What war?
When I thought, while watching the new Girls Aloud video, “I wasn’t expecting that white phosphorous imagery,” I filed it away as the sort of trivial and rather bad taste joke twitter is made for. But the more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed. Is it a kind of return of the repressed, the appearence, out of context, of the images of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that don’t appear in the media? Except it’s not really true to say that these wars don’t appear in the media; most days there’s something or other about them (the other day on the local news there was some nauseating bullshit about a parade being held for a returning soldier from one of the suburbs round here). Yet every time I hear about these wars, I’m kind of surprised they’re still happening. Somehow (and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this), I can’t keep the idea of war in focus. I suspect this will need to be changed if we’re going to bring these wars to an end, but I’m at a loss as to how. But clearly representation in the news media isn’t enough, it’s somehow too compartmentalized; perhaps the ocassional leakage of war-related imagery where it’s not expected is somehow helpful here.