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The Practice of Domination in Everyday Life

Amidst the many images of hostility, conflict, and destruction that come out of the occupied territories in Palestine, this one is truly shocking.

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The photo appeared on page A8 of the morning edition of the New York Times with this caption: “Tinderbox In Hebron, a Jewish settler threw wine at a Palestinian woman.  The city is a center of tensions between settlers and Palestinians.”  The complete set of images, which included a photo on page 1 of an Israeli child being bathed and three other photos on page 8 labeled “Veneration,” “Remembrance,” and “Preparation,” clearly favored the Israeli settlers.  Even so, the photo above gives the lie to the myth of taming the frontier in the Holy Land.

But why does it shock?  He is not hitting her, and surely spraying her is less of a crime than, say, razing a house with a military bulldozer.   Or blowing up a bus with a suicide bomber.  Since there is violence enough on both sides, why make so much of a minor incident of teenage insolence?

I think that there are at least three reasons for the photograph’s impact.  One is that it reveals what is rarely shown: the small acts of personal viciousness and humiliation that make up the practice of domination in an occupied land.  Second, it is clear that both the boy’s aggression and the woman’s protective reaction are often-practiced, habitual responses.  Were he taunting an older woman for the first time, he would be likely to look much more ragged, uncoordinated, and either furtive or overly demonstrative.  Instead, he could be a figure out of Whitman: throwing his weight around without breaking stride, a figure of youthful grace on the city street.  Likewise, she isn’t being caught by surprise.  Her head is already turned, her body hunched against the impending blow.  She’s been through this before, and she’s learned that direct confrontation is not an option.  This may be her neighborhood, but it’s his street.

The third dimension of the photograph’s power derives from its capacity for analogy.  Look at the woman’s coat and hat, and at the Star of David scrawled on the storefront; she could be in the Warsaw ghetto, and all it takes is a change of costume to see him as a German soldier.   Or they could be an African-American woman and a young white teenager in the Jim Crow South, or any other tableau that depicts the small details of domination.  One picture isn’t enough to nail down such comparisons, but it should make you think of them.

Photograph by Rina Castelnuovo/The New York Times.  The accompanying story is here.  Note that the caption at the online slide show is less vague than in the paper edition: “A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence.”

Update: Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Emptiness at the Center of the Nation

The New York Times ran a story yesterday entitled “In the Middle of Nowhere, a Nation’s Center.” The subject was the geographical center of the U.S., which is a windswept prairie in Butte County, South Dakota.

There is a monument, of course, but it’s in the nearby town of Belle Fourche. Most visitors–yes, there are visitors–are content to take their pictures there rather than trek out to the actual spot. The reporter’s sense of irony is light, in keeping with his respectful attitude toward the folks actually living there. The story even includes a feel-good ending. “But then, in this remote, still place, there comes a strange sense of reassurance: that in this time of uncertain war and near-certain recession, of home foreclosures and gas at $4 a gallon, at least somewhere in this nation a center holds.”

But does it hold? Or, more to the point, why would it not hold when no one wants a piece of it? And isn’t the scene pathetic? The abandoned landscape reduced to flee market status by the hand-scrawled sign? The Times story provides an inadvertent chronicle of how rural America, once vying for its place in the nation’s prosperity, has been bypassed for roads leading elsewhere. And let me add that $4 a gallon gas hurts them a lot more than it hurts you. But you already are accustomed to not seeing them, and there are no pictures of people in the slide show accompanying the story. All you have to do to complete efface the unpleasant fact that people still live there is remove the sign.

This is another photo from the slide show, and the last of the set. Now we have a classic shot of America the Beautiful, the mythic landscape of the American West and its message of endless possibility. That image was already in the first photo, but there it sets up the irony of the ragged sign, which in turn changes the magnificent vista into a desolate “moonscape.” Ironically, the sign declaring a center highlights its emptiness. When that emptiness is not marked by the visual excess of a verbal text obviously added to the scene, a tawdry bit of culture marring nature’s grandeur, then one can see fullness, a richly symbolic affirmation of national potential. Like the wind, endless, waiting to be harvested.

Or, like the sign, symbolic in another sense. With his assurance that “at least somewhere in this nation a center holds” the reporter offers a refutation of W.B. Yeat’s famous indictment of modernity in “The Second Coming.” But the center in question is not holding, not in South Dakota, anyway. Agribusiness, agricultural policies, transportation policies, and other very real historical forces are draining the land of people, soil, water, you name it. America has invested heavily in centrifugal processes, and seems to have little time to be centered, much less balanced, reflective, or attentive to its own.

Photographs by Angel Franco/New York Times. For another perspective on the Great Plains and what one can learn there about being centered, see the wonderful book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris.


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Courting the American Dream in Ramadi


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The lemonade stand. It is as American as apple pie, a time-honored tradition deeply rooted in the American dream and its Horatio Alger ethos. All it takes is an old soapbox or small table; some lemons, sugar, and ice; a few paper cups; a hand scrawled sign and, of course, some good old American initiative. For many children it is their first encounter with the spirit of capitalism, and hey, even if there isn’t much monetary profit at .10¢ or even .25¢ a cup, there is the social capital gained by cooperating with friends and neighbors, and learning how to encounter the marketplace, both of which may be far more important civic lessons.

A safe and open marketplace is essential to a vital democratic public culture. What better way, one might then imagine, to demonstrate the success of our military surge in Iraq than to show a safe marketplace operating in the Al-Anbar Province, one of the most volatile and dangerous places in all of Iraq. And more, what better way to show that safety than with “a young Iraqi boy selling lemonade in the town of Ramadi …”

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Prior to the surge, Al-Anbar Province had been the “hub of [the] Sunni insurgency.” But apparently not anymore, as over 6,000 U.S. troops walk the streets, along with a growing Iraqi police force and tribes of “provincial volunteers.” That the police force is beleaguered and the volunteers bear a striking resemblance to vigilante groups doesn’t seem to matter, for here in Ramadi, seventy miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, safety and commerce seem to rule as the marketplace is open for commerce and, as the caption tells us, a young boy sells lemonade. At least according to the caption, one might imagine themselves on a street corner in middle America.

Upon a second glance, however, it is not clear that all is well. The eye is drawn initially to the boy who we might expect to see smiling for the camera or making a sales pitch to a potential customer. But there is none of that. The tentative and concerned look on his face and the gestural attitude of his body suggest that he is far from at ease with the situation. And with good reason, for the soldier and his weapon pose an ominous presence as they simultaneously frame and obscure the scene—perhaps a metaphor for U.S. military presence in Iraq writ large. Indeed, one has to wonder how truly safe things can be if something on the order of international martial law is needed to insure the everyday routines of domestic commercial life.

The contrast between the two images points in some measure to the problem of the project of exporting liberal democracy. A liberal democratic public culture relies upon the sense of trust that is generated by the kind of social capital we see being invested in the photograph of the two young girls at the top (or in any of the hundreds of pictures that you will encounter if you google “lemonade stand”). Such images are tinged with nostalgia and too easily romanticize our bourgeois and middle class sensibilities, and we need to be very careful about being too proud of ourselves in this regard, but the sense of trust and cooperation that they depict is necessary to such a politics. It is not the only thing, of course—the opportunity for free and open dissent come to mind as no less important—but it is essential. And it is hardly the cultural or civic attitude that is generated by a massive and sustained foreign military presence or roving tribes of provincial volunteers. To accent the point, one need only visualize the scene of the two girls at the top—innocent, pure, and white—with the soldier and his weapon framing and overshadowing the scene. It is virtually unimaginable.

Photo Credits: Central Ohio Center For Education, Richard Mills/The Times

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The Way We Were

The first day of school. It is a bourgeois, middle-class ritual. New clothes. New backpacks. A new start on a new year. And, of course, photographs; lots and lots of photographs, usually taken by parents and grandparents trained to recognize a Kodak moment when they see one—snapshots that celebrate the normative and gradual transformation of childhood to adulthood, marking it for future use and consumption with the tinge of nostalgia. “This,” the photograph says, “this is the way we were.” My family photo albums are filled with such images. And I cherish them, even though I know the many crises and unhappy moments that they help to repress and erase from memory and family history.

Capturing the first day of school is also a photojournalistic ritual, especially in local newspapers that regularly mark and celebrate the various cycles of the calendar: fall harvest, winter holidays with families meeting in reunion and engaging in spiritual observances, spring break renewal and the planting of new crops, summer fun on the beach, and on an on. And, of course, in an analogy with the photographs in our family photo albums, they frame and feature the habits of sociality and collective living that we want to observe and remember. The picture below appeared in a Washington Post slide show titled “Starting a New School Year” and consisting of eighteen photographs of elementary school children returning to school in the Washington D.C. area.

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The photograph is in many respects typical of the other pictures in the slide show and of similar images one might find at many other newspapers. According to the caption they are a group of children “march[ing] to class” in a new school in suburban Maryland. Clean and orderly, they have learned early to walk in line at a common pace and to maintain their distance from one another (“no touching” is one of the rules we learn in kindergarten), and yet they are not automatons as each displays a somewhat unique personality in dress, attitude, and gesture. They are different and yet unified, obedient but not rigidly or obsessively so, and thus they evidence the habits of communal living a liberal democracy might want to inculcate among its citizens. And, of course, they are all African Americans being educated in a brand new school.

What caught my attention in the picture was the second girl from the left, dressed in a white blouse and taking what seems to be a playfully long stride, nipping at the heels of the boy in front of her. Where had I seen this image before? It took a few moments to register, but eventually I realized that it was vaguely reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With.”

Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With

This painting first appeared in Look magazine in January 1964 but it depicts a scene from four years earlier when six year old Ruby Bridges was escorted by U.S. Federal Marshals to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans following a court order to integrate the schools in accord with the mandate of Brown v Bd. of Education (1954). White parents removed their children from the school and only one teacher—Barbara Henry—was willing to instruct Ruby. And for much of the next year Ruby was a class of one.

It is a painting, not a photograph, but in all likelihood it was artistically derived from one of several AP photos that show Ruby and her escorts entering the school. It is marked by strong contrasts of color: her dark skin and white dress, shoes, and hair ribbon stand out against the drab, muted colors of the suits and the wall. Notice in particular how the color of the suits connect the headless and anonymous marshals to the wall and the vicious word scrawled across it; the composition thus subtly identifies the institution now protecting Ruby with the institution that built the walls of segregation and contributed to her oppression and stigmatization. The wall is stained with the red of a tomato, the color of heated passion and blood, and thus a sign of the threat that abides outside of the frame of the picture. But amidst all of this is Ruby, pure, innocent, and, of course, looking forward to a new day–the first day of school with a new notebook and ruler in her hands. Note too that her stride is natural, but she walks faster than the escorts behind her, riding up on the feet of those in front of her. She is thus anxious to get to her destination, but she also holds herself in reserve, her emotions contained and constrained, another strong contrast with the scene around her. She is also an individual. And though there were hundreds of persons who orchestrated this moment in history, it is the lone individual standing up against the much larger forces of oppression that is featured (and remembered). It thus functions as part of the standard liberal antidote to political trauma, and in its own way it anticipates the photograph of the lone individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square many years later.

There is no doubt a great deal more that can be said about this image. But it is its relationship to the contemporary photograph from the Maryland suburbs that most warrants attention here. For now we have seven children not one. We can assume that there are teachers directing the parade even though we don’t see them–a sign, perhaps, of established authority and effective leadership. Indeed, the photograph purports to be an ordinary (bourgeois, middle-class) first day back at school. It depicts an orderly scene in an open and brightly lit modern building. There is nothing that suggests even the hint of a threat; the vicious “n” word has been replaced by an affectively neutral and abstract term: “primary.” That the children are exclusively African American seems almost incidental—and more so when seen in the context of the entire slide show—as if the problems of equal educational opportunity among the races has been solved; and maybe in this school district they have, as this is a picture of a brand new school. But one has to wonder if there is not also a sense in which the photograph works to erase the image of the Rockwell painting from public memory, a substitution of the “real” for the “mythic.” Or if the word “erase” seems too strong, then perhaps the photograph mutes the mnemonic force of the earlier image, suggesting “that was then and this is now.” In either case, its reference to the conventional first day of school frames both images in a somewhat nostalgic register that underscores a myth of social progress: the idealism of the lone individual standing up to the forces of oppression (then) and the appearance of the happy-go-lucky first day of school (now).

If only that’s the way it truly was.

Photo Credits: Marvin Joseph/Washington Post; Norman Rockwell Estate


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