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Notes 221
we cite Don Delillo and Italo Calvino’s fictional expressions of
the ‘madness’ this democracy of images can tend to create in
those seeking to capture on film their surroundings – see Harris
and Taylor (2005: 90–9).
5 This is a toned down but thereby more insidious version of
photography’s previously cited normalization of toilet bowls as an
object of aesthetic contemplation – see previous note.
6 August Kleinzahler Diary – London Review of Books, 17 August
2006, p. 35.
7 The linguistically challenged nature of the Bush administration
has been analysed in detail in Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon:
Observations on a National Disorder (2001) and a more overtly
satirical account of Donald Rumsfeld’s incoherent public utter-
ances re-presented in the form of poems and haikus in Seely’s
Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld
(2003).
8 The event was addressed from the perspective of critical media
theory in Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism (2002) and Žižek’s
Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002).
9 Baudrillard develops this idea further in The Spirit of Terrorism
(2002), in which the destruction of the Twin Towers is explained
in terms of his theory’s distinction between cultures based on
symbolic and semiotic exchange.
10 See Gary Younge (2003) and judging from survey evidence,
despite (or perhaps ironically because of) the extensive nature of
the media’s coverage of the second Gulf conflict, basic factual
issues have failed to survive: ‘According to a New York Times/
CBS survey, 42% of the American public believes that Saddam
Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on
the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news
poll says that 55% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein
directly supports al-Qaida’ (Roy 2003: n.p.).
11 For example see Curtis White’s (2003) entertaining critique of
the negative representations of intellectuals in Spielberg’s Saving
Private Ryan.
12 A similar process occurred with the false story of Iraqi soldiers
pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators in the previous Gulf
conflict based upon the emotional (but coached by a US public
relations firm) testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl initially
known only by her first name of Nayirah, but who was later
discovered to be the daughter of a Kuwaiti Emir keen to help
encourage US public opinion to support military involvement.
See www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html (accessed 28 June
2007). In this context, Naomi Klein (2003) illustrates the nature
of the media’s ideological manipulations by comparing the

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