© Frank H. Jump
Here is a Sontag quote forwarded to me by David Duckworth who is preparing for a coming lecture [the 2008 National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations Conference] in which Duckworth will “discuss gay artists and the themes of detention and torture in art. I am sharing with you an excerpt from Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”:
“All memory is individual, unreproducible — it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs — the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the astronaut walking on the moon — are the visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed, the triumphalist ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become postage stamps. Fortunately, there is no one signature picture of the Nazi death camps.”
When they (we) executed Saddam Hussein, I was compelled to do a U.S. Commemorative Stamp series on American Torture in the name of democracy and freedom. The stamp design was modeled after Nazi German Propaganda stamps from the 1930s and the images were culled from what was made available on the Internet by the news media. Since the fall of Hussein’s regime- gay and lesbian Iraqis have been systematically hunted down and executed in the streets, their homes and driven into secrecy. There was evidence of religious pluralism and gender tolerance during Hussein’s reign. Here is a glimpse of what is occurring now that Iraq has been “liberated.”
The body of Karar Oda, who was murdered in April 2006 because he was believed to have had an affair with another man. Murdered and set ablaze April 2006, Karar Oda is just one of the many Iraqis dragged from their homes by hooded militia and shot, set on fire or beheaded because they were believed to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. – Gay Lesbian Times 2006
