I’m trying to figure out if the people at runaway.contagiousmedia.org are malicious or just stupid.
Their homepage looks like somebody decrying what they consider the pointless deaths of US military service people in Iraq. Fair enough. However, I found two other pages while Googling for Clayton Henson, the half-brother of my cousin, who died in Iraq.
The first page is a fake news story about people selling bread on eBay with the faces of those fallen in Iraq toasted in. The second page is a fake news story about Terri Schiavo being kissed by her mother with faces of the fallen photoshopped in.
Someone spent quite a bit of time doing this. Did they think this was funny? Profound? What?
I look at Clayton’s face photoshopped onto a piece of toast and I wonder what the “artist” thinks I should experience besides anger and disgust. Did they think for a moment how the families of the dead would feel to see their loved one’s image turned into incompetent kitsch? Did they seriously think that anyone would think this was respectful in the least?
It is so hard to credit such people with good faith. It’s hard to grasp that anyone would could be so stupid as to think this was an honest and respectful way to protest the deaths of service people. Hatred and arrogance seem so much more likely explanations.
The people you are talking about at runaway. contagiousmedia.org are terrorists. They are not the kind that throw real bombs and kill real people in real time; they are the kind that throw a different kind of bomb aimed at destroying the web of decency, integrity, honor and respect that binds a free people together and makes possible our individual freedoms.
They glory in any criticism of their actions. Their values are the exact opposite of normal human values. They are like the poisons that are naturally generated by our bodies while we eat, drink, work and sleep. We have organs that collect these poisons and excrete them from our bodies.
We need organs that can find these poisons and excrete them from our body politick without harming any of our healthy tissue.
I was doing a google image search of Ryan Cantafio, a Marine I served with in Iraq who had been killed, and I came across one of the toast pictures you desribed. I clicked on the original URL, and not only is the original context of the photo gone, but the website now refers to some kind of dog lovers page. I found this blog while trying to get to the bottom of the toast picture.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say these people are “terrorists” (they’re guilty of poor taste, not mass murder, and the word ‘terrorist’ is already so overused that it has lost much of its impact) I agree with Shannon Love that it is disrespectful, “incompetent kitsch”.