“Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators…. Eccentricity is [its] special category, organically connected with the category of familiar contact; it permits–in contcretely sensuous form–the latent sides of human to reveal and express themselves….[It] brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

                                  — Michael Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 122-23

 

Photo Credits:  Ricardo Moraes/Reuters – Images 1, 4, and 5; Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images; Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images;

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The scene is a recycling plant.  It could be anywhere in the world, but in this instance it happens to be in Lahore, Pakistan.  The plastic bottles, either clear or lime green, are recognizable, not only by their labels—some because they are in English and clearly mark internationally recognizable brands, and many others because they simply reproduce a common form of branding—but also by the general uniformity of their size and shape.  Not perfectly identical, they are nonetheless similar enough to mark a common commercial product.   Almost to a number they were used to sell sugared drinks or bottled water, but in any case each was generally used one and only one time.  That they are being recycled rather than burned or buried or simply left to deteriorate  at their own glacial pace is a good thing, to be sure, but their sheer volume, accented by the tight framing of the photograph, suggests that something is remiss.

If you look closely you will see that there is an individual in the very middle of the image.  He is barely recognizable. Nearly buried by the bottles that encompass his body, his face all but occluded by two bottles that he appears to be juggling, only his dark skin distinguishes him from the commercial colors that surround him. And therein likes the paradox of neoliberal globalization for all too see.  Cast in the center of a sea of products reliant upon and marketed to his individual needs and desires, his individuality has been almost totally effaced, made unrecognizable by the commercialization and mass production of a product that for all intents and purposes lacks any nutritional value.  And one can only imagine what will happen when he has been thoroughly absorbed by the waste.  Here, it seems, we see one version of the future of the global individual.

Photo Credit:  Rana Irfan Ali/Zuma Press

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You have no doubt seen the above photograph in the past couple of days as it has been making the rounds, featured, well, just about everywhere on the internet, as well as places like The Daily Show and the Sunday morning news programs.  Yesterday it appeared on the front page of the New York Times, centered and below the fold, although the story about it was buried on p. 22.  The photograph, it seems, was much more important than the story that went along with it.

I find it a troubling image,  but before I get to that I should make a confession:  Although I am a strong advocate for strict gun controls laws, I too once purchased and shot a gun.  Some years ago I had a woodpecker roosting in a nest it had created inside one of the side walls of my house.  Woodpeckers are (or at least then were) endangered species and so one could do nothing about this that would actually endanger the life of my feathered friend.  On the advice of an exterminator I sheepishly and with no small amount of embarrassment went to the local K-Mart and purchased a BB gun pistol with the idea of trying to scare the bird.  The logic was that a BB gun pistol did not have enough force to hurt the bird from the distance I would be shooting, but if I could ping it once or twice in the butt it would move away.  In retrospect the arrogance of thinking that I could hit anything with this weapon is, well, truly stunning.  And my friend Woody figured that out pretty quickly too, as he sat there and actually mocked me—and my manhood— as I shot away at it.  After a day of this I decided that peaceful coexistence was the better policy, but then out of nowhere an owl perched in a tree in my backyard.  Owls are natural predators of woodpeckers and Woody took his leave.  Sitting on my deck and watching the owl swoop through the trees in the early evening hours gave a whole new meaning to Hegel’s invocation that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”  But I digress.

The controversy that has flourished around this photograph concerns whether or not President Obama really does hunt skeet at Camp David or not.  And if not, so the logic goes, it would seem to be a somewhat disingenuous performance posed for the camera and simply for the purpose of creating political identifications and promoting his own agenda.  I find this a somewhat odd argument because one of the things that politicians (of all stripes) do is to perform their jobs for the purpose of creating political identifications and promoting their own agendas.  In its way, such photos are not much different than pictures of politicians cooking meals in country diners or kissing babies.  It is worth calling attention to the convention, but making a major issue out of it seems to be more trouble than it is worth—or at least an unwarranted distraction—particularly given the gravity of the debate over the mayhem created by the usage of guns in the United States.

But that said, I do find it a troubling image.  And the reason is that it is a visual symptom of the troubling love affair we have with guns in the United States.  Guns are weapons designed to destroy life—an irony given their phallic symbolism.  And but for their original and primary purpose we would not have them.  It really is as simple as that. That we rebrand them for the purposes of “target shooting,” whether as the manly weapon the President wields or the child’s BB gun that I purchased with the idea that it wouldn’t hurt anything, is a marker of how easily and willing we are to accept and mask their fundamental purpose. Whether the picture above was posed for political purposes or not is really besides the point, what should trouble us is the assumption that the image it displays really does create lines of identification with very many Americans by naturalizing and valorizing a tool created for the purpose of maiming and killing.

We may live in a world where such weapons are as necessary as some allege, and our Constitution guarantees at least some rights to “bear” them under qualified conditions.  But I would hope that we never lose sight of how regrettable the former condition is if it is in fact true, or how truly profound our obligations are to securing the later.

Photo Credit:  Peter Souza/White House

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