Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. - Susan Sontag

Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

Watkins said no with the practiced brusque delivery of a man who's always been rather sparing with his yes.