The Globe has started a new and irritating practice on their front page. Rather than having those teasers for frivolous features inside the paper above the flag (a controversial enough practice when introduced not so very long ago), they have occasionally migrated below the flag, to where we've been conditioned to look for the big headline of the day, like so:



I thought that photo of the Lowell soldier's funeral on Wednesday's front page bordered on greatness, by the way:


Gorgeous. Very powerful. As a picture. I'm not sure how I feel about it as front page news. I mean, on one level it is a more affecting editorial statement than any I've seen. On another it is exploitative—if not exactly sensationalistic—of a family at a moment of extreme vulnerability.

When you think how a couple of years ago there was such a hue and cry about just reading the names of the dead on the news. And how it is still virtually verboten to print pictures of flag-draped coffins. This photo is as powerful a repudiation of the administration's war policy as any I have seen lately.

But I'm not sure we've earned the right to this. We haven't, as a nation, owned up to our complicity (active and passive) in all of this, and we have certainly not earned the right to gawk at their grieving families, or present them as an implicit indictment of the war. Sure, the tide has turned against the war, but four years too late.

The latest thing in liberal circles—and I can't say I disapprove of the trend—is to castigate the whole country for complicity, instead of laying all the blame on Bush. James Carroll's excellent op-ed Monday was a good example. But I found a more succinct one in this week's Ted Rall cartoon in The Dig:


As for this new practice of putting the teasers below the flag. Maybe they have been slipping it in now and again, and I just haven't noticed until now. I'll admit I don't generally get the paper in paper form, although I do enjoy perusing the paper in paper form when there's one handy. Like a lot of folks nowadays I read it online, so it doesn't matter all that much to me what the printed page looks like, but it's the principle of the thing, innit?

At least they're not ads, although that would be the next logical step.