Credit: Mike Lukovitch
Sight Gags” 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.
Last Wednesday the New York Times and ran this this photograph of demonstrators filling a street in the Paris during a one-day national strike organized by the French labor unions.
The photo was front page above the fold but not on the web site at mid-morning (if it had ever been there). For the most part, visual coverage of the strike at the Times and elsewhere focused on the disruption experienced by commuters–in short, on its effect on everyday activity rather than its purpose of affecting national policy. (The unions were protesting a government proposal to raise the retirement ages from 60 to 62 for the minimal pension and from 65 to 67 for a full pension.) Subsequently, coverage of any sort has vaporized, as if the controversy in France had lasted only a day and had no relevance in the US anyway.
I’m not going to discuss the ins and outs of social democracy in France, because this photograph exposes something far more fundamental: the invisibility of labor in the United States. To put it bluntly, to imagine a photograph like this being taken in the US, you might as well be in an alternate universe.
Estimates of the turnout in France range from 1.12 million to 2.5 million people. That is the equivalent of a turnout of roughly 5 million to 11.5 million in the US. Can you imagine what would have to happen to provoke that kind of response across America? Certainly not the rollback of the Social Security retirement age, which recently was pushed back from 65 to 67 with about as much discussion as you would have when changing the clocks to Daylight Savings Time.
In this photograph, however, the massed response to another neoliberal assault the quality of life of ordinary citizens seems entirely to be expected. Although the demonstration stretches into the vanishing point of the picture, as if it were endless, the woman looking down on the crowd isn’t in any way put out of joint by its presence–she might as well be stepping outside to check the weather on a balmy day. And although the woman, like the viewer, is set above the fray by being positioned on the balcony, that viewpoint is also connected with the demonstration by the parallel lines of the balcony and street and by the colors of the red flowers above and orange insignia below. Instead of setting individuals and mass movements at odds with one another, here they are coordinate. Indeed, one can imagine the demonstrators being advocates for the woman, who may well be in her 60s.
That can be imagined, that is, as long as the photograph is about France. Its presence in a US newspaper makes it an oddity or an allegory. It is an oddity because one has to cross the Atlantic to photograph a strong union movement. It is an allegory because in the States it acquires a double significance: it both depicts the labor movement that exists in France and marks the empty space left by its demise in the US.
The image goes further still. By looking at what is there, I realize how amidst the pervasive neoliberalism of US public life, not only the unions but labor itself has been rendered invisible. In its place is a phantasmic world of derivatives, debt-to-GDP ratios, stock market indexes, and even unemployment statistics–but not labor–and a refashioning of everyday life through bar codes and on-line shopping supported by globalized production–but not labor. Many people are still doing the work, of course, but the work and the people doing it are disappearing from public consciousness.
And when labor is no longer visible, capital is that much closer to becoming completely dominant. The disappearance of all other values cannot be far behind.
Photograph by Christophe Ena/Associated Press.
No soldier wants to be the last casualty in a war, but surely that designation pales in comparison to being the first fatal casualty in a combat mission that has already been declared “over.” One week after “turning the page” on Operation Freedom, two unidentified U.S. soldiers were killed by Iraqi soldiers in a firefight inside an Iraqi Army base north of Baghdad. This would be the same Iraqi army that 50,000 U.S. military personnel were left behind (after the page was “turned”) to “advise and train.” It would be comedic if it wasn’t so tragic, but even these theatrical characterizations fail to capture the sheer absurdity of the situation: soldiers fighting a war of foreign occupation/liberation that was initiated under false or grossly mistaken pretenses, and subsequently attacked and killed by the “security forces” they were assigned to help once the war was declared “over.”
The photograph above, which accompanied one of the early stories reporting on the incident, calls attention to the irrationality of the ordeal. The soldiers here, of course, are alive, cast in silhouette against what is either a setting or a rising sun. The incongruity of featuring a photograph of two unidentifiable soldiers that live and breathe in a story about two unidentified fatalities marks the event being reported as somewhat farcical, almost as if to challenge the very possibility of representing soldiers dying in a war that has been declared over. But of course, all appearances and declarations aside, the war isn’t over, a point underscored by the ambiguous register of the blazing hot sun. It is important in this regard to notice that there is nothing in the photograph that clues us as to whether the sun is setting (on a day gone by) or rising (to a new day). The past and the future are utterly indistinguishable, each day apparently pretty much like the last with no discernable end in sight. Indeed, the photograph could be a scene out of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Of course, the alternative to casting such a situation as utterly absurd is to try to make it fit within our ordinary conventions for representing war. So it is that we find another news story on the incident accompanied by a very different photograph.
The photograph here is altogether familiar; an image, the likes of which we have seen hundreds of times in recent years in newspapers all across the nation—national, regional, and local alike. It is an appropriately solemn and reverent honoring of one who sacrificed his life for the nation. The difficulty is that the soldier being memorialized in this photograph actually died and was interred in 2005. That the photograph anchors a story about a different event without so much as an explanation would seem to challenge the logic of journalistic representation. But the bigger point is recognizing the effect of an image that is so generic, so transportable, that it can be substituted for any military casualty so as to locate the meaning of any particular death under the cultural logic of heroism and sacrifice without any consideration of the attending circumstances. There is no reason to believe that the soldiers that have died since we “turned the page” on Operation Freedom were anything but brave and heroic representatives of the nation. At the same time, substituting an image like this to represent their deaths rationalizes their sacrifice at the expense of calling attention to the madness of the circumstances that led to it.
Photo Credit: AG/MGB; Albans/News.
Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.
Credit: John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera.
Credit: Richard Bartholomew, Artizans.com
Sight Gags” 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.
Today NCN features work by Kay Westhues, who is documenting how rural history and traditions are interpreted and transformed in the present. I encountered Kay’s work at the Evanston cultural center this past weekend, and was immediately struck by how she is able to show both the devastation and dignity of rural life. People who are suffering catastrophic economic and civil decline often have little choice but to cling to patriotic and religious symbols–even as they are being largely abandoned by state and church alike. Kay captures that predicament without condescension or mockery, and she seems to understand how people find a way to live within tattered legacies. This is a portrait of the people at the bottom of the Real America, people who might be in the Tea Party if they were even that well off.
You can see the rest of the exhibition here.
Kay lives in South Bend Indiana, where she and her partner, artist Jake Webster, run a small gallery and performance space called Artpost. She is currently working on a photo project about old artesian wells in the Midwest and the people who visit them; the project explores how these vestiges of the public commons continue to have meaning in contemporary rural life. More information is available at her website.
New York Times columnist David Brooks cheerily announced yesterday that nation building works. Specifically, that the $53 billion spent to reconstruct Iraq is going quite well, thank you. Not surprisingly, Brooks led with economic indicators, quoting the IMF on the country’s progress since 2003. (Gee, we might ask, what happened in 2003?) He then added for good measure statistics on oil production, cell phone ownership, and the like. To be fair, he did acknowledge that trash removal still leaves something to be desired. Generally, however, it seems that what is good for business is good for Iraq, and that the past can safely be forgotten.
Out of sight, out of mind, unless you lost your son to the sectarian violence unleashed by the US occupation. To be fair to the Times, they presented the other side eloquently with this front page photograph and an accompanying story on the painful search for those victims still lying in unmarked graves. Other stories have chronicled how the reconstruction funds were squandered by mismanagement, corruption and waste, how the country’s civil infrastructure remains devastated, how the security and political arrangements remain tenuous at best, and how military insurgency is on the rise again. Brooks, however, must not read the Times. In his account, there is no memory that reconstruction was needed because the country had been wreaked by the US invasion and occupation (and before that, another war and a decade-long blockade). His most unconscionable oversight, however, is to deny the permanent human damage caused by the invasion.
Brooks allows that “the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity” and then faults their lack of social trust. Besides hitting a high mark for hypocritical condescension, this argument makes light of the human heart and its most intimate bonds. (You’d think a conservative writer would care more about families and communities than market opportunities.) Worse yet, perhaps, by wrapping oneself in the discourse of national development and aggregate economic data, one forecloses on an opportunity for human sympathy. As Adam Smith knew, sympathy is crucial for extension of the self beyond egotism, naturalized greed, and unwitting immorality. It is the stuff of human community.
And that is why we are fortunate to have this photograph from the cemetery in Najaf, Iraq. Having finally located the grave site of her son who was abducted and murdered five years ago, Hassna Mirza grieves. What else can she do? She is plopped down on the ground like an old dog, disconsolate, body shrouded, legs and hands inert, mouth open in a long wail as if grief were running through her, as if grief and gravity were one. Other graves, some marked and some unmarked, extend in all directions to the horizon, as if she now resided in a perpetual city of mourning. The omnipresent sand has covered everything, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, as if blanketing identity and memory alike with the pale uniformity of inanimate oblivion. All that remains, for the moment, is her pain, weighing her down but also bonding her to her beloved.
And tying her to us, if we are willing to admit to the deep, tragic, painful connections between her world and ours. The invasion of Iraq has caused untold suffering in the both the US and Iraq, and no amount of economic development and nation building can undo that damage. Nor is this a matter of finally making right. If we can’t accept a common history of pain, we diminish ourselves. Perhaps this is another case of why nation building has to start at home.
Photograph by Moises Saman/New York Times. For an example of how public discourse can acknowledge two nations united by “shared suffering,” see the remarks by William Jefferson Clinton at the University of Hanoi, Vietnam, November 17, 2000 (Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents,vol. 46, no. 36, 2887-91).
Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.
