Ian Brown writes in Canada’s Globe and Mail about how Abu Ghraib looks to someone immersed in The Iliad. It’s impressionistic — at one point, it’s Europe that’s sulking in its tent, and at another Donald Rumsfeld is the modern stand-in for Achilles — but it’s also splendid.

I, too, have been reading the Robert Fagles translation, which is both muscular and lyrical, and it’s hard not to see the Iraq war through its lens. Homer does something that our accounts of our war have not: He conveys the sweep of the war by showing, one at a time, what happens when a spear strikes flesh encased in thin armor. The descriptions are vivid and concise. After telling us that someone’s “limbs went loose,” Homer will often remind us of where the soldier — each with a name — came from, what used to bring him pleasure, who will cry for him. Not for Homer the stupor of the cinematic long shot.

If our own journalists had shown us more of what war means to the soldiers and civilians who are fighting, dying, suffering, our shock at the photos at Abu Ghraib would not have been so great, although our outrage might be the same. We back at home aren’t even allowed to see the caskets draped in honor, much less the corpses of our dead warriors. The photos from Abu Ghraib were one of the first glimpses we’ve had of what war brings us to. We citizens are being treated as if we’re moral cowards, as if we can’t face the suffering of war.

Where is the reporting that is unafraid to embed itself in reality? Where is the story of the broad sweep of the war that proceeds by talking of people, each of whom has a name? Where is our Homer?

A: On the Simpsons. D’oh.

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