 Adapted from Libertinus [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Peoples Dispatch
Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.
Issue No. 155Sensitive Content
Sam Thielman
Sensitive ContentThis was on a Thursday. What I saw was the top half of a video clip that a search for “Gaza” returned on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Consider that your content warning. There wasn’t much in the news about the war because of the Democratic National Convention, so against my usual judgment, I was checking X. The footage was of a man holding… something. Cradling it. In his arms. Textures blend together in digital video because of the way the photos are encoded and decoded. But these technologies have gotten better—less noticeably “lossy,” if you want the old-fashioned technical term—in recent years. Everything is very vivid now. I could see the item or entity was loose and disconnected. The word I keep wanting to use is floppy. It was not the right structure for a child, but again, the man was cradling it as if it was still a child, gently supporting it. People always describe the effect of bombs as turning people to meat, but that’s not right, is it? Meat is neatly dressed and butchered and treated with care. Subsistence hunters respect the animals they prey on. My wife’s niece hunts deer sometimes; she makes her own venison sausage and brings it home for Christmas. She loves animals; she used to have a pet pigeon and has always had a dog or a cat or two around. She would never treat an animal she planned to eat the way someone had treated that little child, ruining it. I’m sorry for saying “it.” Little children are not “its.” They are he or she or some other word they have picked out themselves. I remember when our niece was a little child, walking around Disneyland with her and my girlfriend, whom I would marry a few months later, and she would be the flower girl. She was eight, and we were not yet related by marriage, and we had so much fun that she held my hand while we walked around the park, and I remember being so proud of myself for having won her good opinion. Now I have a child of my own.
The video was posted by an account that reuses footage from wars, most of it originally posted to Instagram and TikTok, from what I can gather. The replies often call the videos fake or doctored but none of it appears to be. The posts are wildly popular; there is no rhyme or reason to what gets posted beyond the account owner’s appetite for gore. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan—wherever there’s bloodshed. The geographical locations listed in the post text seem largely accurate. I managed to hit the pause button before the account’s most recent video showed me a man being destroyed by a malfunctioning rocket launcher. X does nothing to censor atrocity images. The account claimed the video I had seen earlier had been shot in Khan Younis, in Gaza. I held up my hand so that I couldn’t see the little body and watched the things around the weeping parent so I could derive some context from them. Even obscured, I found the video almost impossible to look at. The sheer indecency of it was like a bright light. For provenance, the video had a watermark in Arabic in one corner. I paused the video, and I put a screenshot of the watermark into a tool that does optical character recognition and translation simultaneously. According to the watermark, the photographer’s name is Moaz Abutah. He is in Gaza. He posts pictures of suffering people and of the remains of people who are beyond suffering to Instagram and has a photo of himself wearing a helmet and a plate carrier that says PRESS in English across the chest as his profile picture. I look for the original video of the dead child, and I can’t find it. Instagram censors pictures of violence, blurring them until you click, so I rely on Abutah’s descriptions of his photographs and videos to look for likely candidates. Even so, twice, I open a picture of some different beheaded toddler. After the second mistake, I stop looking. My own son has come in to read a picture book to me so I’ll let him play more Minecraft. This is the deal he and I struck this summer. I don’t want these images on the screen.
It’s later. I’m tired and feel sick. My son is leaning up against me and playing Minecraft and narrating the silly traps and secret passages he’s building into his ever-expanding fortress. The left-wing cartoonist Eli Valley has posted what appears to be a caricature of the same dead child, the first one, next to Kamala Harris, which makes me feel better, for some reason. The memory of the video feels less like a hallucination. I want to say this again: You shouldn’t look at this stuff on purpose. But sometimes you can’t help it, when you’re trying to learn what’s happening in the world. It seems clear that our leaders are happy to cause the worst things in human experience so long as they are happening somewhere far away to someone powerless, but distance is simply no longer an impediment to communication. And yet we pretend. The disjunct is profound, and made starker by the clarity with which we can see what we’re told isn’t important enough to talk about, and the way in which it all unfolds. When the U.S. military wants to kill someone, they collect data from the same cell phones the survivors use to record the murder. Left to our own handheld devices, we have little choice but to watch a disjointed slurry of clips from reality shows, videos of happily chirping pet birds, people weeping over the remains of loved ones, ads for video games, racism, pornography, racist pornography, and requests for donations. We aren’t getting structured information about this conflict; in that, it differs very little from preceding conflicts. We are getting unstructured information, though, mixed in to our Content, and suddenly we have to do the work of verification and reportage ourselves because no one seems to think it’s in the public interest to devote newsroom resources to recording, investigating, and depicting this conflict in detail. It’s brutal work—frustrating, enervating, and sad—and you can’t do much of it well before you have to take a break. But the presence of these images demands that we do it, heedless of the effect the truth might have on the sensitive electoral environment or delicate beliefs and prejudices.
Two factions, one that wants this country to meet the needs of its countrymen, and another that wants to preserve and maintain the authority that has made the United States the terror of the world. Both want to rescue the American government from dissolution under Trump. Harris, like Solomon, is the unlikely arbiter between the two. But you can’t cut a baby in half and still have a baby. I know. I’ve seen it.
ELSEWHERE IN FLAMING HYDRAIf you're watching the debate tonight, Hydra Parker Molloy has an incisive analysis at The New Republic that I found elegant, sane and steadying.
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