"You are non-persons for the moment, victims without an audience. Get killed and maybe they will notice you."
- George Haddad, a spokesman for a Lebanese militant group, talks to American author Bill Gray and his publisher Charlie Everson in Don DeLillo's novel Mao II (1991)
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Haunting image of rescued Aleppo boy
Syrian opposition activists released a haunting image of a young boy rescued from the aftermath of an airstrike in Aleppo. Video shows the boy sitting inside an ambulance covered in dust and with blood on his face.
Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian child whose image is the latest to capture our attention, was not killed, but he has been noticed.
That makes him different from Alan Kurdi - the last child to transfix us in this way - and from an estimated 10,000 or more children slain in Syria's bloody conflict.
In this age of viral transmission, images of children become a kind of currency, and journalists are often dragged in their wake while trying to put them into a wider context.
A couple of years ago a colleague sent me video of a child being born in the war zone that had been put out by the Raqqa Media Centre, which operates under Islamic State rule. We published a story about that too.
When you work in journalism, there is the nagging awareness that while these images document a tragedy, they are also an attempt to sell a perspective and to start a conversation.
The Aleppo Media Centre which put out the footage of little Omran after his rescue puts out similar images every day, in the hope that one - they know not which - will stop editors in their tracks, be published, galvanise the global public and force international action to resolve the Syrian conflict.
It is the reason why a group of artists in the Syrian town of Kafr Nabl latches on to every trending topic in the West - from the death of James Gandolfini and the shooting of Trayvon Martin to the current craze of Pokemon Go - in an attempt to reach us. They believe that the global community might at some point display the conscience and the wherewithal that their own leaders have not.
So far that perfect sequence - from story to salvation - exists only in their imaginations.
Certainly, some impressionable young Muslims and non-Muslims have been moved by such images to abandon their day-to-day lives and travel to Syria and take up arms. And several foreign countries are arming various parties in the conflict or committing their own military resources to fighting in one direction or another.
But a sustained effort to try and halt the whole military process is absent. Instead we have sporadic flurries of diplomatic activity in New York or Geneva or Vienna, as unpredictable and ultimately as fleeting as the stories about Marwan and Alan and Omran and Afaf.
This may be because Syria simply doesn't rise to top-tier importance in the calculations of great powers. Or it could be because our diplomatic institutions lag far behind our military ones in their power to make a difference. Sometimes I worry that it is because sitting here in the West we have grown to believe that such misery is the normal lot of Arabs or Muslims.
But one thing seems certain - as surely as Omran captures our eyeballs today, he also marks the limits of our concentration and our seriousness when it comes to addressing Syria.
Until the next child comes along.
Maher Mughrabi is Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.