In his explanation of why he refused to release the photos of the dead body of Osama bin Laden, President Obama told 60 Minutes “”We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football.”
I don’t agree. Put me down as standing with the Beatles on this one. As they sand in “A Day in the Life”, “I saw a film today, oh, boy/ The English army had just won the war/ A crowd of people turned away/ But I just had to look/ Having read the book.”
I have seen the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy‘s head exploding, Eddie Adams‘ photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of the head of Nguyen Van Lem, Nick Ut‘s photo of the naked nine year-old Kim Phuc running in panic down Route 1 near Trang Bang, and Bobby Kennedy lying on the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. More recently I have witnessed the hi def pornography of air liners crashing into the World Trade Center, buildings falling, people plummeting from Windows on the World; as well as the exploded train in Madrid, and the exploded trains in London, and the exploded bus near Tavistock Square.
A government is a thing that exists to have a monopoly on violence. We create it–we give it power–we relinquish power to it–because we realize that decentralized violence is volatile and weak. Governments should not be in the business about editing the images of the violence they have perpetrated, or that has been perpetrated against them. If something has been done, we should see it; we should have no illusions about what has been done against us, or in our name. It’s not spiking the football. It is testimony.
No doubt the pictures of Osama’s corpse are gruesome and macabre. If people don’t want to look, so be it; that’s not a good enough reason for the government not to show them. If some people over-react and threaten American lives, then that’s terrible, but there are people who are just waiting to fly off, and you can’t keep editing yourself.
I’ve seen the photos of Carmine Galante, cigar in his mouth, dead on the patio of Joe & Mary’s Restaurant in Bushwick. It wouldn’t bother me to see bin Laden in a similar posture. Just another gangster and murderer who got what was coming to him.
It’s not like we put down the old family dog. Go ahead a spike the fucking football.