The Fallout

My little birthday card exercise has served as an excellent reminder that images can in fact start wars. Above, is an incomplete poll conducted by Dr. Veruca Salt this morning. Upon seeing the card - which she found inappropriate, to say the least - she embarked on a mission to collect the opinions of the others in the lab. As you can see, she rallied quite a few to her side.

I admit: I was looking for a fight. What makes it a rash, and incomplete action on my part, was that I did it in a moment of enraged boredom, rather than a moment of outrage. That, and I genuinely find the scene beautiful, in it's own tragic, horribly sad way. Of course I expected a reaction - grumbling, complaints floating around beneath the surface. I assumed I would hear about people's dissatisfaction with my choice of image after the birthday party, and from someone who wouldn't have had such a strong reaction like Raquel, or Jen. But instead, I managed to unintentionally mobilize a vote. The results revealed that 5 out of 8 people found the image "inappropriate"; 2 either didn't care or didn't understand; and 1 person liked it. I won't get into the fact that the question as posed was a biased ("do you think this is appropriate for a birthday card?"); that perhaps a few of those 5 who found it inappropriate might not have thought so before they were asked. I won't get into the fact that while it was perhaps not lovely in the way birthday cards tend to be, it was indeed original, and in my opinion at least, moving.

No, and maybe I shouldn't dwell on the fact that despite entering now into our 3rd year of war, this card has elicited a much more passionate reaction in this group than have the news of roadside bombings, civilian and military casualties left and right, and the blatant violation of our individual privacies. Perhaps the heart, the real pumping sentiment, behind this matter is that the image of a burning oil field was an assault on one of us. It wasn't an abstract statement at the coffee machine criticizing the war, a sad comment about the death of a local soldier, but instead a superimposition of a statement of joy - Happy Birthday! - over the ultimate symbol of human violation in our time.

And I suppose it's naive of me to surprised that so many didn't like it. We don't look for misery and violence, so when it's presented to us I suppose it's only natural to flinch. Had the image not been so arresting in it's vastness - the flames just flicker in a huge cloudless desert (save for the plumes of white cottony smoke), the sky so opaque with its' own blue, I too perhaps would have flinched.

And maybe what happened today is that beauty trumped us all. (Like the corny last line in Peter Jackson's version of King Kong when Jack Black says something to effect of "It was Beauty that killed him.") Well she trumped me. I suppose too that it was my mistake to fall out of context and drink in the part of the scene that I needed to drink - that I wanted to drink - and leave the rest an unaccounted for sludge. Indeed it's the sludge that was sent forth to the group, while I , greedily secreted the beautiful froth for myself.