“Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people. Vietnamese people, poor people – some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night.” – Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted
I often joke that I became a liberal at about the age of 10, but in fact this is probably pretty accurate. Before the U.S. government decided it wasn’t wise to show its citizens exactly what war was about journalists were right alongside our soldiers in the trenches. Reporters dodged bullets and hollered into their microphones as bombs dropped behind them. Newspapers carried grisly images daily. These images have stuck with me all of my life and most recently I’ve been inspired to use them in my artwork to show others what it was like.
Today we don’t see this. We are allowed only vague descriptions of war, images of our soldiers giving trinkets to the children in countries we are waging war upon, tiny bits of information on soldiers who’ve lost their lives. No blood and guts. No images of violence, but sanitized images that make it easier for the government to sell us these wars.
The newspaper is brown with age but the words there are still crisp and charged with meaning. The images speak for themselves.
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