The Shape of Days

I know I’ve been writing a lot about Steven Vincent lately. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the simple truth is that the man writes beautifully. He manages to be idealistic and unsentimental at the same time. That’s a trait for which I’ve always striven in my own writing. Whether I’ve ever succeeded or not is up for debate, but at least I’ve learned to recognize it when I see it.

One of his latest is an article titled “Politics of Grief.”

What the image doesn’t—and can’t—convey is why her husband died, for what purpose.  Photography—the visual media in general—is ill-suited for conveying the abstract thoughts and concepts that provide context for images.  The once-living soldier’s face, the flag-draped coffin, the brave war widow make us feel profound worlds of grief, but beyond that grief there is no narrative, no meaning.  Like a fetish, the image constantly returns attention to itself.

Opponents of the war know this.  They seek to decouple the conflict in Iraq from a larger narrative that might provide meaning to soldiers’ deaths.

He’s right, of course. Photography, as powerful a medium as it is, can’t tell the whole story. With a photograph we can say that a soldier died. We can even say that he left a family behind. But it’s so much harder to say why he died, whether his death was for a just cause or a waste of life.

There are those who believe that war is never justified. There are those who believe that no cause is worth killing for, no cause worth dying for. I respect these people, I really do, but I think they’ve got their heads in the sand. To paraphrase George Orwell, they’re able to chant “no war” only because soldiers in generations past have fought and died that we might be free.

This isn’t really Steven’s point; he writes at great length about his disgust — I don’t think “disgust” is too strong a word to describe it — at the extent to which the anti-war movement has politicized grief and loss. You should go read what he says. But even more, you should go read what “Sharon,” the mother of a soldier serving in Iraq, has to say about the subject. Her comment is the third one from the top, below Steven’s article.

I generally think that worthy opinions can be found all around us, and that it’s rare that one person’s opinion is just intrinsically worth more than somebody else’s. But this is one of those exceptions. I’m more interested in hearing what the mother of a soldier has to say about the war than I am in what Michael Moore has to say about it.

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