Abu Ghraib, responsibility, prurient interests and Catholic guilt

Jeanne of Body and Soul is back from her blogging hiatus with a very long (but not, as she says, contradictory, at least not that I can see) post, headed with the picture of the naked, filth-covered Iraqi prisoner in a "stress position". There's a lot there; you may want to re-read a few times to get it all. One of the things I really responded to was her nagging suspicions that the "interest" the American mainstream media is showing in all the horrifying imagery of Abu Ghraib is stemming from the same dark and ugly place in our psyche as its earlier "interest" in Janet Jackson's breast. As I mentioned before, I have very mixed feelings about all the traffic this blog gets from people searching for video of Nick Berg being beheaded or "pornography" from Iraqi prisons. If Jeanne is saying that this is in large part a twisted and depraved world, then I agree with her. Well, I agree with almost everything she says in this post, even the Catholic parts, and I'm not a Catholic. (However I had Catholic best friends and belonged to a Catholic Girl Scout troop, so I may have been infected.)