A New Use for the "Sharpie" and the Brevity of Historical Memory

This morning's New York Times included this photo:

Jacob Silberberg/Associated Press

A United States marine writes an identification number on a man
detained Wednesday during a joint assault on Haditha, in western Iraq.

I think of myself as fairly hard-nosed about human affairs. But, seeing this picture early this morning produced immediate revulsion and astonishment.

How could this American soldier not feel that writing ID numbers on people is totally unacceptable and humiliating treatment? How could he not have the forearms of Hitler's death camp victims pop into his mind?

It is not as though there are not any number of other solutions to identifying people available. For example, as we all know from the Abu Ghraib images and countless others from this war, digital cameras are pandemic in the US Military.

You may grouse that I am being too sensitive and refined. Afterall, this is war and things get tough. If you feel this way, my rejoinder to you is: war is in the end about politics.

Combine this sort of imagery with others, like this headline, "Documents Say Detainees Cited Abuse of Koran by Guards: FBI Agents Received Repeated Complaints" on the front page of the same edition of the Times and you might take a different approach.

Class Warfare - the rich continue to win

President Bush is continuing the decades' long triumphant march of the rich to their more absurdly engorged land of wealth "beyond merely filthy rich". His most recent proposal to recalibrate the payout for Social Security reflects the ongoing success of class warfare in America. Under his proposal, those with middle incomes will find their retirement income from Social Security cut by more than 30% while we preserving the income for the poorest sector. Many a tooth is gnashing over this. Barely is it heard that we could solve this "crisis" by simply extending the payroll tax to all income instead of the current maximum of $90,000.

This silence, and the overall vapidness of the response to the manufactured "Social Security crisis", does not surprise. For almost forty years under both Democratic and Republican regimes, the tax burden in the US, both Federal and State has been shifting inexorably and enormously away from corporations and the rich (now super-rich) to the middle class.

As I noted last year in my brief mention of Perfectly Legal: the covert campaign to rig the tax system to benefit the super rich - and cheat everybody else by the New York Time's David Cay Johnston (see the entry for Wednesday 04/14/04 in my photoblog, Year-In-Pictures)
class warfare is alive and well in the US - the only disjuncture - the rich have won!!