It’s funny how various threads in my life will converge sometimes. I recently read Susan Sontag’s essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, a dense and beautiful examination of the relationship between photography and war. It has enough fodder for a few dozen blog posts (her observation that the US has a museum devoted to the Holocaust and another to the Armenian genocide, but not a single museum devoted to the African slave trade could be fodder for a four volume gift set), but for this post I’ll focus on her closing point. However much we hanker for statistics, sound bites, and photos regarding war, for those of us who haven’t been there, those things can’t hold more than a momentary shock to our otherwise fortified thinking. Art, film, and literature, on the other hand, can go a long way toward a deep change in how we see and understand war.

Two recent examples of this come to mind for me