Monday, May 10, 2004

It becomes more and more obvious to people who are reading about prisoner abuse that these aren't the isolated acts of a few rogues.

The problem is, people aren't reading about this. People are looking at pictures. I'm afraid the pictures may be so powerful that they focus the public's attention too much on the perpetrators, and not enough on the people who formulated the policies and saw to it that they were carried out. "Isolated" still wins overwhelmingly over "systemic" in every poll that asks the public for a judgment on how this all happened.

If narrative doesn't take over from visual imagery soon, the general public is never really going to grasp the truth of what's been going on.

No comments: