Anniversary

My wife and I just celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary recently and it is hard to believe that during a sizable chunk of our married life the US has been at war in Iraq. My daughter is as old as the war and just celebrated her 4th birthday. (If the war was a child it'd be jumping on the couch, and telling potty jokes)

It is interesting to see how, beyond the daily potpourri of images of violence and political talking heads, we visualize the war, the costs of war, the other, and, really, how the visual becomes a playground where we think through all facets of our situation trying to make sense of nothing less than our political reality.

Here are two illustrations of that:

The Iraq Veterans Memorial is a video tribute to fallen soldiers in the vein of the Vietnam memorial or the AIDS quilt project.

Rageh Inside Iran is a BBC documentary that gives the viewer a very complex, nuanced view of Iranians.

UPDATE:

Additional videos to check out: Hometown Baghdad follows several young Iraqis as they struggle to survive in Baghdad.