FB friends, please do not open this link if you can’t bear to look. The photo at the top of the post is graphic. From Gaza, terrible pictures and terrible stories mediate or re-present, as best they can, the reality of human carnage, death and destruction. The photgraphs are from the Atlantic Monthly, which you can see here. The stories are by Amira Hass, which you can read here. We know, of course, that pictures and stories are always only partial, that they conceal as much as they reveal. But without their mediation, there is no way to understand the condition they reflect or to generate a general opposition to this condition. The problem is that up close to the misery, these kinds of pictures and stories show no way out. Perhaps what they do is to remind us of what not to say about conflict, what not to say, self-righteously, about the right to self-defense or the right to resistance. We are given these pictures and stories by tireless journalists, but I’m not sure what to do with them except to share them, pass them around as electronic copy.