a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, 968.

Imagine for a moment that you are the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper and in even a normal day don’t have nearly the space or resources to sufficiently cover all the day’s critical events. Suddenly, you are faced with news that the most wanted man in Iraq, responsible for numerous deaths and barbarities not seen since medieval times, had just been killed. You’ve got some tough choices to make.  What do you do?

If you are the editor of the Washington Post and the dead man is Al-Qaeda terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi, your choice is clear: You devote 21 column inches to criticism over the frame that was used to display his picture.

The most obvious question that comes to mind is, “There was a frame? Really? Because I was kind of focused on the fact that I was looking at a picture of a man’s corpse.”

By missing the significance of the frame, you probably ended up wasting your time contemplating the broader implications of Zarqawi’s death on American policy and the war in Iraq. Fortunately, we have Washington Post “culture critic” Philip Kennicott available to focus on the far more important issues of not only what frame was used (any idiot can do that) but the kind of matting as well. (A FOIA request may be necessary to wrest the truth from a reluctant Pentagon: Regular? Rag? And was a foamcore backing used? We may never know.)

It is also important that we not spend too much time on the frame itself but rather on the hidden meaning beyond the frame. “In many traditions,” Kennicott points out, “a framed picture of the deceased suggests something like an icon, something to be venerated.”

And in other traditions, a framed picture suggests something was needed to keep it from curling up in the heat.

Perhaps even more important than the frame is the composition of the photograph: “The image itself, a disembodied head, connects this event to the abject misery that Zarqawi had brought to so many people in Iraq over the course of his deadly career.”

I’ll be honest here, for me the image mainly connected the event to the fact that he’s dead.

Now, I’ll grant you, had they made a poster out of it and added some inspirational message like you see in the hallways of large corporations (“Choose to be different. Choose to be a leader.  Not a bloated corpse.”) then THAT might have been weird (but then those posters have always kind of creeped me out).

Perhaps a better course of action, one that would have provided not only the needed proof of his death, but also served a greater, more timeless purpose appropriate to such an event would have been the creation of a tasteful Café Press Shop where a wide selection of hats, mugs and T-shirts could have been offered.

But absolutely no kitchen magnets. That would be disrespectful.

J.