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I really do not mean this to be a pol-thread, but I found the intent of this essay worthwhile, i.e., made me think on things. - Perdita
THE LYNNDIE HOP - Neva Chonin, SF Chronicle, August 29, 2004
"It was just for fun." -- Pfc. Lynndie England
It's already become one of the most iconic images of the new century, right up there with the World Trade Center on fire and Howard Dean screaming: Private Lynndie England stands before a row of naked detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, smirking at the camera, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she points an imaginary rifle at a prisoner's pixelated genitalia.
The image is loathsome. It's also the inspiration behind the Internet's latest 15-minute phenomenon -- or, as one blogger termed it, the new "U.K. guerrilla street craze": "Doing a Lynndie," brought to us courtesy of the British blog Bad Gas (badgas.co.uk/lynndie). Using the tactics of stealth disco (videotaping a prankster sneaking up behind an unwitting victim and performing disco moves), Lynndie hoppers ambush passers-by, re-enact Lynndie's famous rifle gesture (with the bemused second party in the prisoner role) and snap a picture.
Some of the results are, well, pretty funny, even if they do make me want to scrub my brain with Clorox. Clicking through the pictures, I peruse each prankster's face and ponder their interpretation of the joke. Is it transgressive performance art riffing on a famous image? Political satire? After all, when faced with the grotesque, sometimes humor is the only logical option. Witness Jonathan Swift's famous 1729 essay, "A Modest Proposal," in which the author suggested relieving Irish poverty by eating Irish children.
I suspect, though, that "doing a Lynndie" is just amoral wanking by people whose sense of humor runs toward fart jokes. The Bad Gas blog seems to agree, noting that Lynndie's original pose "has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a s -- about anything."
The Lynndie has spread beyond jolly England (pun unintentional ... OK, maybe a little intentional). Bad Gas' expanding rogues gallery of Lynndie hoppers includes a dope with a pen hanging out of his mouth to simulate a cigarette Lynndie-ing a co-worker in Windhoek, Namibia, and a San Francisco barbecuer pulling a Lynndie on his grilled sausages. Lynndie is the Gap, the Big Mac, a Nike shoe. She's our latest all-American export, our new cultural ambassador.
It's all done in dark humor, for sure, a visual version of those gallows jokes we tell after every celebrity death. But doing a Lynndie is also a gesture of contempt, encouraged by the titular woman's less-than-comely face and her victims' less-than-American nationality. To many, it's OK to make light of an ugly American abusing hapless Iraqi men; in fact, it's high hilarity. No one wants to identify with the subjects of those Abu Ghraib pictures. We'd rather humiliate them. Racists can do the Lynndie to mock the prisoners' pain; sexists can mock "she-man" Lynndie; misanthropes can mock everyone.
Conversely, consider this. We mock to distance ourselves. Perhaps the bad behavior of poster girl Lynndie and her less-famous male colleagues crawled under our skin like a carnivorous bedbug because, on a deeper level, they were all too familiar. Who wants to consider that, under the right/wrong circumstances, any number of us might engage in the unthinkable? Some words of wisdom from Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote in the Aug. 6 Times of London, "Private England was young and came from a stratum of society -- that which is unkindly known as trailer-park trash -- that rarely finds itself in control of anything, even of its own life, and is generally the object of derision and contempt. Suddenly she was dressed in a little brief authority, and she knew how to take revenge for all her past humiliations, as well as satisfy that desire for cruelty that never lives very far below the human surface."
There's a fine line between "doing a Lynndie" and "becoming a Lynndie." 'Tis true.
THE LYNNDIE HOP - Neva Chonin, SF Chronicle, August 29, 2004
"It was just for fun." -- Pfc. Lynndie England
It's already become one of the most iconic images of the new century, right up there with the World Trade Center on fire and Howard Dean screaming: Private Lynndie England stands before a row of naked detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, smirking at the camera, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she points an imaginary rifle at a prisoner's pixelated genitalia.
The image is loathsome. It's also the inspiration behind the Internet's latest 15-minute phenomenon -- or, as one blogger termed it, the new "U.K. guerrilla street craze": "Doing a Lynndie," brought to us courtesy of the British blog Bad Gas (badgas.co.uk/lynndie). Using the tactics of stealth disco (videotaping a prankster sneaking up behind an unwitting victim and performing disco moves), Lynndie hoppers ambush passers-by, re-enact Lynndie's famous rifle gesture (with the bemused second party in the prisoner role) and snap a picture.
Some of the results are, well, pretty funny, even if they do make me want to scrub my brain with Clorox. Clicking through the pictures, I peruse each prankster's face and ponder their interpretation of the joke. Is it transgressive performance art riffing on a famous image? Political satire? After all, when faced with the grotesque, sometimes humor is the only logical option. Witness Jonathan Swift's famous 1729 essay, "A Modest Proposal," in which the author suggested relieving Irish poverty by eating Irish children.
I suspect, though, that "doing a Lynndie" is just amoral wanking by people whose sense of humor runs toward fart jokes. The Bad Gas blog seems to agree, noting that Lynndie's original pose "has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a s -- about anything."
The Lynndie has spread beyond jolly England (pun unintentional ... OK, maybe a little intentional). Bad Gas' expanding rogues gallery of Lynndie hoppers includes a dope with a pen hanging out of his mouth to simulate a cigarette Lynndie-ing a co-worker in Windhoek, Namibia, and a San Francisco barbecuer pulling a Lynndie on his grilled sausages. Lynndie is the Gap, the Big Mac, a Nike shoe. She's our latest all-American export, our new cultural ambassador.
It's all done in dark humor, for sure, a visual version of those gallows jokes we tell after every celebrity death. But doing a Lynndie is also a gesture of contempt, encouraged by the titular woman's less-than-comely face and her victims' less-than-American nationality. To many, it's OK to make light of an ugly American abusing hapless Iraqi men; in fact, it's high hilarity. No one wants to identify with the subjects of those Abu Ghraib pictures. We'd rather humiliate them. Racists can do the Lynndie to mock the prisoners' pain; sexists can mock "she-man" Lynndie; misanthropes can mock everyone.
Conversely, consider this. We mock to distance ourselves. Perhaps the bad behavior of poster girl Lynndie and her less-famous male colleagues crawled under our skin like a carnivorous bedbug because, on a deeper level, they were all too familiar. Who wants to consider that, under the right/wrong circumstances, any number of us might engage in the unthinkable? Some words of wisdom from Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote in the Aug. 6 Times of London, "Private England was young and came from a stratum of society -- that which is unkindly known as trailer-park trash -- that rarely finds itself in control of anything, even of its own life, and is generally the object of derision and contempt. Suddenly she was dressed in a little brief authority, and she knew how to take revenge for all her past humiliations, as well as satisfy that desire for cruelty that never lives very far below the human surface."
There's a fine line between "doing a Lynndie" and "becoming a Lynndie." 'Tis true.
and, for those other than Perdita that might misunderstand, I was referring to myself.
