For my first official blog post, I wanted to address Shakirah Esmail-Hudani's article about the torture at Abu Ghraib. Several interesting things occurred to me while reading Hudani's analysis of the tortures: the seeming contempt of Western culture for reality, and the consumption of place and tourism.

When I first read the article before Wednesday's class, I was most interested in Hudani's classification of the torture as documented by photographs as a display of disregarding reality by the soldiers involved. Hudani characterizes the fact that the tortures were documented in such a way, staged according to cultural codes of the United States, put on as theatrical set pieces as contributing to this loss of and disregard for reality. I find this intriguing since so much of our discussion in this class has centered around topics or theories that, in the modern day at least, seem to disregard and flaunt reality at every turn. Neo-liberal economics proposes an economic system that ignores the realities of the world, such as the fact that businesses unchecked by regulation and rules will inevitably consume the entire economy and collapse (as seen in the home and credit meltdowns only a few years ago, or the lead up to the Great Depression before that, or the constant economic swings of the 1870s through the 1900s). When we watched the documentary The Persuader we saw how the whole industry of marketing, the cornerstone of our current economic model and even our culture, is built upon a disregard for reality, instead focusing on selling a feeling or an image, never mind what the product really is or actually does. The actions of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib do much the same. The realities of the war in Iraq are disregarded. The rules of the Geneva Convention, to which the United States has agreed to abide by, are forgotten. It is entertainment. It is a ruse. I had never thought about the actions at the prison in this light. The Iraq War has been cloaked in misinformation, lies, and a disregard for the facts since the beginning. Its a shame that the disregard for the real, the pastiche of reality, as Hudani puts it, has permeated so deeply into the fiber of this supposedly "necessary" and "just" conflict.

After our discussion about consuming place and tourism, I looked at Abu Ghraib and the actions there another way. Hudani speaks of the prisoners as nothing but props for the performance of the soldiers. The photographs are not about the prisoners and their suffering, they are about the soldiers and their posturing. It seems to me this is mostly the case in tourism, or at least the "bad" kind of tourism we discussed in class. When we visit a place and pose for a picture, is it really about the place? Can the picture really capture the history and the culture surrounding the monument we want to associate ourselves with? It doesn't seem that it can. The monument can only really be a prop for us, the subject, to use to create a meaning around ourselves. I have pictures from the first time I went to the Golden Gate Bridge. While it is hard to argue that I am more noticeable than the giant orange structure behind me, is the picture really about the bridge, or it is really about ME and how the bridge props ME up and allows ME to say, "I've been there! I went to the bridge." It seems to me that its the same with the restored plantations of guided tours of areas of New Orleans still recovering from Katrina. Per Professor Irme's experience, we are encouraged to stop and take a picture with the sight. Why? Because its famous, because it is important. Therefore, we can become important too if we insert ourselves into it. Is all of this bad? I wouldn't say so. I'm going to keep taking pictures of myself at fantastic locales I travel to. Its just very scary to consider the breadth of experiences that are considered okay to commoditize this way and consume. Its one thing when its a bridge, another thing when it is a ruined part of a city, and still quite another when our military commodifies and consumes a place through the torture of its people.