War isn’t pretty

Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder and, as Reed Johnson writes in his piece, it can be found in words and images depicting war. However, I think his analysis is flawed in that he confuses artistic depictions of war with war itself.

Doubtless, there is nothing in life, on Earth or in the universe that isn’t found beautiful by someone, somewhere. It’s pointless for me to claim that no one could find beauty in war, but I’d hope that those who do are the exception, not the rule. Pictures of and words about war can contain beauty, but in actual war, my eyes behold none.

Steven A. Wells

Glendale

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While Johnson’s treatise on the beauty of war is peppered by statements that momentarily acknowledge the human aspect of loss and suffering, it is simply not good enough.

The mere suggestion that war can be equated with beauty is ludicrous. It is clearly insensitive to aestheticize something that is fundamentally marked by human loss and tragedy. War is not beautiful. It is marked by death and destruction. To say that such images can be beautiful is to remove any human link and make it into a commodity to be consumed by the public.

The images illustrating “war aesthetics” are indicative of the same distasteful and callous human detachment reflected in his article. On a human level, they are offensive -- images of the remains of the World Trade Center, U.S. missiles in Iraq, British soldiers reflected in pools of oil, incandescent lights of gunfire in Basra, are all portrayed as beautiful and artistic instead of as terrifying. In reality, they signify the sure death of unsuspecting innocents on the ground.

Neetu Chawla, Rabeya Sen

Los Angeles