Suffering

Abstract

nation’s vets, but that the images only communicate to us in a second-hand way. This can also be said when we do not see the images, as in the cases of the death of Osama bin Laden (“Laying Bin Laden to Rest: A Case Study of Terrorism and the Politics of Visibility” by Jody Lynee Madeira); a day where no one dies (“Unremarkable Suffering: Banality, Spectatorship, and War’s In/visibilities” by Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol); digital representations of war (“Digital War and the Public Mind: Call of Duty Reloaded and Decoded” by Roger Stahl and “War in the Twenty-First Century: Visible, Invisible, or Superpositional?” by James Der Derian); fictional post9/11 action films (“A Cinema of Consolation: Post-9/11 Super Invasion Fantasy” by De Witt Douglas Kilgore); or a liberalized understanding of peace (“The In/visability of Liberal Peace: Perpetual Peace and Enduring Freedom” by Jon Simons). All of these essays are well written and are seemingly of one mind-set. In/Visible War: the Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America is an amazing read about images of war and also how we really do not have a clue as to what these men and women in uniform go through on a day-to-day basis. A picture can make us see, but we can never know the “truth.”