Image abuse?
Time’s ‘green’ Iwo Jima cover sparks outrage among Marines
Donald Mates clearly recalls the moment, more than 63 years ago, when he stood at the foot of Mount Suribachi and looked up as his fellow Marines planted an American flag at Iwo Jima.
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/issues/stories/0-MARINEPAPER-3494461.php
By Andrew Tilghman - Staff writer
Posted : May 05, 2008
On Feb. 23, 1945, the Marines were taking heavy casualties. Japanese soldiers were popping out of hidden trenches everywhere, and Mates saw the flag rising in the distance as a sign of hope.
“We were really having trouble. We were getting our asses kicked. The flag-raising really gave us a shot in the arm. It stiffened us up,” said Mates, who was a 19-year-old private at the time.
Mates, now an 82-year-old former real estate developer, was stunned when he caught sight of the latest Time magazine cover with the iconic image of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima — yet in place of the flag was a tree and a headline: “How to Win the War on Global Warming.”
“At first I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a parody,” Mates said in a telephone interview. “I couldn’t believe that they would debase an image of that monument by taking out the flag and putting in a pine tree. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Marines worldwide took offense at the magazine’s cover image, which implicitly compared looming environmental problems to the Second World War and, more specifically, Iwo Jima — the costliest battle in Marine Corps history, with 5,931 Marines killed, nearly one-third of all Marine Corps losses in World War II.
“We feel like it’s trivializing a pretty significant moment in our history,” said Jordan Cross, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, a Virginia-based educational group.
Time’s cover was not the first time the now-iconic image of the flag-raising has been altered.
In the 1960s, a faked image popular among opponents of the Vietnam War featured Marines appearing to raise a flag emblazoned with the circular “peace” symbol.
In 1979, as dozens of Americans were held hostage in Iran, the icon was altered to show Marines hoisting an American flag and inserting the pole into the Ayatollah Khomeini’s behind. More recently, the image adorns bottles of wine known as “Jarhead Red” — a Cabernet Sauvignon from Firestone Vineyards in California, owned by a former Marine captain.
The flag raising at Iwo Jima is easily the Corps’ most celebrated image. Captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, it served as a model for the Marine Corps War Memorial alongside the Potomac River in Arlington, Va.
Image not copyrighted
Charles Melson, the Marine Corps’ chief historian at the History Division in Quantico, Va., said people routinely complain about the uses and manipulations of the famous image, but the Corps retains no copyright and has no legal say in how the image is used.
“It’s out there in the public domain and it’s part of American consciousness and culture,” Melson said. “That [photo] inspires people for a lot of different reasons, not just Marines.”
Some photographers also denounced Time magazine for manipulating the image.
“The power of that photograph comes from the fact that it’s real, that it shows reality. And to change that lessens its power and impact,” said John Long, who chairs the ethics committee for the National Press Photographers Association and teaches photography in the military program at Syracuse University.
Blogs popular among the military churned with outrage. Some lashed out at the magazine. “Time is a crap mag,” wrote one person on the Web site “Blackfive.” Others lashed out at the content of the story.
“This is totally disgusting and the environmentalist wackos will use anything to force their propaganda down our throats. Utterly despicable,” wrote one person at the blog FloppingAces.net. Another wrote: “Change the pic to the Marines holding Al Gore upside down and planting his head in the ground! I don’t think there would be many Marines objecting to that.”
Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, defended the magazine cover, saying the aim was to get people’s attention. “My feeling is you have to grab people by the lapels and say, ‘Hey, pay attention’ and that was the idea of doing this,” Stengel said, according to the Business and Media Institute.
“[I] just think you can’t be squeamish about trying to get people’s attention.”
Time’s cover could be seen as honoring the Marines at Iwo Jima by using the image to evoke broader notions of challenge and perseverance that extend far beyond the battle in 1945, said Jeff Curto, professor of photography at College of DuPage in Illinois.
“Everyone understands these guys went through Hell and high water. They participated in a heroic event that has now come to stand for the general idea of struggle and success and victory,” Curto said.
Underlying the controversy may be political sentiments about global warming, said Jack Zibluk, a journalism professor at Arkansas State University.
“I think what you’re hearing is more politically oriented: ‘We don’t want to be associated with those darn tree huggers,’” Zibluk said.