I've been thinking and researching the concept of impunity for my Juarez doc I came across a
recent article in the Nation by Naomi Klein about impunity in Iraq. She pulls no punches dissing John Kerry:

By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanization of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

She talks about a famous photo of a soldier in Iraq, smoking a cigarette, and decodes the image and its social context. It reminds me, very positively, of Barthes' Mythologies, especially the essay about the photo of the black French-Algerian soldier and what it really meant. Klein concludes with this scathing observation: "Genuine impunity breeds a kind of delusional decadence, and this is its face: a nation bickering about smoking while Iraq burns."

(coincidence #6938: as I write this I'm listening to Beck's album Odelay and the song "New Pollution" is playing, but it sounded to me for a moment like he was singing "New Fallujah"...)