I've been at a public lecture on water and Adelaide's future by Peter Cullen at the Adelaide Town Hall. Since I have little time to post I will pick up where I left off with the previous post.
If you recall Sontag was talking about the meaning of these photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib prison. We left the post at the point where she had observed that "the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun."
Sontag then builds on this by spelling how what this means---the cultural significance of this--- for America as a society. What does understanding photos of torture as fun mean? How do we understand that society that accepts such photos as fun.
"And this idea of fun is part of "the true nature and heart of America." It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys...to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence has grown. ....America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sado-masochistic longings ....is now being normalized, by the apostles of the new, bellicose, imperial America, as high spirited prankishness or venting."
She adds:
"Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis who resisted their American liberators. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family."