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Lest We Forget

The third Monday of April is celebrated as Patriot’s Day in commemoration of the battle of Lexington and Concord.  Since 1998 it has coincided with In Memory Day, a memorial remembrance held at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for those who “died as a result of the Vietnam War, but whose deaths do not fit DOD criteria for inclusion upon the wall.”  It is hard to know just how many of the 3.5 million men and women who served in Vietnam fit in this category, but the In Memory Day Honor Roll now includes 1,800 names, most of them having died as a result of the effects of “Agent Orange exposure or emotional wounds that never healed.”

There are numerous photographs of the event but the one above of an anonymous veteran putting his hands on the Wall is perhaps the most visually provocative. Shot from behind and in medium close distance, the polished black surface of the granite blends almost perfectly with the black t-shirt and hat, inviting the momentary illusion that the veteran is literally one with the Wall.  Only the glare and shadows near the very top of the image disrupt the spell by just barely illuminating the names etched into the Memorial and thus invoking the linear perspective that enables a degree of visual separation between the two; at the same time, however, that very perspective complicates our understanding of the relationship between those who died in combat and those who presumably survived the conflict only to contribute to the “body count” in a different register.  That tension is further underscored visually by the way in which the orangish tint of his arms and hands draw our attention from the black Wall to the orange legend on the back of his t-shirt, a stark verbal reminder that the devastating human costs of the Vietnam War have extended—and continue to extend—long past the final battle and retreat.  The red, white, and blue matting that frames the photo he holds up to the wall is an equally poignant reminder of where the responsibility lies—not with individual soldiers, anonymous or etched in stone, but with the nation state that fostered the war in the first place.

If the photograph was simply a journalistic representation of a particular memorial event, or more, even an evocative representation of the continuing sufferance of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it would easily deserve to be displayed throughout the land for citizens and leaders alike to see and contemplate.  But the context for interpreting the meaning of the image cannot be so easily contained, especially at our current moment in history as the war in Iraq morphs into the war in Afghanistan, and so the photograph speaks in more than a simple or literal voice.

By official estimates there have been 4,274 U.S. military deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003 plus an additional 678 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan.  But if our Vietnam experience has taught us anything it is that such literal “body counts” are only the beginning. By even the most conservative estimates 1 in 6 (or 16%) of all returning veterans from Iraq suffer from some form of PTSD (i.e., “emotional wounds that never heal”) that has been linked to excessive levels of obesity, alcoholism, and drug addiction, as well as “epidemic” levels of suicide—with far too few getting needed or effective treatment.  As in the past, it is often difficult to see such psychic wounds, or worse, it is all too easy to see past them; and yet, as the photograph above seems to suggest, the degrees of separation between combat deaths and other forms of the “body count” is often something of an illusion that we retain at our own peril.

And so the photograph takes on the quality of an allegory for the complexity of war’s costs; indeed, perhaps it is a visual analog to George Santayana’s warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty IMages

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Sight Gag: Pun Intended

Credit: Craig Damrauer/NYT

The “Sight Gag” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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The Beauty of War Through a Child's Eye

This past week we honored America’s veterans, but except for a few conventional news stories and ritualistic photo ops the day passed with little notice or fanfare, eclipsed in the national consciousness by trying to figure out who President-elect Obama will appoint in his new administration and political wrangling over how to address the so-called “financial crisis.”  And what has been missed (or is it repressed?) in all of this has been the 150,000 U.S. troops who continue to occupy Iraq (and who are likely to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2011); the 278 U.S. military deaths and 1,500 + U.S. military casualties that have occurred in Iraq since January of 2008; or the astonishing admission by the Veteran Administration that on average a staggering 18 veterans commit suicide everyday.

It is against this background that I was stuck by this AP  photograph that showed up in a number of on-line newspaper slide shows this past weekend.

The image is of a young girl as she “looks at a life-size painting of  men from the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division” that is part of the Lima Company Memorial at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Lima Company suffered some of the heaviest casualties of any unit fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the death of 22 brave marines in a very short period of time in 2005.  There is no question but that their service and sacrifice needs to be sanctified in public memory and yet there is something altogether unsettling about this photograph. Part of this (dis)ease is no doubt a recognition of how an innocent child—and a young girl at that—serves as the cipher for orienting the model citizen towards the nation-state as a gendered and infantilized spectator.

Children, we are told, “should be seen and not heard.”  Notice here how the young girl silently directs the national gaze upon the marines even as she holds their attention.  The colors of her hair, sweatshirt, and pants coordinate perfectly with the red, white, and blue of the flag that she holds and thus cast her as the metonymic (and fetishistic) embodiment of the nation-state.  Her shadow marks the corporeal distance of the passive spectator from the painting no less than the candles, boots, and photographs that frame it.  There can thus be no mistaking that the young girl is a passive spectator clearly separated from the scene in the painting—seeing and not speaking or acting.  And so, we must wonder, is she a child citizen or the citizen-as-child?

There is no final answer to this question, of course, but the smiling and approving gaze of the marines seems to suggest a paternal protectiveness of the child/citizen/flag that resonates with normative assumptions of the public as an innocent and passive child and all of that is troubling for those who might imagine a vibrant democratic public culture.  But what if the child was not in the photograph? How else then might we understand the painting as part of a public memorial?

This life size canvas, it turns out, is one of  eight panels portraying all 22 marines from Lima Company painted by Anita Miller, a liturgical artist motivated  “to paint images that open the viewer’s eyes to the beauty of the world.”  In each of these eight panels we have portraits of two or three of the deceased marines and in each instance we are presented with a smiling and caring countenance.  And there can be no doubt that the images offer comfort to those who knew and loved these men as friends and family members within the contours of private life. But when cast as a  war memorial the appeal to the spiritual beauty of the individuals doing the fighting diverts attention from the sheer ugliness that is combat regardless of the cause. War’s “beauty”—if that is the right word—is terrible, and that is a lesson that we forget at our peril.

And so, once again back to the photograph and the young child who gazes upon the scene with what we can only imagine is beatific awe and admiration.  And the question here must be, is this the best way to transport the civic virtues of sacrifice and service from one generation to the next?  I am not so Pollyanna as to believe that wars will never be needed—though hope springs eternal— but I never want my children to think of war as “part of the beauty of the world” or that those who do the fighting do so with a “smile” upon their face.  We owe the men of Lima Company more than that.

Photo Credit:  Ernest Coleman, AP Photo/The Enquirer

 

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The Visual Codes of Racism

Racism is the American tragedy, and as the current political campaign reminds us, it comes in many shades and colors.  Sometimes it is explicit, as when a Georgia bar owner visually compared Senator Obama to a playful monkey, or more recently when a San Bernadino Republican group distributed Obama Bucks adorned with visual racist stereotypes linking African Americans with watermelon and fried chicken.  At other times it is a bit more subtly coded, as when a nationally syndicated political pundit emphasizes “blood equity” rather than “race or gender” as a sign of one’s fitness to be president, or when the current housing crisis is blamed on the efforts of ACORN, a “community organizing group,” to facilitate mortgages for “low income groups” and  “inner city” residents rather than, say, on those within the financial industry who targeted such communities for subprime loans in the first place.  All forms of racism are troubling, especially for a nation dedicated to social and political equality, but in some respects these more subtly coded versions are all the more pernicious because they operate under a thin veil of interpretive ambiguity that enables such advocates to absolve themselves of the responsibility to acknowledge (let alone to justify) the insidious implications of the views that they espouse.

Consider, for example, this photograph published in an online slide show at the Washington Post this past week:

The caption reads: “Police officers accompanied by police dogs, stand guard near supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama outside a campaign stop of U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain in Sandusky, Ohio.”  At first blush, everything seem reasonable enough.  After all, presidential candidates need security, and crowd control is a valid concern for local police departments, even when the purpose of a large event does not engender the high visibility of a hotly contested political campaign. The presence of the police at such an event is a legitimate usage of state authority to maintain public order that should not even raise our eyebrows.  But of course there is something disturbing about the scene captured by this photograph and it warrants our careful attention.

A defender of the scene might argue that the photograph clearly marks the tension between “security” and “liberty” that is symptomatic of political culture in a liberal-democratic polity. The pivot point, one might note, is the yellow police line that marks the often tenuous division between public order and chaos. Shot from an oblique angle, the image distantiates the viewer from easily aligning with either the police officer and dog (the signs of public order) or the Obama supporters (the signs of potential disorder); it thus invites and implies a degree of viewer objectivity that encourages us to treat such tensions as regular and ordinary: protest is legitimate within bounds, but so too is the exercise of state authority, and as long as the two operate in careful equipoise all is well.  But, of course, such an analysis begs the larger question:  Why the guard dogs?  What is about this particular event that warrants the presence of dogs trained to kill upon command to guard the public welfare against what appear to be peaceful and orderly Obama supporters? 

There are no doubt answers to this question that deny any racist implications to the image or the scene it records, but as with those who invoke specific racial stereotypes only to deny any racist implications to their comments, such responses willfully  ignore the history and symbols of American racism writ large.  And one prominent symbol of that racism has been the use of dogs to manage and control African American populations.  Dogs were regularly used to hunt down escaped slaves or to otherwise keep unruly slaves “in their place” in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in our own era they have been used by the police to intimidate and control nonviolent black marchers and protestors as during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  The presence of the dogs at this rally thus function, at least in part, as an altogether insensitive symbolic reference to the “unruly” slave and the “rabble” of  black protesters, particularly as the protestors/supporters are divided from the forces of order by a police line that implies that they stand on the other side of the law.  But lest I be accused of a too simple “political correctness,” there is more, for the presumed legitimacy of the very presence of guard dogs—and why else would the police use them but for the belief that they were necessary to maintain the peace—contributes to a culture of racial fear and anxiety that manifests itself in comments like those reported recently on NPR by concerned white citizens who worry that if Senator Obama loses the election there will be race riots across the nation.

Of course, the presence of a single symbol of racism at one political rally will not, by itself, animate or sustain a culture of racism and racial anxiety—or at least not for very long.  The problem is that at some point the accumulation and concatentation of such symbols, explicit and subtle alike, reinforce and eventually naturalize one another.  And when that happens it becomes increasingly difficult to resist the power and appeal of their “common sense” pretensions.  The only antidote is to develop the verbal and visual literacy necessary to understand and interpret such codes for what they are and to be guided, in the end, by what Martin Luther King referred to as the “true meaning” of our national creed that “all men are created equal.”  

Photo Credit:   Brian Snyder/Reuters

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The More Things Change …

What you are looking are members of the Russian Olympic Woman’s basketball team just prior to an exhibition match against the United States in Hainilng, China.  The young women in the front with her hand on her chest and her eyes fixed above is Becky Hammon, a former All American at Colorado State University and currently a member of the top-ranked San Antonio Silver Stars of the WNBA.  She is also a native of South Dakota and, as of this past year, a naturalized citizen of Russia.  There has been something of a small controversy brewing here, as some such as U.S. basketball coach Anne Donovan, have accused her of being unpatriotic, but Hammon’s more numerous defenders have been quick to point out that there is nothing new about naturalized citizens playing in the Olympics, and the simple fact is that she was not originally invited to try out for Team USA and this was her one opportunity to participate in the Olympics.  And truth to tell, the look on her face as the Star Spangled Banner plays tells you what uniform she would much rather be wearing, and given the intensity of the gaze—in contrast to the bored and nonchalant indifference of her teammates—I doubt it is simply because it would give her a much better chance of winning a gold medal. This is not a picture of an unpatriotic U.S. citizen regardless of the uniform she is wearing.  Indeed, it displays the passionate love of country with a powerful and subtle nuance that reminds us of the tension between nationalism and individualism.

There is more to this picture, however, than the pained and conflicted loyalties of a single, individual athlete, however pronounced that might be.  For it also stands as a marker of the changes that have taken place in world of geopolitics over the past 30 years.  In the late 1970s the Cold War between the United States and Russia (then the USSR) was at full tilt and the tensions animated by ideological differences between western capitalism and Soviet style communism were no more evident than in the politics of the 1980 Winter and Summer Olympic games held respectively in Lake Placid, NY and Moscow, Russia.

The Winter Games came first, and the picture above stands in stark contrast to the most famous image to come from the Lake Placid games of a ragtag collection of U.S. college hockey players who “miraculously” defeated a Soviet team which, by almost any standard, consisted of seasoned and “professional” veterans.

The present day image comes from before the sporting event not after, and so it is marked by a degree of calm and reserve that we would not expect to find following an upset victory, but the larger point to be made is that the contemporary photograph would never have been taken in 1980 (and if taken surely not featured in the NYT), precisely because it would have been anathema to the spirit of the times—a Cold War world where national citizenship trumped all.  We have no doubt not yet moved fully into the “globalized” world that recognizes the legitimacy of post-national citizenship—and, indeed, we clearly continue to live in a country where at least one version of the cold war optic organized around the notion that walls of national separation and isolation might be a good thing persists— but that such a picture as the one of Hammon could even be taken and featured in a mainstream news outlet suggests at least the possibility of such transformation to a more complex and nuanced sense of citizenship on the worldwide stage.

But there is perhaps one additional point to be made as well.  For while we have a photograph from Lake Placid that helps to foreground the difference between a Cold War world and a post-Cold War world, there is no contrasting image to be found from the subsequent Summer games later that year in Moscow.  The reason, of course, is because the U.S. led a boycott of the Moscow games and no such pictures exist period.  And the reason for that boycott:  in the summer of 1979 the Soviet Union had invaded …. Afghanistan. There are differences, to be sure, as we are tracking “terrorists” and not seeking to oppress “freedom fighters,” and yet, the more things change …

Photo Credit:  Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

 

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A Dream Deferred

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This is the vantage point from which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed his “Dream” in 1963 of a world in which “little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with the little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” I have listened to King’s oration hundreds of times and I have published essays on that moment in history; and more, I have taught the speech in classes more times than I can remember and I never—not ever!—fail to be deeply affected by the sound and the power of the words. But all of that paled in comparison to standing in the exact spot that King stood, literally cast in the shadow of Lincoln and gazing out upon the broad vista of the National Mall with the reflecting pond leading one’s sight to the Washington Monument. The Mall was not entirely full on the day I was there, but I could easily imagine it packed with a quarter of a million people, sitting and standing in common cause for racial equality guided by King’s eloquent tones and his vision of a “beloved community.” It was a truly spiritual moment.

And then I saw this photograph in the Washington Post and it brought me up short. The clouds are a steely grey and somewhat foreboding, as they engulf the top of the Washington Monument and seem to be moving forward to enshroud the entire Mall, and by extension the nation that it stands in for. There is no sun, and so Lincoln’s shadow is nowhere to be seen. But most of all, there are no crowds of people—black, white, brown, yellow … —joining hands or otherwise; what we have instead is something of a civic and social void underscored by the lone microphone stand that substitutes metonymically for the absent King—the eloquent voice of our national social conscience. Shot straight on and from ground level the microphone stand is placed in linear perspective with the Washington Monument and seems to dwarf it in size. And what it made me consider is how seductive the romantic mythos of the National Mall can be with its magnificent views and enormous monuments, and yet how symbolically empty (and even ominous) that mythos can be when there is no one to speak for social justice or when there is no one there to listen.

Photo Credit: Tim Sloan-AFP/Getty Images

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Domesticating Dissent

When I ask my students to make a list of iconic photographs they almost invariably recall the image of the two black athletes at the 1968 Olympics with their hands raised in a “black power” salute.

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They rarely know the names of the athletes, nor can they typically recall the particular track event that was being celebrated or who won what medal, but the image itself seems to be seared in their collective consciousness. And why not? Reproductions of the photograph of this moment of political dissent during a time of social and civic turmoil are ubiquitous. Indeed, one can barely read about the 1968 Olympics without the picture showing up, and indeed it has been the subject of several movies including an HBO documentary film titled “Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games.” It was prominently displayed in the movie Remember the Titans and it is available for purchase as a mural-sized poster and as a fine art print, as well as stenciled on t-shirts; a rendition of it was cast as a larger than life size statue and is on display at San Jose State University were the two athletes went to school. Both of the men—Tommie Smith and John Carlos—have recently published autobiographies about their experiences featuring their moment on the victory stand.

Given the notoriety of the photograph it is of little surprise that Smith and Carlos have embarked on a year long lecture tour in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the “black power” salute and the significance of the moment of political dissent that it depicts. What is surprising—if not altogether disappointing—is how the NYT chose to cover the lecture tour as it made its way to the Black National Theater in Harlem last Wednesday. The Times article is titled “Enduring Image Leads to Enduring Dispute” and the story it reports focuses on the petty and personal jealousies that have vexed the lives of Smith and Carlos, once good friends who now “harbor deep-seated and previously unexpressed resentment toward each other.”

As with so many iconic photographs – think of the migrant mother, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, the Times Square Kiss, the Kent State massacre, accidental napalm, and the list goes on – popular interest seems quickly to shift from the key public issues represented and negotiated by such images to the subsequent private lives of the individuals being depicted, i.e., who are they? what became of them? And so on. And in the process, the complexities of significant political events central to the history of liberal-democratic public culture fade deeper and deeper into the background, as a neo-liberal interest in the life of the individual trumps the public interests of a democratic polity. Or at least that is how such images are typically treated by the national media.

This cultural and ideological revisionism is marked by the photograph that accompanies the NYT report on Smith and Carlos:

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The first thing to note is that the image signifies the tension between “then” and “now” while putting the accent on the present moment. The point is emphasized spatially as the contemporary Carlos (on the left) and Smith (on the right) dominate the image. But note too that the two men are cast in the light and seen in living color, while the past that spawned their relationship is represented by black and white photographs and cast in dark shadows. The author of the article bemoans the “inevitable” moment when “idealism” (then, black and white) gives way to “reality” (now, in color), but the focus in the article on the contemporary travails of these two men (now more private individuals than citizens) seems reinforced by the photograph which treats the past as a antique and fading memory. One might wish for more attention to the idealism of that earlier time, perhaps emphasizing a truly “Olympian” moment when at least some athletes were guided more by issues of social justice—and its attendant risks—than by private self-interest. But I think that there is a different and more important point to be made here, for the photograph above also functions to domesticate the original image of the “black power salute.”

Notice how the contemporary photograph puts the black and white image of King closer to the foreground than the iconic image of Smith and Carlos, even though chronologically the later image is more recent. Our present day remembrances of King thus become the frame through which we are encouraged to view and interpret the original image of the two athletes, and accordingly it is the standard of King’s Christianized, “beloved community” that becomes the marker of idealism against which the current day dispute between Carlos and Smith is to be measured (and found lacking). What this ignores is that the 1968 summer Olympics took place nine months after the publication of the Kerner Commission Report, six months after the assassination of Dr. King, and in the midst of increasing concerns that the then so-called “civil rights movement” had lost its political edge and effectivity. And most of all, what it ignores is that the “black power salute” – a phrase which is never once mentioned in the NYT article – constituted a very different and more threatening political idealism than the one we retrospectively affiliate with King’s “dream.”

In short, what we seem to be witnessing is the domestication of a valued photograph that marks and models an important and radical moment of dissent in the life of the polity. The tragedy here is that the “enduring dispute” announced in the title of the NYT article refers to a normalizing, private quarrel between two individuals, and not the more important tension animating our understanding of the relationship between the “civil rights movement” and the “black power movement.”

Photo Credits: Staff Photo/AP, Gabriele Stabile/NYT

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Flag Week: Iwo and Manzanar

On February 19, 1945, the Marines hit the beach at Iwo Jima. A few days later Joe Rosenthal would take the most famous iconic photograph of them all. That image will appear throughout the media this week, and it should be no surprise to see it here:

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That should not be the only flag we remember, however. Three years earlier, but on the same day as the invasion of Iwo, President Roosevelt signed an executive order granting authority to the military to relocate Japanese-American citizens to internment camps. These two stories could not be more contradictory: on foreign soil, men giving their lives so that their country can remain free; in their own country, soldiers imprisoning fellow citizens who were no threat to the liberty broken by their incarceration.So it is that we should look at another image of the American flag:

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This photograph was taken by Dorothea Lange at the internment camp near Manzanar, California. The image captures perfectly the terrible mixture of irony, betrayal, pain, and longing that defines every aspect of this desolate moment in American history.

Two photographs, two flags, two sides of American history. Let’s not forget either one.

Photo Credits: “Flag raising on Iwo Jima.” Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press, February 23, 1945. 80-G-413988 (http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/#iwo).

“Dust storm at this War Relocation Authority center where evacuees of Japanese ancestry are spending the duration.” Dorothea Lange, Manzanar, CA, July 3, 1942. 210-G-10C-839 (http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/#home).

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