The effects of the drone war as illustrated by neoclassical painting? I'm not sure you'd expect that, but the ramping up of drone killing by the USA which is a consequence of two imperatives; the need to cut costs and the difficulty of handling prisoners legally, has an alarming neoclassical side effect. Apparently the main problem with this insidious development is that people at home no longer care about it, therefore they won't demonstrate about it, therefore they won't vote against the president in the polls. People only care, it seems, when the body bags of their own land back on their doorstep. This is a shocking demonstration of our need to confront the real, and Claude understood it well enough back in the C17 with this Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake (detail above) where we see the effects of death cool off as the news floats in to the distance. A precursory phenomenon to our own future trauma is the disbelief that descended on the German people at large at the close of WW2, when they were confronted with the existence of the extermination camps, since beforehand, it was possible to not believe in mass extermination when it was hidden away in the forests.
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