The stark symbolism of U.S. POW-MIA Flag is self-evident. The guard tower, barbed wire and silhouette combine to invoke a feeling of dread and hopelessness. Though he probably represents “Every POW-MIA”, does the silhouette depict an actual person? If so, who?
It’s an icon. It’s every man who has ever been the victim of these dreadful circumstances.
It’s a Japanese-American, put into an internment camp in WWII because of white bigotry.
Ah sheeshe Lump.Let’s don’t go there here.Start a thread and we’ll talk,but even I resisted any thing here. (and the word 'icon’was just sitting there)The guy on the POW-MIA could be white,black,old line family, 1stgeneration,immigrant,old,young.Phd,dropout. When you make one for the victims of that action you’ll have to include women and children too.
Nick, I understand it is an icon and what it represents. Often, though, artists base use real people as subjects (Supposedly, Michaelangelo used a despised cardinal as the model for Satan on the Sistine Chapel ceiling).
I was wondering if the artist(designer) used a real person and whether that person was a POW? I’ve not been able to learn who the artist even was, so I put it to the TM.
Thanks for covering my six, John.
It’s an icon for the empty set. Hence the feeling of hopelessness and dread.
Seriously, there’s absolutely zero evidence that Hanoi kept any remaining U.S. prisoners after we pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. We’ve got files on all the 2000 or so MIAs from Vietnam, and all of them were ‘missing’ in the sense of, say, being on a plane that crashed and burned in the mountains, and the remains of the crew were never located. (Jungle, mountains - big surprise.)
People forget that, at the end of WWII, we had tens of thousands of MIAs in the European theatre alone – and that’s a war that ended with us in control of the battlefield.
The whole POW/MIA ‘movement’ has been a bunch of people who haven’t been able to let go of the fact that we lost the Vietnam war. That’s all.