We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia
Tami Silicio, whose photo of flag-draped coffins ("transfer tubes" in military parlance) in the interior of a C-5 provided Americans with their first view, after over a year of fighting, of rows of the deceased, has been fired.
You cross the famiglia, you pay.
God forbid that we should see that there are consequences, paid in blood, of Bush's Vanity War.
Not surprisingly, the Bush people's antics bring to mind Orwell's 1984:
"About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of The Times of about ten years earlier -- the top half of the page, so that it included the date -- and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known."
(Emphasis added)
Naturally, Cheney, Rummy the Idiot, and Ashcroft (R-Choad) want photos like Ms. Silicio's to go down the memory hole; better yet, they'd prefer not to have them exist in the first place.
So this woman and her husband have lost their jobs because she dared to take a picture. She received no money for her submission, and her only stated intent was to let people back home see that the remains of their loved ones were attended to carefully.
I'm kind of cynical, but I get the impression that Rove and his gang wouldn't have ordered her fired if there had been an overwhelmingly negative response to the pictures, instead of the positive one received at the Seattle Times.
NOTE: Edited for spelling.
Tami Silicio, whose photo of flag-draped coffins ("transfer tubes" in military parlance) in the interior of a C-5 provided Americans with their first view, after over a year of fighting, of rows of the deceased, has been fired.
You cross the famiglia, you pay.
God forbid that we should see that there are consequences, paid in blood, of Bush's Vanity War.
Not surprisingly, the Bush people's antics bring to mind Orwell's 1984:
"About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of The Times of about ten years earlier -- the top half of the page, so that it included the date -- and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known."
(Emphasis added)
Naturally, Cheney, Rummy the Idiot, and Ashcroft (R-Choad) want photos like Ms. Silicio's to go down the memory hole; better yet, they'd prefer not to have them exist in the first place.
So this woman and her husband have lost their jobs because she dared to take a picture. She received no money for her submission, and her only stated intent was to let people back home see that the remains of their loved ones were attended to carefully.
I'm kind of cynical, but I get the impression that Rove and his gang wouldn't have ordered her fired if there had been an overwhelmingly negative response to the pictures, instead of the positive one received at the Seattle Times.
NOTE: Edited for spelling.
posted by Jude at 9:34 AM
