There was a great discussion of this last week at on the Media.
A couple of great quotes below...
"PHILIP GOUREVITCH:There is no particular need at this point for the President to hoist his head on a stick and parade it in the street, and that’s what anybody who wants these pictures released is essentially calling for, whether that’s what they believe they would like to see or not."
"PAUL WALDMAN: If you think about the images that get repeated of Osama bin Laden, there are really three that stand out. The first one is him kneeling down and shooting an AK-47. Everybody’s seen that. That displays him as a warrior, engaged in this large epic battle.
The second image, that we've also all seen, is him charging through the mountains of Afghanistan. What that communicates is his cleverness and resilience, and America’s impotence.
The final image, perhaps the one that we see the most often when bin Laden is shown, is him speaking into a microphone. And this shows him as a leader; there’s an implied audience on the other side of that microphone.
I think it would be tremendously useful to replace those images with one that shows a kind of a finality to this whole episode in history. It doesn't have to be the gruesome one of his face with a bullet hole in it. It could be the image of his body being pushed into the sea."
I agree with both men. The reason people are outraged by the Obama administration for not releasing pictures of his body is not because of their desire to have verification of his death, but because of their unnatural obsession with enjoying evidence of violence and gore. Think about it; we live in a generation where horror movies are craved for and video games have themes of violence straight out of hell. The lure of the forbidden makes them desire to see a bullet ridden body. Even though this is Bin Laden we're talking about here, no one should be all excited over a dead body. Have some dignity! Why are we all so violent? :(
ReplyDelete