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by Joey Sweeney

: Photos courtesy of www.badgas.co.uk

Keep Smiling

There was a time — you must remember, really, you must — when the scornful ridicule of Americans was an industry mostly kept within the confines of our own country. We had a whole truck full of choads whose job in life it was to do this, and they came in a lot of flavors: Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Howard Stern, Bill Maher, Garrison Keillor, Ann Coulter. It was a tough business to break into. Not everyone could do it.

What you really had to do was find your own niche; there was only so much scorn to go around, and in gentler times, mockery was tetchy — to paraphrase Goodfellas, if you wanted to mock, you better be sure that the mocking was right and just, or else you'd get mocked yourself.

But ever since the U.S. blew the lid off its own scorn industry, it seems everyone is in the business. And each time there's a new wound, a grotesque new arm grows out of it, pointing a finger, clenching a cigarette and, well, basically, doing a Lynndie.

A Lynndie, you ask? Why, it's short for Lynndie England, our very own war-of-choice poster girl; you know, the one with the cigarette and the two fingers that point menacingly but smirkingly at Iraqi cock? That's her!

You almost forgot about her, didn't you? Well, maybe: The inverted shame and sheer weirdness of her my-bosses-told-me-to-do-something-dirty-and-fun gaze is a mental image that's going to stick around for a while. It's probably what has made her the unlikely first icon of the phone-camera age. Because all over England — and soon the rest of the phone-cam-having world (sorry, Africa!) — there's a brand new craze sweepin' up the bandwidth. All you need is two hands, a smoke, a camera and a person near you who, at least for the moment, is to be treated as a subhuman object of derision. Your mark could be anybody, really: sleeping roommates, the homeless, your mom, Courtney Love. (View the results, if you must, over at www.badgas.co.uk/lynndie.)

I know what you're thinking: Oh, the humanity. How could something this sick ever approach the parlance of snapshot photography? It's easy: The Lynndie is, at least on some level, the gut reaction of most Westerners: This war, everyone says, is just fucking unreal. People's reasons and takes on that vary, but the sentiment is the same. It's here, though, that the Lynndie approaches its own meta-poetry:

Aren't we all, the photos say, prisoners of war, the Lynn-die and the Lynn-der alike? Aren't we all soldiers in the war on taste and decorum? Aren't we all, at one point or another, being told to do fucked-up things by our bosses, and secretly loving every minute of it?

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