I thought Johnny Cash brought a considerable and rather miraculous
dignity to what I'd always considered an inherently laughable bit of
Reznorism (every modern-day miserabilist who proclaims that pain is
the only reality owes a debt to NiN). But it seemed to me as if a
passing propagandist had picked up on the phrase "empire of dirt",
thought to himself, "yes! how apt!", and hied himself briskly and in
feverish excitement to his iMac. One quick search for "Iraq war" on
Google Images later, and Noam's your uncle.
I do rather particularly disagree with the obsessive focus on images
of Bush, making him the central figure in an iconography of
recrimination. Yes, he's a godawful strutting dickhead and his
administration is the worst thing that's happened to America since
Reagan (I was about to say "in my lifetime", but then I thought back a
bit and realised it wasn't so). But you could juxtapose images of
Clinton looking smug with images of the carnage occasioned by some of
his administration's military operations, and you know what, it just
wouldn't fly in the same way. Why not? Carnage is carnage; a smirk is
a smirk. I think it's dangerously stupid to focus on Bush in this way:
it hardens the hearts of those who sympathise with his persona against
any cogent criticism of his actions.
(So too the continual recycling of scare stories about what a bunch of
addled fundamentalist nut-jobs his supporters are. I'm prepared to bet
that if you asked all the people who responded to that survey about
belief in the divine authorship and literal truth of the Bible a few
carefully-worded questions about a couple of other things, you'd find
that their answers contradicted each other pretty sharply. Affirming
the divine origin, inerrancy and literal truth of the Bible is pretty
much a matter of social politeness in some circles: a default position
for those who aren't especially strongly-minded about such things).
Dominic
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