the famous Rosenthal photo of the flag being hoisted atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, the iconic image of American sacrifice and victory in war. The painting is titled “Half Staff.” What does it mean? My first thought was that it is about the use and abuse of history. The image of sacrifice and triumph in war had been here redeployed to create a context in which there has been much sacrifice but no triumph, so as to argue that perhaps there can be no triumph in Iraq. The memory of the Second World War is sometimes deployed to justify or make sense of the war in Iraq, but this art disputes such a use of memory. Troops can take an almost impregnable mountain if they are prepared to pay the price; in the Second World War, we commonly understand our experience to mean that enough sacrifice took enough mountains, metaphorical and otherwise, and we won. In Iraq the burnt-out car, if Iraqi, may suggest psychological and not physical territory is being contested, i.e., territory that cannot be subdued in similar fashion. The cartoon may argue that we are making a category mistake; this is not a war like that other one, and it cannot come out the same way, which is to say, successfully. The cartoon may mean this without it being true, but the compression the cartoon achieves is remarkable. Millions of words have been deployed to argue that this war is in some fundamental way not at all like that other one, which the cartoon does wordlessly and with greater power. On the other hand, the cartoon may be referencing the recent loss of some American soldiers in a particular ambush, some of whom have disappeared, and who are very probably dead. So the painted flag is at half staff, and real flags should be. The cartoon may be arguing that we have not sufficiently attended to the deaths of our young men, who deserve to be as present to our grieving minds as past soldiers are, around this coming Memorial Day weekend. This is a common trope among both opponents and defenders of the war, for different reasons. The New Yorker, first a cautious defender of the war in Iraq, latterly an opponent, could intend a number of things on that score. As noted above, the cartoon’s possible arguments may be false—for example, the discipline and sacrifice of British soldiers in Northern Ireland eventually defeated a terrorist insurgency there (most terrorist insurgencies waged by ethnic or sectarian minorities in the long run fail, although few fail to enemies as disciplined as the postwar British army, and thus as relatively disinclined to reprisal by atrocity). But in this case, anyway, I have never seen a false verbal argument as quietly powerful and impressive as this possibly false non-verbal argument. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps it is because the argument, while compressed, is also stripped down; its strongest visual element honors and mourns the dead, whereas some verbal argument equivalents do not do that sufficiently persuasively. If a category mistake is here implied, it is done without gloating. In any case, it may be worth remembering that despite the sort of memory the Suribachi flag-raising evokes, the war against Japan did not end in victory because of U.S. sacrifice. It ended because when Japan sought to break its enemies’ will by creating fear via deployment of a weapon even more high tech than the suicide-driven car bomb—the Japanese went in for suicide-piloted plane bombs—the United States decided to inflict exponentially greater terror, which broke Japanese will. In the case of Iraq, this is extremely unlikely to be done by the U.S. What is more likely is that the Shiite majority the Sunni Arab minority seeks to terrify into submission will inflict that crushing counter terror. So if discipline and sacrifice fail in Iraq, and it may, counter terror will again prevail, rather than the terror of our current adversaries. Which doesn’t make that New Yorker cover any less powerful a work of art.
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