“Judgment Deferred on Lieutenant Calley”

Although Lieutenant Calley was tried and found guilty of his role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, President Nixon effectively pardoned him in April 1971 by placing him under house arrest. The anti-war poet Robert Lowell highlighted the media’s fascination with Calley as a commodity of national spectacle: “He too fought under television for our place in the sun”. The activist artists’ group Retort opened with this quote in written versions of Afflicted Powers (2004 and 2005) to draw parallels between military power and media representations of the US war in Vietnam and the US-led war in Iraq in 2003. Lowell continued: “Our nation looks up to heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution is someone somewhere else and we are young. In a century perhaps no one will widen an eye at massacre, and only scattered corpses express a last histrionic concern for death”.