`It Summed the Situation Up'

In the April 14 issue of The Spectator, Theodore Dalrymple writes a tart, clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s kidnapping of the English sailors and marines, their release and the vulgar circus surrounding their return to England. For Dalrymple, Tony Blair is a virtual reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain, c. 1938, and his nation’s journalists are even more craven:

“The sub-death-of-Diana hysteria which gripped the tabloids was bad enough. The picture on the front page of the Daily Mirror, of Faye Turney reunited with her daughter with the caption of MUMMY! MUMMY! was enough to make any inveterate enemy of this country laugh with pleasurable — and justified — contempt. President Ahmadinejad was quite right all along (though he didn’t quite put it this way): if you’re going to go all soppy and weak at the knees over the fate of a young mother, and demand special consideration for her, you shouldn’t send her to a war zone. It is well-known that war zones are bad for young mothers.”

In Cold Calls, the most recent installment of Christopher Logue’s Tarantino-esque adaptation of The Iliad, he describes the vividly gory death of the Greek hero Nyro:

“Took his head off his spine with a backhand slice --
Beautiful stuff ...straight from the blade...”

Dalrymple reminded me of the passage that follows several lines later:

“When Nyro's mother heard of this
She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside
Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks:
Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts;

“'I saw her running round.
I took the photograph.
It summed the situation up.
He was her son.
They put it out in colour. Right?
My picture went around the world.'”

The juxtaposition of mother and photographer, in Dalrymple and Homer-cum-Logue, is striking. Logue devotes much of Cold Calls to the horrors of war, yes, but also to its media representations. A picture snapped by his boastful photographer might readily be captioned: “MUMMY! MUMMY!” In a moment of elevated bullshit, I once told a fellow reporter that you could learn more about war from Homer than from The New York Times. In “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” Simone Weil writes:

“Battles are not determined among men who calculate, devise, take resolutions and act on them but among men stripped of these abilities, transformed, fallen to the level either of purely passive inert matter or of the blind forces of sheer impetus. This is the ultimate secret of war…”