My Thursday column begins like so:
Yesterday morning I was making my usual rounds through the blogs when I habitually clicked over to Andrew Sullivan’s site, as I do every day because I dig the insight, variety and brevity of Sullivan’s writing even though I don’t always agree with him.
As I scrolled down through several of Sullivan’s posts there was something about The Simpsons, a Hathos Alert, a post about George Washington and Barack Obama, and then it hit me — a sucker-punch of revulsion, anger and mild nausea at what had, without warning or invitation, appeared on my screen. It was a photograph of three people in what appeared to be a back alley in Iraq during the war: two very sad-looking men, one of whom was carrying a child who could’ve been a boy or a girl and appeared to have been two or three years old. The child was wrapped in a bloody white sheet and he or she was clearly dead, as indicated by the morning sunlight showing through a large, grisly head wound.
Sullivan included this horrifying photograph in a post (WARNING! Death porn!) that served as a tenth anniversary “maxima culpa” for having supported the Iraq invasion and occupation so vocally throughout much of the previous decade. [continue reading here -- no death porn within]