One of the important features of public culture today is that globalization has become a social fact. For example, economic historians can document that the world has had a global economy for centuries, but now people know that they live in a global economy, and many people know this, and they know it not only in New York and London but also in Peoria and Bangladesh. At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that this shared social knowledge carries with it a common map of the world. To the contrary, another interesting facet of the 21st century is the emergence of multiple geographies. One still acquires a geography of nation states, but amidst that there are diasporic communities, media capitols, free trade zones, black markets, clashing civilizations, greater Kurdistan, the New Caliphate, and perhaps someday the fabled Northwest Passage.

This melange of borders, flows, and visions is not yet a social fact, but it is not merely academic speculation either. One sign that the maps are changing is that the terms First World/Second World/Third World are becoming increasingly outdated, although not because hierarchies are being leveled. Let me suggest that something else is being leveled, and offer one suggestion for a more up to date map. What matters today for a significant number of people is whether you live in Rubble World:

This photograph is from Baghdad. But it also could have been in Beirut, like this one:

Or, most recently, Gaza:

These are without a doubt among the leaders in the field, but let’s not forget Grozny and Sarejevo, among others. And then there are the periodic terrorist bombings in Kashmir, New Delhi, Sri Lanki, or wherever, not to mention Ground Zero in New York. Nor should we limit ourselves to the devastation of war, as the combination of poverty and political failure allows quakes, typhoons, and plain old shoddy construction due to corruption to add to the pile. Type “rubble” into Google Image and you can begin your guided tour of Rubble World.

If you take that tour you might notice that many of the images look very similar to the three here. Rubble World doesn’t start from scratch: there has to be something to wreck first. Like war itself, it is parasitic. The curious thing is that it seems as if everything still is pretty much as before–say, as if only the facade of the building has been blown off, or the wallboards and mattresses rearranged. The blast exposes building infrastructure or leaves people gathered together on the ground as if they were in a house, but you might think that everything important remains in place. That is a lie, of course. The buildings have to be condemned, and rebuilding can’t even begin until the all the work and expense of clearing the site has been completed. We are looking at skeletons, not at disruption; not a setback but ruin.

And so we get to the people–those still alive, that is. Rubble World is not uninhabited. As in many of its images, the people here are reduced to being spectators to their own desolation. There are many such scenes, whether of a few people in the urban ravine or of a small gathering of neighbors trying out their new status as squatters on their own property. Each might be a sign of hope. The urban space can be rebuilt only if citizens survey the damage and begin to talk about how to to organize. The local community can only survive if people remain attentive to one another amidst danger. Even so, these people have all been idled. The loss is not limited to an apartment building or a house, but spreads like a blast pattern across the entire economy. Rubble World includes some stories of renewal, but the total losses of productivity, prosperity, and hope itself are staggering. By documenting architectural wreakage, these images reveal how civil society is being laid bare, torn apart, damaged, and dispersed. As that happens, the rubble is sure to spread.

Photographs by Associated Press; Getty Images; Abid Katib/Getty Images.

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I kid you not.

I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to the intersections of aesthetics and politics, but I was struck dumb by the Miss Landmine project.

Others will react with much more clarity. At the least, the issues regarding gender and commodification are, well, explosive. They even have a T-shirt bearing the logo:

Still a princess, and perhaps Hallmark will want to get into the act. Hell, there already may be sections for Landmine Survivors in the card shops in Angola. Or around Army bases in the US. And who am I to tell them how to get past their trauma?

After reading the manifesto, turning on the theme song (yes, the theme song), and looking at the contestants, I started to get the point. But I’d still be interested in what others think about this weird, Angolan-Norwegian attempt to confront the continuing toll of war in our time.

And if you are interested, voting remains open until April 3.

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Barbara Ehrenreich brings her book Blood Rites to a brilliant close by advancing the idea that war is a meme: a self-replicating pattern of behavior. She highlights Richard Dawkins’ observation that a meme can propagate as it does “‘simply because it is advantageous to itself.'” Her conclusion follows: “If war is a ‘living’ thing, it is a kind of creature that, by its very nature, devours us. To look at war, carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.”

Let’s follow Ehrenreich’s injunction to look at war carefully, and do so while aware of another implication of her thesis. If war is a dynamic entity committed to its own survival, then it will adapt to elude environmental changes. Peace, prosperity, education, globalization, and similar threats need to be outflanked or infiltrated. One possible adaptation is to shift “backwards” from organized war between nation states to more primitive forms of violence. Two examples follow.

You are looking at a grown man clubbing a boy. The man is strong and practiced: holding the boy with one hand as he swings the club with full force. He keeps his eye on the target as he bring his weight into the blow. With any luck he’ll bring the thigh bone or the wrist, perhaps both. The boy can see it coming. His face is already a mask of pain and terror as he leaps to try to avoid the blow. The predator has him firmly in his grasp, however. The boy is young and thin and hobbled by his clothes; he could not be a threat to the man or to the state. He looks like at rabbit caught in the clutches of a wolf. Another member of the pack looks on approvingly.

The Chicago Tribune Photos of the Day caption said, “In Karachi, an anti-government demonstrator was struck by a police officer. There were protests in several cities around Pakistan.” The distortion is obscene. They might as well have said, “What else are the police to do when the entire county is under attack by those who would tear down the government?” Of course, the protests were on behalf of democratic government and justice, and the boy is not a demonstrator but a kid on the street who was most likely guilty only of acting like a citizen. The caption does get one thing right: state terrorism of the sort seen here–a common but mild version of the beast–is one of the forms of war in our time.

And here’s another:

I can hardly bear to look at this photo. If the young man on the ground isn’t dead yet, he’s about to be. Again, another male throws his full strength into the act of violence. His eyes are focused directly on the target–the head that is about to be crushed. Again, a bystander looks on with interest. They are in Kenya, but they could be many places in the world today. The guy with the rock is a Luo, and he is another strand in the propagation of war. This is another old pattern that has been resurgent in the past decades: rampaging violence let loose by the collapse of political and social order into anarchy. The state may still be a player behind the scenes, but in its place there is sheer destruction, mutilation, torture, and murder as done by roving bands of rogue males.

Either way boys are being ruined. And that may be the least of it. A third form of war’s predation today is the horrific rape and mutilation of many thousands of women throughout Africa. I don’t yet have the stomach to report on that. For the moment, let it be enough to look carefully at the two photographs above. They record the news but also show something worse. As “war” becomes contained, violence spreads like an epidemic. A new century is the scene for ancient forms of violence as the beast continues to devour its human prey.

Photographs by Rizwan Tabassum and Yasuyoshi Chiba, Agence France-Presse–Getty Images. The first image also brings to mind this photograph from the American civil rights movement. That image provoked strong public criticism of the white resistance in the South. But who protests similar violence on the streets of the world today?

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World news coverage of late has been filled with images of violence in the streets. Typically these are photographs of demonstrators battling with police or rival mobs. Sometimes there are scenes of looting or beating–often of the police laying into someone–or of spectators such as children or shopkeepers looking anxiously at the still unfolding madness around them. For all that, the many images look much the same, as if there were one endless demonstration playing out continually across the world, one long-running political spectacle in the theater of the Arab/African/Asian/Latin American street.

That may be why this image is at once familiar and yet scandalous:

Instead of the usual backdrop of the demonstration along an otherwise busy city street, here we see real wreakage amidst what otherwise was already a slum. And instead of the stock characters of earnest citizens and bullying cops, or outraged citizens and cautious cops, or mob frenzy and state terror, or any other political scenario, here we see a man exulting in the sheer ecstasy of destruction. An obscene truth is being revealed: what is violence and burning and horror to some is for others an experience of raw freedom as it can be perversely but powerfully known only through violent revenge and ruin. The sound track should be the Ode to Joy.

We’re not supposed to see that truth, and many others appear once that Pandora’s box is opened. Violence persists not only because so many are denied so much by so few, but also because it remains the best shot some have at feeling powerful. Freedom comes from democracy and prosperity, but the experience of freedom can be had by destroying those that have what others lack. I could go on, but you get the point. And that’s why it also is important to look at the next photo:

The Washington Post caption says, “A woman finds the body of her brother lying by the roadside in Nairobi’s Mathare suburb.” This also is a terrible picture. We see not violence but its aftermath of death. And, as if it matters, useless, sad, lonely, ignoble death. But that doesn’t matter. A person–a brother, son, friend, and more–has been destroyed. The terrible absence of the head could be an optical illusion, but one fears the worst. The boulder, which could have killed him and seems to be his severed head, lays there as if the reality of the body alone weren’t enough to communicate the harsh brutality and finality of his murder.

This also is a photo about softness, however. Other than the hard-edged boulder, the scene features draped clothing, a woman’s torso, her companion’s kindness, the lavender umbrella, and, of course, the elegiac rain. Nature has obliged to express the appropriate tone for a scene of mourning. And she is mourning, and by standing there without touching her brother she already is giving herself over to the utter helplessness that death lays on the living. Yet by being there and bearing witness to her brother and her loss, she stands for the return of human decency.

The joy in the first photo comes from hate. Hate is something harder, deeper, less changeable, and far more dangerous than other emotions. It also has no place in politics. Hate is in fact one border of the political: You can struggle to live with others, even to dominate them, or you can hate and kill them. Likewise, hate is felt toward groups, while anger is felt toward individuals (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1382a). By seeing the senseless loss created by an individual laying dead on the street, the second photo returns us to a world of persons who deserve justice or protection but not violence.

Grief may be a deeply political emotion. Even though no one can reach the depths of pain felt by the individual stricken with grief, it calls forth empathy and can move us all to cross the borders of our estrangement from one another. It was grief, not killing or victory or glory that finally brought Achilles out of his rage against the Trojans to a moment of decency. Perhaps the recognition of grief can remind us that violence is not just another means for political expression. It is how we end up dancing in Hell.

Photographs by Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images and Boniface Mwangi/Bloomberg News.

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No one is moving, nothing is happening, and the scene is unexceptional, yet I find this photograph strangely poignant.

There is something serene here, yet not with the promise of safety. Although the men are sitting quietly, almost as if posed for portraits, they remain soldiers in full combat gear with weapons drawn. But somehow they are, for a moment, seemingly at peace, just sitting and content with that. They may be waiting for something to do, yet the coming of evening bathes the scene in quietude. They could be at Vespers.

The emotional resonance may be very simple: men sit calmly in the evening, self-contained, not asking for anything as the dark moves in. But other soldiers are hovering above them, and those sitting are in front of a house that belongs to others. So the emotional tone becomes complicated. The scene contains rural domesticity and military force, modern electrical lines and ancient designs in the brickwork, warm colors and deep isolation. The men seem at peace, but they each sit alone within a very small place that exists only for a moment, only until the war starts up again.

The photo accompanied a New York Times report on 9 U.S. deaths from a bomb that went off while the soldiers were searching a house. The photo’s caption said, “American soldiers briefly occupied a house in Diyala Province on Wednesday as American forces hunted for insurgents and bombs.” That’s the same province where the 9 were killed. These troops might be staying “briefly,” but not so little that they haven’t posted guards and a machine gun on the roof. This clearly is dangerous duty: they could be attacked or they could be sitting above a bomb about to be detonated. In that context, just to sit quietly might be a moment of grace.

Photograph by Jehad Nga/New York Times.

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This could be a group of good ole boys out for an afternoon on the lake, drinking beer and “buzzing” those who come from out of town for the summer with their big yachts, fancy cars and lake front condos. But as it turns out it is one of five similar open-air speed boats commanded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz, taking what President Bush characterized as “provocative” action against the U.S.S. Hopper. The Hopper is an 8,000 ton guided-missile destroyer equipped with M240 machine guns that fire 10 armor-piercing projectiles per minute, and on this particular day it was accompanied by two other guided-missile ships, including the U.S.S. Port Royal, a 9,000 ton cruiser that is capable of firing Tomahawk Missiles. If you ask me it wouldn’t be much of a fight, even if, as the Pentagon reports, the speed boats can carry machine guns. But, of course, if you are the Captain of a U.S. vessel in the Persian Gulf you probably can’t be too careful. And so the question is, how did this event become an “incident”? And what do the pictures that have been used to report the incident tell us about it?

The photograph, released by the U.S. Navy and featured by nearly all of the national news outlets tells us almost nothing. It could be a snapshot taken anywhere in the world, and so its value as visual evidence is virtually nil. Hence, the U.S. Navy also released a four minute, 20- second videotape taken from the deck of the Hopper which purports to contextualize the image above and thus corroborate the claim of provocative action. That videotape, however, is shot at long distance and shows very little. And what it does show is jumpy, grainy, and tonally muted:

Indeed, much of the imagery in the videotape recalls the photographs we were shown of the three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats attacking the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 and used as positive visual evidence to grant President Johnson the authority to deploy military forces in Vietnam. We now know that if there was a provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin that it was almost assuredly made by the Maddox, and so we have to be not only somewhat skeptical about the truth value of such photographs, but also about the ways in which they are used as visual arguments.

The Bush administration’s usage of the photographs from the Gulf of Hormuz to suggest that Iran is being provocative relies upon two optics or visual logics, one drawing upon a Cold War consciousness and the other drawing upon the logic of the “suicide bomber.” The Cold War optic recalls the ability of the modern, technologically sophisticated, military to observe the world from afar as a means of identifying and assessing threats to national security. Think here of Adlai Stevenson challenging Ambassador Zorin of the USSR with satellite photographs of missile silos in Cuba in 1962. Or more recently, of course, we have Colin Powell using similar photographic evidence to prove the existence of WMDs in Iraq. One case turned out to be true, the other false, but what is important is the underlying assumption of the positive truth content of such visual evidence which presumes to show what otherwise could not be seen. Of course, this is nonsense. Nevertheless, recent videotape from the Gulf of Hormuz operates in precisely this optic. Shot at great distance, we never actually see individuals, let alone incontrovertibly threatening behavior, but that actually works in the favor of the underlying optic of the Cold War logic, for in a sense it is what cannot ordinarily be seen that is the threat, and so the speed boats function as a cipher for a presumably hidden, greater menace.

In this instance, the threat that can’t be seen is animated by the more contemporary optic of the “suicide bomber.” Suicide bombers operate in the light of day, not the cloak of darkness (as was the myth of the Cold War spy). They can be anyone, and indeed, their very visibility makes them effectively invisible (hidden in plain sight), and thus all the more a threat. Add to this the discursive connection between “suicide bombers” and “Middle Eastern Islamic fanatics” and the picture of the speed boats takes on a somewhat different resonance. All the more so in the wake of the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, a self-professed terrorist organization, in 2000. And to accentuate the point the U.S. Navy added an audio recording to its version of the videotape that has someone threatening to bomb the Hopper. We are now told that the Navy doesn’t know where that voice came from and, indeed, cannot confirm that it came from the speedboats. And more recent videotape released by the Iranian government suggests that it is unlikely that it came from the speedboats. But, again, the point is that the photographs are framed within the optic of the suicide bomber that encourages the viewer to see the ordinary and everyday as threats.

The final question then, has to be, did the speedboats perpetrate a threatening and provocative action that would warrant treating this as an international incident – for that is clearly what the Bush administration seems to be trying to make out of it? The Iranian videotape seems to suggest that the speedboats were doing no more than seeking to ascertain the identity of the U.S. ships and to determine their intention. One might imagine the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard doing something similar in the waters between Cuba and Miami. The U.S. Navy reports that the ships had been questioned earlier in the day by the Iranians and that the U.S. ships were clearly marked, thus suggesting that the action had to be provocative in a warlike sense. An alternate possibility is that the Revolutionary Guard was simply trying to harass the U.S. armada occupying its home waters, itself no small threat to Iran. As a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry noted, “[This] is something normal that takes place now and then for each party.” And what is that normal behavior? Could it be, that what we were witnessing is something like the political version of trash talk? An international version of the masculine bravado designed to distract and annoy one’s opponent in a contest while beating one’s own chest? If that is what we mean by “provocative,” so be it, but it is hardly warlike behavior that might warrant military retaliation. And to be sure, the fact remains that no shots were fired and no one was hurt.

The bigger point here, of course, is to remember the sense in which making this a persuasive and compelling international incident seems to rely upon the visual evidence. But once we identify the underlying optics that animate an interpretation of these photographs and videos as provocative action, it is only too easy to see their particular enactments for the fallacies that they are.

Photo Credits: U.S. Navy/Defense Department

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Of course not. Where would the movie industry be without Saw, Hostel, and similar delights? So it might come as a surprise to learn that the Motion Picture Association of America has censored this movie poster:

According to Variety, the Association was put off by the hood. We can’t have children seeing a prisoner wearing a hood, can we?One wonders where to begin. Will the MPAA also be firing off a letter to the Bush administration protesting their treatment of prisoners? Since the hood is seen via a photograph of can actual event (and not an illustration or a staged image of a fictional scene), one might ask why the MPAA is prohibiting visual documentary–indeed, depiction of the practice of detention that is the subject of the film. And if children are to be protected from seeing hooded prisoners, does that mean that we should also censor the daily newspapers that have been carrying such photos for the past several years? If so, we also had better protect those tender eyes from this photograph, which received a World Press Photo Award in 2003:

There are two sides to the normalization of violence in the US. On the one hand, fictional protrayals of beatings, rape, torture, and murder are standard fare in the culture of popular entertainment (TV, film, video games). The viewing public is constantly rewarded for suspending disbelief and ethical revulsion about the conduct of violence; just play along and you get all the pleasures of the show. On the other hand, actual violence being perpetrated by the government is minimized, sanitized, or outright censored. Let it not be said that the MPAA does anything in half measures.

Second photograph by AP/Jean-Marc Bouju. Thanks to Steve Perry at The Daily Mole for the heads up. Additional links are available at Movie City Indie.

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