Michael Moore thinks someone will eventually leak a graphic photo of a Sandy Hook shooting victim's body, and it will have the same impact as the release of other appalling images in the past sixty years:
The year was 1955. Emmett Till was a young African American boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. One day Emmett was seen "flirting" with a white woman in town, and for that he was mutilated and murdered at the age of fourteen....First of all, someone who leaked such a photo without the parents' consent would be hounded out of a job and possibly out of his or her own neighborhood. If a parent did it, Joe and Mika would surely speak for all of us when they'd say that, while they understand this parent's profound sense of grief and anger, surely it would be much too much to expect responsible news outlets to reproduce something so horrible. Every mainstream media outlet would agree, and the taboo would extend to the Gawkers and BuzzFeeds and Wonkettes of the Net world. The photo would remain in the can-you-bear-the-grossout? online ghetto, next to the Daniel Pearl beheading video. You wouldn't be able to see it without searching it out, and most people simply wouldn't.
To the shock of many, his mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral....
"I just wanted the world to see," she said. "I just wanted the world to see."
The world did see, and nothing was ever the same again for the white supremacists of the United States of America....
In March of 1965, the police of Selma, Alabama, brutally beat, hosed and tear-gassed a group of African Americans for simply trying to cross a bridge during a protest march. The nation was shocked by images of blacks viciously maimed and injured....
In March, 1968, U.S. soldiers massacred 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam. A year and a half later, the world finally saw the photographs....
That is why now, after the children's massacre in Newtown, the absolute last thing the National Rifle Association wants out there in the public domain is ANY images of what happened that tragic day.
But I have a prediction. I believe someone in Newtown, Connecticut – a grieving parent, an upset law enforcement officer, a citizen who has seen enough of this carnage in our country – somebody, someday soon, is going to leak the crime scene photos of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. And when the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child's body, that's the day the jig will be up for the NRA. It will be the day the debate on gun control will come to an end. There will be nothing left to argue over. It will just be over. And every sane American will demand action....
And if it did somehow penetrate America's consciousness? If it did generate the same outrage as photos of Emmett Till's body and civil rights marchers being brutalized?
The difference here is that the pro-gun right knows how to push back. Joke all you want about Wayne LaPierre's media skills, half of America now supports putting an armed guard in every school and Americans trust Republicans slightly more than they trust President Obama on guns. So the NRA is messaging about as effectively as it needs to, thank you very much.
If gruesome photos threatened a serious disruption of the gun status quo in America -- i.e., the firearms industry's sky-high sales figures -- the gun lobby and its right-wing media allies would respond, if necessary, by releasing a few brutal images of their own. Violent looting in natural disaster zones? Scary "urban" flash mobs? Images of sexual assault victims on lonely country roads? They'd put out whatever they thought would buttress their argument with their people, and with persuadable heartlanders in the middle. They'd be a lot better at image warfare than the '60s segregationists or the executive branch in the Johnson and Nixon years. So, no, I don't think this would work.
Boy, some days you're a real Debbie Downer, Steve - anyone ever tell you that?
ReplyDeleteThat being said, sadly, I agree with you.
And, after Bush was successful at being able to hide the flag-draped coffins of the dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq from public view, they can use the excuse that the American people are such tender little petunia's, that the least exposure to graphic photographs of the bullet-ridden bodies of dead children, would be just too much for them to bear.
Or, rather, too much for the NRA to allow them to bear.
It's been a disheartening year so far.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to look to far to find photos of what Israeli bullets do to Palestinian babies. If you're into that sort of thing. I agree, it can be disturbing, but I don't think it can be effective. These animals don't give a shit.
ReplyDeleteNo fear...
Some of us have already seen similar images, only they weren't pictures. They are seared into our brains and we see them, sometimes nightly in our dreams.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard enough to see school pictures of smiling young faces because we can so easily 'see' what those pictures from that day will show.
So called "pro-life" advocates like to use graphic images to shock people into supporting their cause. I like to think that people who are advocating for the victims and families of gun violence are above using such gruesome propaganda.
If anyone feels the need to see first hand those kinds of images to convince them of the horrific damage these weapons inflict on the human body they can volunteer in an urban ER on a Saturday night.