It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere and another snowstorm is descending across the Great Lakes.  Traffic will snarl, walking will become a chore, and those staying home will come to feel  like they are under house arrest.  It seems inevitable, yet almost cruel, to then dream of summer’s golden reverie.

The surfers are almost incidental–tiny figurines or animate shadows whose puny shapes are there only to remind us how much the lavish, liquid sunlight dwarfs human scale.  One has to labor to realize that the photograph shows only light, not pools of molten gold.  And yet, even as that gold pools on a plane of sand and sea that also seems forged of the sun’s metal, there is a dark undertone.  The day is long, and we know that this moment of sheer natural extravagance cannot last.  A moment out of time is still tinged with mortality.

Here the golden light is even more pronounced, and yet the drama of light and darkness is sharper still.  The brilliant horizon, as if the sea were another sun, flows like lava into the city of Cape Town, but both sky and land are already under another dispensation.

But the light always returns.  Indeed, it ennobles all that it touches.  Here an arid land, fractured by mountains and riven by war, appears like Shangri La.  The golden mountains of Afghanistan, one might imagine, looking like pure gold, set in the middle distance of God’s eye, surely a blessed place.

And surely not a blessed place, if you think of the suffering there, with more to come.  And so gold can seem to be no more than a trick of light, just as it also is an obviously artificial commodity, a fictional standard, and the stuff only of distraction and fantasy.  The eye is easily mislead, one might say, and so both photographic art and serious thought should stick to reality’s gray scale.

But these images reveal another truth, one that could have genuinely radical implications.  The golden light is but one aspect of the sun’s unending flow across the earth, and with that, of humanity’s ever present wealth.  No one–ever–accomplishes anything without this free gift of energy that could never be created otherwise.  There is a metaphor here as well (another extravagance), for sunlight not only gives of itself but represents other forms of wealth.  The lesson of these images is not that warmth or beauty or any human good is necessarily apportioned to certain times or places, but that the good life is constantly available for those who can learn to see.

As I’ve said before, the deeper challenge now facing politics, and so art, is not to manage scarcity but to realize the abundance already available in nature and culture.  Abundance that often is not seen up close and that might be waiting where least expected, as if far out at sea or on distant mountains.

Photographs by Sarah Lay/Guardian, Mike Hutchingst/Reuters, Moises Saman/New York Times.

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One of the primary anxieties of late modern life is modernity’s gamble, the wager that the long-term dangers of a technology-intensive society will be avoided by continued progress.  And, as with any wager, it is driven not only by calculations of probability but also by an unrelenting desire to beat the odds  There is perhaps no better representation of the anxiety that has attended modernity’s gamble than the dialectical tension animated by the iconic photographs of the tragic explosions of the Hindenburg and the Challenger: the first a dark, gothic, dystopian warning against the excesses of technological hubris, the second a bright and forward moving, utopian celebration of the heroic frontier spirit.

I was reminded of modernity’s gamble when I came across the above photograph of the recent public unveiling of the “VSS Enterprise,” named in honor of U.S. and British naval vessels, as well the “Starship Enterprise” of Star Trek fame.  The VSS Enterprise is the first commercial passenger spacecraft that will offer 300 paying customers a two and one half hour suborbital space ride—including five minutes of weightlessness—for the modest sum of $200,000 each.

The first thing to recall when considering the Hindenburg and Challenger explosions is that the events leading up to the tragic moment in each case were orchestrated as media spectacles.  And note that here too, the “unveiling,” which takes place in the Mojave dessert and in the dead of night, accompanied by “dreamlike purple lights” and “an ethereal soundtrack,”  is heavily attended by the media dutifully recording the event.  But the comparison does not stop here, for as with both the Hindenburg and the Challenger, the development of the VSS Enterprise has been beset with one technological delay after another, as well as with tragic injuries and three deaths following equipment failures and explosions.  We can only assume that more will follow.  And yet, the fetishistic desire to conquer the heavens never seems to die, a point driven home by the billionaire Richard Branson who noted, “Isn’t that the sexiest space ship ever?”

These similarities notwithstanding, it should be recalled as well that both the Hindenburg and Challenger were statist enterprises driven by a martial spirit and distinct militaristic goals—the Hindenburg underwritten by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and an interest in exploiting the advantages of air warfare, and the Challenger a manifestation of the U.S.’s involvement in the Cold War “space race”—while the VSS Enterprise is an entrepreneurial, free market enterprise.   This difference, it seems, is worth remarking upon, for while one might imagine militaristic functions as part of a “rational” public policy agenda, the current enterprise seems driven by the same hubris that led Icarus to fly too close to the sun, and one can only assume that the current “enterprise” will have a similar ending.  How else to account for such space tourists as Natasha Pavlovich, a native of Serbia who bought her ticket “on credit” because she wants to “bring pride to her native country.” In short, the fetishized,  ritualistic thrill of modernity’s gamble comes in many guises, and the desire to “beat the house” is an unyielding addiciton for indivduals and states alike, regardless of how tragically fated its failure it might be.

It is little wonder, then, that agencies like NASA stay in business and that the citizenry is willing to support them with public dollars. Or that the media is always there to play its part.   Yogi Berra had it right.

Photo Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

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Your NCN guys are taking the holiday off to be with our families.  We wish everyone a peaceful holiday and we will return next Monday.

Credit:  Jeff Parker, Florida Today

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Credit:  Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune (Note:  The cartoon is this week’s Cartoon for the Classroom “Caption Contest”  run by NIE and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists).

“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.

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