GLH10302-Visual Rhetoric #2: Concentrated Ideas

George Lewis Hughes

English 103: Accelerated Composition – Visual Rhetoric Assignment #2; Concentrated Ideas

Daniel Richards

September 12, 2008

Preliminary Notes and Thesis Concepts on the Second Visual Rhetoric Assignment, Topical to the Subject of the Compelling Attributes to Photographs of Shellshock Victims

• It is in the eyes; those glaring, lifeless eyes that have seen too much. Ever since the first victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, also known as “shellshock,” were hysterically – or frozenly – pried from the soul-smashing trenches of the Great War, the medical field had devoted immense studies to the causes of such stunning, bizarre cases of mental malfunctioning. They needed to know – and still do today – how to avoid it, not necessarily because of its debilitating effects on the soldier himself, but rather because of the debilitating, demoralizing impacts it would have on the outlook on all wars thereafter.
• Sometimes a result of extreme sleep deprivation, which particularly falls under the subcategory of battle fatigue, shellshock impairs the individual’s both physical and mental capabilities to a surprising extent. The worst outcome regarding the now so-termed “medical condition” is the life-lasting impact it can have not only upon that individual alone, but also upon his prior friends and family back home.
• In these respects, shellshock can be legitimately regarded as a contagion. The mere facial expression resembling a hypnotized, even faceless, zombie can prove remarkably – but not so surprisingly on the order of humanity – dangerous to the sentiments of all his other brothers-in-arms caught up in the same combat situation. One man’s plummeting into that notorious “thousand-yard stare” could easily become another man’s cracking into a crazed state of hysteria, which can sometimes go as far as suicidal behavior.
• Perhaps arguably the worst accompaniment of shellshock, hallucinations, can impose an enormous safety hazard on all the victim’s squad members, especially when he remains entrusted with a deadly weapon in hand. The grave detriment essentially presides in the victim’s eventual lack of notion for who is friend and who is foe. Several cases exist having recorded incidents in which soldiers have been killed by their own comrades – happening to be shell-shocked, of course – mistakably because of their lack of better judgment otherwise; this appalling concept additionally proves to be starkly problematic to the credibility of all further conductivity of modern warfare because it dangerously plays in to that nihilistic pacifist theory that ultimately, after having seen war for what it really is down to its core – pure Hell – the only enemy is one’s very own bleared and compassion-weary mind. The fine line between brother and enemy becomes even more obscured in this light.
• In World War One especially, the smart ones – that is, the veterans – would quickly learn the true rudimentary practices behind this new-war-era philosophy: that the only victory was within their very own personal spheres, specifically in which the element of survival came first and foremost. Existentialism exploded out of the festering womb of the Great War’s scars on the Western world, those scars comprising its mutilated survivors, either physically or mentally – or both. Thanks to the new impact on the mindset of the war-weary combatant, that wrought by the plague of shellshock – in which the basest Social Darwinian instincts of animalistic, self-preservation-driven behaviors would simply drop all other human concerns, such as one’s further caring for the disposition of his fellow man – all wars today have been philosophically approached at the level of the individual, not the crucial team of hierarchical leadership, as it had once been such. Therefore, automatically, even though our country may come out of it all victoriously in the end, we will no longer dwell on team accomplishment, but on the individual trauma, regardless of military statistical consequences in dispute for either conflicting side.