Class today--reading smiles, reading graffiti

Hey all:


Okay let's get right into it: a smiling American woman standing over the dead body of Manadel al-Jamadi.



The photograph, taken by a man who would also appear with his thumb up, is damning evidence. Horrific evidence. These are the images that stick with me when I think of Abu Graib. The photos that rocked many of us sitting in our comfy seats in America and raised many questions that echoed questions raised during the My Lai massacre--how could American soldiers do this? In fact, if you read through my blog, I actually forgot that this article by Erol Morris was about Sabrina Harman and instead I thought it was about Lyndee England because she became the face of the scenes that unfolded in this prison. Amazing how the mind works like that.



But let';s get back to the photo--here is a woman giving the thumbs up sign over a dead body. The immediate response (and here I am paraphrasing the article) is e a to feel horrified by the image and to put the blame on the woman doing the smiling. How could someone do this? She must be a "bad apple"; a rogue soldier who probably has mental issues. The army needs to court martial her (which they tried to do) and get rid of her. Strip her of her rank and privileges. She is a black mark on the name of the army.



Hold on, says Errol Morris. Wait a second--did you look at the photo? The photo shows a smiling woman, yes, but what it actually shows is a murder as well (and here, I suspect, some of you may question Morris's assumptions)? The smile was perfunctory--she did not mean it and Morris then pulls out all the stops; let's look at the "evidence" and has intelligent men who spend their whole lives investigating smiles (how do you get that gig?) saying without a shadow of a doubt that Harman wasn't smiling out of enjoyment but was actually smiling because this was what you are supposed to do when taking a picture. In fact, Harman was not happy but was disgusted by the death of the prisoner as well as (and this is the way I read it) that she was lied to by her commanding officers. And so the photos, which broke the whole case open, is more about what happened to al-Jamadi before the photos were taken instead of the actual photos.



And so Morris, in what I think is a well documented case, tries to find out what happens. And as he sifts through all this material, he says the government is "guilty" of fuzzing it up; meaning, there is so much information that the truth is buried in the mounds of paperwork. There is no "answer"; no "truth" and so he returns back to what he can find out and that is the photograph. And he says that the reason why it is so disturbing is NOT the dead body per se but the fact that she is smiling is what makes it horrific--a combination of disgust and terror. When we see her smile, we also want to smile (it's automatic) but when we see the dead man we recoil in horror; and therefore put the blame on her instead of the people who killed him.



But all of this article which I hope we talk about in some detail today is connected to this issue of torture--which is of course what we talked about last week and what I feel is the undercurrent behind THE PILLOWMAN in the first place. But what is torture? Let's define this in class. And what does a storyteller have to do with the whole thing--how do stories, in fact, offer more resistance to a totalitarian government than the actual murders as well? Let's get into this as well.





Here are some film clips from Standard Operating Procedure, the documentary that Errol Morris did in connection with this Op-ed piece.



Megan Graner



U.S. Soldier



Sabrina Harman





Okay, after we talk about this article, I then want to move the discussion to the way that you read this piece. I want to hear your discussion of your reading practices. Did you click on the footnotes? Did you read some of the excerpts? Did you read where the clicks took you? This is important; I really want us to be more conscious of the way we read.



Then I would like to move to Graffiti. Time is running out before class so I want to just load some pictures up and then we can talk about in in class.....