NO CAPTION NEEDED

ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Commemoration Sunday is over, and America has resolved once again to never forget the terror attack of 9/11/01.  That terrible day should not be forgotten, but concerned citizens might ask whether 9/11 has much to do with the problems defining the US today.

Al Qaeda didn’t destroy this Fisher Body plant in Detroit, Michigan. Didn’t have to. Nor, as the comic Andy Borowitz has astutely pointed out, have foreign terrorists threatened to dismantle “some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.”  You had to go to the recent Republican Party Presidential Debate at the Reagan Library to hear that.

To steal a phrase from Barbie Zelizer,  9/11 commemorations may be another example of “remembering to forget“: It is easy to remember the planes hitting the Twin Towers, but difficult to face the massive cost of 9/11–according to Sunday’s New York Times, $3.3 trillion and counting, with the greatest portion by far the result of an ill-advised and fraudulently justified rush to war.  And while that national treasure was being squandered, jobs were being lost by the thousands every month: 2.3 million between 2001 and 2007, and the hemorrhage hasn’t stopped since then.

This is how the US should look: a gleaming city. It need not even be a “city on a hill,” just a city that shows the signs of strong investment guided by government policies representing a dedicated and intelligent effort to lift the nation to new heights.  Unfortunately, the photograph is not from Milwaukee or Buffalo or New Orleans or Portland or any other American city.  Welcome to the Jinzhou New Area on the northern side of Dalian, China.  It’s what you can do if your national economic policy is dedicated to creating jobs, and if you aren’t spending a trillion dollars on an unnecessary war in Iraq, and if you are not held hostage to economic policies that now have a proven track record at benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes.

Is the comparison unfairly selective?  Sure, and one could show pictures of poverty in China and gleaming office towers in the US.  But consider this: Detroit has been in trouble for a long time–the first Chrysler bailout was in 1979–while everything you see in the second photograph has been built since the establishment of the Dalian Economic and Technological Development Zone in September 1984.  Detroit is still waiting for its “market solution,” while Dalian exemplifies what capitalism can do when it is made to serve the national interest.

The US economy is experiencing serious structural problems due to government policies at home and abroad.  Terrorism has nothing to do with it, save as a distraction and an invitation to mismanagement of national resources.  For the record, American democracy isn’t broken beyond repair. It is is serious trouble, however, and not least because the Republican party is prepared to reduce the nation to Third World status in order to win elections.  And as Mike Lofgren has trenchantly argued, don’t think they don’t have the political will or the policies to do it.

Along with the memory of 9/11, it is imperative that Americans recall just how much has been lost in the last ten years.  And why.

Photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre/The Ruins of Detroit and Jim Ford/Evanston.

Cross-posted at BAGnewNotes.

9/11

The New Security State 1

The New Security State 2

The “Liberation” of Iraq

Abu Ghraib 1

Abu Ghraib 2

Abu Ghraib 3

Abu Ghraib 4

Guantanamo Bay

Extraordinary Rendition

Vice President Dick Cheney and Friend on a Hunting Trip

“We Got Him!”

Searching for Bin Laden in Afghanistan

Finding Bin Laden

“Old Glory” Continues to Fly Proudly

Pete Brook, author of the important blog Prison Photography, is taking his work on the road.

Pete will be interviewing three dozen photographers who have documented the rise of America’s prison industrial complex. He also will be talking with leading practitioners in prison arts, prison education, law and advocacy. All content will be made available free of charge, via Creative Commons, to the photo and prison reform communities.

You can read more about the project here.  You also can donate to help cover costs.  (I don’t think Fox News is going to bankroll this one.)  Donors also can pick up some serious prints.  Pete is going the extra mile here; I hope some of the NCN readership can lend him a hand.

Photograph by Bruce Jackson.

You would not know it from this photograph—or for that matter from anything you’ve read in the mainstream press in the past week—but August was the deadliest month in the now longest war in U.S. history, with 66 American deaths, bringing the grand total of such fatalities to 1,760.  This number does not include an additional 1,000 fatalities among coalition forces or literally countless Afghanis, or for that matter the thousands of non-fatal casualties.  But that aside, the photograph does tell a story.

These Marines are at a patrol base located in the dangerous Gereshk Valley of the Helmand Province where more than half of all U.S. fatalities have occurred.  We know that war, when its not about death and destruction, is a combination of periods of adrenalin reinforced, horror tinged highs, and incredible boredom.  But none of that is present in this photograph. Instead we have four young men who could just as easily be hanging out in someone’s basement waiting for the big game on Friday night. Or perhaps, more appropriately in context and in its own way, it could be a scene from a John Ford western, where the cavalry sits around a crackling fire after a day of chasing renegade Indians and someone plays a guitar while singing a wistful, romantic ballad.  Either way, the point is that there is no real evidence of the prolonged war that they are very much a part of or the dangerous war zone in which they sit.  And more, there is an altogether relaxed atmosphere as if everything is fine and there is nothing to worry about.  All is good – except, of course, for the fact that August was the deadliest month in the war.

But there is something else. The board game they are playing is Risk – “the classic game of world domination” which relies as much on the flip of a card and the roll of the die as it does on strength of force or strategy.  It could almost be an allegory for the war itself.  One has to wonder if they get the irony.  Or if we do.

Photo Credit: Brennan Linsley/AP

 Labor Day THEN (1894)

Labor Day was signed into law as a federal holiday by President Grover Cleveland in 1894, six days after the end of the infamous wildcat, Pullman Strike when U.S. Marshals and some 12,000 U.S. military troops were ordered to Pullman, Illinois to break the strike under the pretext of enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act and maintaing public safety.  The lithograph above by Frederic Remington (no fan of the strikers who he considered “malodorous … foreign trash”) appeared in Harper’s Weekly and shows the U.S. calvary herding strikers in the stockyards.  Although accounts differ, somewhere between 20 and 37 men were killed and more than fifty more seriously wounded.  The declaration of the holiday was intended in large measure to appease the labor movement against the fear of further violence and subsequently became a day for celebrating the economic contributions of laborers of all sorts to the nation.

Labor Day NOW (2011)

 Needless to say, No Caption Needed!

Credit: John Sherffius

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

Metropolis: City Life in the Urban Age

September 11-October 9 2011

Noorderlicht Photography
Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen
The Netherlands

Since the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the world’s population are living in cities. Metropolis:­ City Life in the Urban Age shows the many faces of the modern city.

In photography of diverse sorts – documentary and constructed – Metropolis literally leads you through a city of images. Metropolis exposes the soul of the city, the place where our future is being shaped.

Information about the exhibition, including satellite programs, is here.  Examples of work by each of the exhibition’s photographers are here.

Photograph by Michael Wolf.