"this refusal to recognize the transcendance of flesh"
The most weirdly uplifting thing about the whole abhorrant US-run prisons in Iraq fiasco has been that it's begun to trigger the first serious discussion of aesthetics and their implications in the public sphere in recent memory. This post on the Brown Wedge, for example (and that blog has been top-notch recently) is an absolutely riveting account of the confluence between the pictures of the prisoners, pornography and "something you can see at the Lincoln Center for an NEA grant".
There's a few spelling mistakes, but who cares? What has happened is horrible, but if out of it we can muster honest, rigorous debate about the increasingly fucked-up aesthetics of the First World (which would, of course, require us to (a) think about it in the first place and (b) acknowledge that maybe aesthetics is of more than merely academic concern) and (possibly) leverage Bush out of power, at least what happened will not have happened in total vain.
There's a few spelling mistakes, but who cares? What has happened is horrible, but if out of it we can muster honest, rigorous debate about the increasingly fucked-up aesthetics of the First World (which would, of course, require us to (a) think about it in the first place and (b) acknowledge that maybe aesthetics is of more than merely academic concern) and (possibly) leverage Bush out of power, at least what happened will not have happened in total vain.
