Iconic Image Bled To Sell Newspapers.
(click ad for closer look)
Well it's not the first time the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph has been exploited in an ad, and it most certainly won't be the last (Icon exploitation is the American way! Much easier than coming up with an original idea.). FYI, Die Burger (The Citizen) is a daily Afrikaan language paper from South Africa. The image disgusts me; but not nearly as much as the death of 4,000 American men and women in the utterly useless Iraq War does. You? (image via)
update: climatechallenge also exploits the image in their masthead logo. thanks to Hillary Blackerby for the tip. for those of you who don't know, half of the men pictured in the original Iwo Jima photo were later killed in the battle for the island.)
posted by copyranter @ 10:00 AM
13 Comments:
Agreed. Both the image abuse and the war are disgusting. I just spent the holidays with a family member who will make his second appearance in Iraq this Spring. He wondered “where were all the anti-Bush people when this thing got started?” He noted, accurately, that everyone was on board at the start and there seems to be a lot of after-the-fact empty talk about getting the troops home these days, usually in the interest of securing votes or selling books. Or newspapers.
And Die Burger is also the name of a vegetarian magazine.
OK. Probably not.
since the original "iconic" image if not staged (does it take six guys to push a small flag-pole vertical?) was at least used extensively for pro-war propaganda in the first place, I don't feel nearly as disgusted as copyranter does about this version especially as it contains more than just a little grain of truth.
"He noted, accurately, that everyone was on board at the start "
Bull fucking shit!
I was protesting the iraq war in new york along with a couple of hundred other thousand people stuck in bull pens by the cops - and we were all reading people online who were not "on board", and writing on many sites how not "on board" we were.
Your comment is contemptible in its blindness. Go back to the archives of 2002 and look for yourself, you'll find many MANY people bitterly against a headlong rush to action.
Only a pinhead with his tv set to FOX could believe "everyone was on board".
To cleanse your guilt now by saying you were only acting like everyone else was just compounds your error and demands an even greater apology.
People like you are why that prick Kristol gets hired as op/ed in the ny times instead of being thoroughly and publically disgraced for his lies.
Hey, Anon - Here's why we can't have intelligent political debate in this country. If you disagree with me, I am instantly a pinhead, contemptible, blind, and I owe you an apology.
Maybe I should've been more precise in my use of the word "everyone." My brother in law and I were discussing the many pundits and politicians who are now so vocal in their criticisms of the war, citing "we were lied to," as their excuse for the flip-flop. Start with Hillary Clinton - move on to Pat Buchanan. They come from all sides.
For the record, I was against the war, also available in the archives of 2002.
"People like me" see Kristol as a smarmy, dog-faced bag of wind. I also see Olbermann in the same way.
And my TV is set to HBO most of the time, except when that smarmy, dog-faced bag of wind Bill Maher is on.
I'd be disgusted by the picture if it weren't halfway representative of what has been behind the most recent US wars. "Iraqi freedom" my ass.
As has been mentioned before, the original image was not as impromptu and wholesomely heroic as it appears to be.
If you want to avoid being called a pinhead on a message board (which, dammit, has hardly 1% the impact of being called it over a dinner table so quit the fake pain) then tread more carefully than you do. Asserting that there were no voices of dissent prior to the iraq adventure and implying that the voices raised now are just bandwagon jumping opportunists makes people (like me) who saw through this sham from the start, and did something to try to stop it, very upset indeed. And btw it isn't just non-entities that dissented. Bill Maher might be an egoist but he was one of those public voices and lost his show as a result. A horde of bloggers dissented. Doonesbury nailed it. Others existed and if they were afraid to speak out it is an indictment of the atmosphere of patriotism laced fear the bush machine created.
If you stick with consuming confection on HBO, then perhaps avoiding any politically charged topics such as these would be advisable lest the dimensions of your head be called into question again!
I’m just waiting for Dov at AA to work in a flag raising/ass theme next time out.
Repulsive AND offensive. They should be proud...
Anon: Well said. Still, some civility in matters of political disagreement are necessary for resolution. And we're not even on opposite sides of this issue.
You write copy, don't you?
Anon at 2:24:
The photo wasn't staged, period!
It was the second flag raising of the day.
The first was a small flag that a marine had carried inside his shirt.
A Marine Corps general on a ship off Iwo Jima wanted a larger flag up there that could be seen on the entire island, so the large flag from an LST [that's a ship that carried tanks & trucks to the shore for those who don't know naval nomenclature] was sent up to the top of Mt. Suribachi. A piece of heavy steel pipe was found & the flag was attached to the pipe, so it did take six guys to raise the flag. Joe Rosenthal, an AP combat photographer was there, along with Bill Genaust, a Navy combat cinematographer. Both photographers stood next to each other, Rosenthal had a 4X5 Speed Graphic & had only one chance for a picture. He didn't know what he had until it had been developed, sent back to the states & published around the world. He got a Pulitzer & unfortunately, because it was the second flag raising, the fraudulent claim of it being staged.
Probably the most famous photo of WWII, it's the basis of the Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Genaust, the Navy cinematographer was also killed on Iwo Jima.
Rosenthal died in 2007.
I LOVE this image.
So right on for the times. The original image was about something - Freedom. This image is about what the present 'war' is about.
I'm disgusted by the image as well, but only because it's so painstakingly accurate. I know a lot of people hate to get caught up in the war/oil connection, but it's there. It doesn't take a hell of a lot of research to find it, either. I highly recommending getting access to the NY Times archive and looking through articles from the 70's, during Rummy's original stint as head of the DOD. All the same people making all the same exaggerated claims about other countries, in order to increase defense spending to an insane amount. America spends over $600 billion a year on defense... the only country that comes close spends $500 billion -- oh wait, that isn't one country, it's the entire rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, our Vice President's former company gets a no-bid contract to "rebuild" Iraq -- Halliburton works in the oil industry, that's what they do. They don't rebuild infrastructures, unless they are related to the drilling and pumping of oil. If you disagree with me (note that I'm stating more fact than opinion), you need to get your hand out of the fucking sand.
And if anybody is king at using emotional images to manipulate people, it's the neo-conservatives. That's their entire philosophy: tie their agenda to some raw emotion (such as the need for retribution after 9/11) and exploit said emotion to advance your agenda.
In the case of this advertisement, they probably will not get the reaction they want because of the detachment from that image that most South Africans would likely have.
while i am just some dumb-fuck lawyer who doesn't write copy (so, clearly, cant claim to be nearly as smart as the rest of you) it seems to me that when you have an ad that says 'Get Talking' and it provokes the sort of diatribe-posing-as-debate between jetpacks and anon et al ummm....isnt that, like, kind of exactly what the ad was supposed to do? (and thus, like, 'good')?
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