¡Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez! Designers get radical

July 29, 2018 Comments (1) Activism, Media, Politics

Waiting for the subway signals the working class identity of the candidate and campaign. Campaign video by Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, Means of Production.

How much does the look of the campaign posters, mailers, buttons, video, and social media matter?

Let’s look at the interplay between inspiring politics and inspired design in the dramatic victory of a 28-year-old, socialist community organizer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crushed the fourth-ranking Democrat in the house. She defeated 10-term incumbent, Queens machine boss Joe Crowley, her $600,000 in mostly small donations against his $3 million from real estate and financial interests — her campaign’s people in the street against his TV ads and glossy 4-color mailers.

First let’s look at her campaigning and then at the campaign’s design aesthetic.

A social movement campaign: “We’ve got the people, they’ve got the money”

Her campaign was movement politics, both in its aspirational platform and in its practice in the street. She was a community activist and, in 2016, a Sanders campaigner; then she was approached by Brand New Congress the day after she left the pipeline protest at Standing Rock. But she doesn’t just have a Sanders-style, democratic socialist platform —  Medicare for All, free public higher education, guaranteed jobs and living wage, affordable housing, criminal justice reform … and abolish ICE. Unlike many formerly centrist politicians who are suddenly sounding radical, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just talk. She built her campaign on a coalition of movement organizations, and hundreds of volunteers hit the streets. And then she showed what authentic socialist politics can look like in an election when, just two days before the primary, she interrupted campaigning in New York to go to Tornillo, on the Texas border, to protest ICE. (more…)

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Part II. An iconic antiwar photo: Myths and meanings

June 27, 2018 Comments (0) Culture, History

 

This is the section of Saigon in which General Loan shot his prisoner. Here residents look for their belongings in the ruins after the Tet Offensive. Photo: Center of Military History, via Wikimedia. Public domain.

Part I of this article tells why photographer Eddie Adams was unhappy with his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, how he, and General Loan also, lost control of its narrative, and how both his makeover as the model American minority and his sordid Vietnam backstory were forgotten, leaving only the simple story told about the photo.

Iconic photos can touch on our deepest feelings and beliefs, yet even if their meaning seems obvious to us, they are often vulnerable to contradictory interpretations, and they can disturb with their ambiguity. Eddie Adams’s photo of General Loan killing a Vietcong officer in the Tet  Offensive has become a teaching example for interpretation and theorizing about what makes photos iconic or enduring images. Like many iconic photos, its subject seems broader than the moment in time and space it captures. Journalists, historians, academics have supplied different stories, different “captions,” over the 50 years since the photo was taken. How do these versions express the way we think about the Vietnam War … and ourselves?   If we imagine how differently the story of the killing might be told in Vietnam today,  we see not just different narratives, but two worlds, complicating the interpretation.

General Loan will be remembered every time Eddie Adams’s photo is discussed, but the man he killed had no name in the caption and for the most part he has remained a cipher. We can sketch out a detailed biography for Loan, even if it is partly made-up by Loan and his defenders. But his victim? Sometimes he is just “the Vietcong,” “the terrorist,” or “the assassin,” sometimes with a particular atrocity attached.

The story, as it was first told

The AP photo’s caption only identified him as a “Vietcong.” He was a “Vietcong officer” in John Chancellor’s narration, when a series of Adams’s stills, with different scenes of carnage, were first shown on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report:

There was awful savagery. Here [photo 1] the Viet Cong killed a South Vietnamese colonel and murdered his wife and six children. And this [photo 2] South Vietnamese officer came home during a lull in the fighting to find the bodies of his murdered children. There [photo 3]  was awful retribution. Here [photo 4] the infamous chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, General Loan, executed a captured Viet Cong officer. Rough justice on a Saigon street as the charmed life of the city of Saigon comes to a bloody end.
—Bailey and Lichty (see source notes at end)

The next day, NBC showed the video footage, with Howard Tuckner’s eyewitness report of the battle around the An Quang Pagoda.

In this part of Saigon government troops were ordered to get as much revenge as possible. The fighting was only one block from the An Quang Pagoda, a Buddhist church the Viet Cong had been using as their headquarters with the reported approval of the militant Buddhist monk Tri Quang. An hour earlier Viet Cong flags had flown from these rooftops. Now snipers were up there and government troops were trying to locate their positions. Crack South Vietnamese Marines considered all civilians potential enemies. No one was above suspicion. The Viet Cong were working their way to the An Quang Pagoda and now the government troops had to clear the area no matter how high the risk. The Viet Cong were now firing from the roof of the Pagoda. For half an hour it was like this. The Viet Cong fled through the back of the Buddhist church but many others were there. Some of these are undoubtedly Viet Cong sympathizers; some are undoubtedly religious Buddhists who felt the temple was the safest place to be in times like these in Saigon. The bullets had wounded at least twenty of them. The government Marines knew that the night before here the Viet Cong had held a meeting and that the Buddhists had cheered when they were told the Viet Cong were in the city to liberate Saigon.

Government troops had captured the commander of the Viet Cong commando unit. [Here the prisoner comes toward the cameras with ARVN Marines.] He was roughed up badly but refused to talk. A South Vietnamese officer held the pistol taken from the enemy officer. [Camera shows the pistol.] The chief of South Vietnam’s National Police Force, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was waiting for him. (“A camera angle from behind Loan, a wide angle view, showed the general drawing his own revolver and waving it to shoo away onlookers. … Loan moved around to the side of the captive and shot him directly in the side of the head. The corpse dropped to the pavement while blood spurted out his head.”)

The “Vietcong” has been identified differently at different times.When you examine an often-told story to question what really happened, you look especially closely at eyewitnesses accounts at the time or close to the event, before the decades of retelling and embellishment. At the time of the shooting, Adams reported that Loan showed no knowledge of any specific acts by the Vietcong. He said simply, “They killed many of my people, and yours, too,” and walked off. As Howard Tuckner remembered a few months later, Loan had walked up to him and said:

Many Americans have been killed these last few days and many of my best Vietnamese friends. Now do you understand? Buddha will understand.

What struck me reading and dating the many accounts of the killing: At the time, Loan gave no indication that he knew who the “terrorist” was. The newspaper captions to Adams’s photograph identified him as Viet Cong or a “Viet Cong terrorist” (caption in the NY Times). But only the pistol, which an officer said he took from the captive, shows that he was a combatant rather than one of the many civilians who took shelter from the fighting in the Pagoda.

When a cop shoots a suspect …

Later accounts giving background to the photo varied greatly, many describing the victim as a terrorist, some attributing horrific murders. So I became curious. We Chicagoans know better than to believe the official story when a cop shoots a black youth. How much more skeptical should we be about the official story of a  political strong man’s wartime killing in a police state? (more…)

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An iconic antiwar photo: Myths and meanings

June 17, 2018 Comments (2) Art, History, Media

“Saigon. 1968” by Fred Klonsky, FredKlonsky.com. 

This striking drawing by Fred Klonsky reimagines one of the iconic photos from the Vietnam War, which we’ve seen in newspapers and on TV many times in this 50th year after it was taken. The photo, “Saigon Execution,” has been called an image “that changed the course of the war.”  Well, maybe it isn’t, but it did help shape America’s collective memory of the war.

I thought I knew Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the “execution” — its story and its meaning (see the photo here). But when Klonsky’s art sent me to refresh my memory, I found a history of the kind of mythmaking that mirrors our shifting, politicized cultural memory of the war itself. I also found the photo to be an intriguing example of  how iconic images have been lifted out of history to gain and shift their meaning, and a good teaching example for seeing how we look at photos through ideological lenses.

The photo shows Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s security services, shooting a Vietcong prisoner point blank during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The photo stood out from the countless images of war we had seen up to then — it showed not the wounded and dead bodies, but the moment of killing and dying itself. That was the “news value” of the photo, which led the Associated Press to rush it to the news media. But what made the photo more unusual, what gave it a meaning beyond its otherwise abstract image of violence, was its context.

The photo’s subversive, moral ambiguity

It also was unusual because, in context, it had a subversive, moral ambiguity — the shot was fired not by an anonymous soldier, but by one of the high officials of the government American soldiers were dying for, and posed the question: Was this murder?  So the photo seemed to stand for something more than the action captured in the frame, and something more than was conveyed by a simple, one-sentence caption.

To understand the importance of the photo, we have to understand the impact of the Tet Offensive. It was a shock to see guerrillas breaching the U.S. Embassy compound and attacking cities and U.S. and South Vietnamese military bases throughout the country. Americans had been told the U.S. was winning the war and the photo seemed to catch the president and the generals in a big and terrible lie.

Americans were shocked to see guerrillas breach the U.S. Embassy compound. Here a prisoner captured in the attack. Photo: Don Hirst, Army photographer.

There had been no photos like this in the “censored wars” of the past, World War II and Korea. In this war, though editors still imposed their filters, photographers and journalists could move independently in the country. Crucially, a surging antiwar movement, coming after the rise of the Black freedom movement, had begun to delegitimize the cold-war framing that had been able to hide, explain away and cover up atrocities in the Korean War. But in February 1968, the mass movements and a growing division in the elites created an opposition ready to extract the subversive meaning out of this morally ambiguous image.

There was also video footage of the killing the next day on NBC news, but it was the photo that became an “indelible image of war,” one of a few powerful images people would always associate with the Vietnam War. The photo was soon on posters in antiwar protests. General Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, later wrote, “The photograph and the film shocked the world.”  In the words of NBC’s Saigon bureau chief, it “showed the horror and insanity of the war.”  Robert Kennedy, a month later and before he officially declared his candidacy in the presidential primaries, said: “The photograph of the execution was on front pages all around the world — leading our best and oldest friends to ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America?”

Viewers saw not only the shocking moment of death, but also the general’s casual performance, untroubled by the presence of news cameras. He raised his arm to shoot as soon as the prisoner was brought before him, seemingly without a moment of reflection, signaling routine inhumanity and impunity. The photo came to serve not only as an indictment of the corrupt and brutal South Vietnamese government. It seems to ask not only, are these the people we are dying for?  But also, Is this us?

A powerful antiwar image … or is it?

Eddie Adams didn’t think so, and he didn’t like the use made of his photo by antiwar protesters. He was the AP photographer who took the picture. When it was first broadcast, along with even more shocking film footage the next day, NBC’s John Chancellor called it “rough justice on a Saigon street.” Adams for sure, Chancellor maybe, took the point of view of the killer and not the victim. (more…)

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In The March for Our Lives, how the students became the teachers

April 2, 2018 Comments (0) Activism, Politics

Are we entering another era of mass protest? It’s as if people want any opportunity to gather in protest, any way to demand change. So many massive outpourings — Black Lives Matter, DACA and immigration rights protests, the Women’s Marches, even a  Science March, and now an unprecedented mobilization against gun violence — and this together with significant increases in election turnout. People we know who never paid attention to politics are going to their first demonstration, and even the un-engaged have heard of Emma Gonzalez in their social media.

 

Over 1 million people, some estimates up to 2 million, in the March for Our Lives. Photo of NYC march by Rhododendrites (CC BY-SA 4.0) Wikimedia.

When political action becomes part of youth culture

The March for Our Lives is weaponized with youth culture. Another youth movement, finally! All age groups from babies in strollers up to 80-somethings in wheelchairs, but the branding of the movement is that it’s led by youth, and the sound and feel and vocabulary of the movement is youth culture. “We call BS” is now a slogan, and teenagers are telling their stories, singing and  declaiming poetry at the rallies. The Guardian invited staff from the Marjorie Stoneham Douglas newspaper to edit their coverage of the march, and young faces and voices are still being sought out by mainstream media.

You can watch the crowds on YouTube as the young people speak. The crowds loved the young people on the stages up front, shouting encouragement if they hesitated. They cheered when Naomi Wadler spoke  —  loud, extended cheering when she said she was 11-years old, again when she said she and her friend Carter led a walkout in her elementary school. Again when she said she spoke for “black girls victimized by guns whose stories don’t’ make the front page.”

All of this is a lesson in how to organize and how to talk about guns, but also in the role of representation in movements. The celebration of young leaders, and in particular queer activists and  young leaders of color, connects deeply with young people;  in a culture that pacifies them, it shows them that they too can act, they too can lead.

We have seen what happens in the past when political action becomes part of a youth culture — that it’s the necessary prelude to change.

Intersectional, collaborative, shaped by the internet

Naomi Wadler and many other speakers drew attention to victims of gun violence who are different from Parkland’s middle class suburban high school, African Americans in the cities. Students from Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School met with students at Thurgood Marshall Academy in DC. They had already come to Chicago to talk to black student activists and victims of gun violence. Then they told us what they learned, using the language of intersectionality and privilege. They reminded audiences that mass shootings and school shootings are a fraction of the gun deaths, that media attention focused on them but not on slain African Americans, and they demanded empathy and action for all the gun victims.

Why Is It? photo by Elvert Barnes, (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr

Their movement is shaped by the legacy of the movements of the past decade — intersectional, collaborative:  Black Lives Matter with queer women of color in leadership; DACA protests also led by young people; the Women’s March with women of color in leadership, making intersectionality a necessary conversation for many white women (and men); the foregrounding of trans people in our national politics; celebrities in the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements foregrounding working class women and women of color. Does this presage a new era of broad coalitions for change?

This movement, like every other since the ’90s, is shaped by the internet — it is decentralized, self-starting, networking. Social media and the web spread not just the bonding through the likes, the people and the story-telling. You also find advice and even “toolkits” telling people how to mount their own action, how to become organizers and leaders. (more…)

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Who are the progressives in the Illinois primaries?

March 12, 2018 Comments (0) Uncategorized

Photo by Nate Burgos Chicago Women’s March 1.21.18 (CC BY-ND 2.0) Flickr

I’m getting a lot of election robocalls and they’re all from “progressives.” Sen. Dick Durbin just called to ask me to “join him in supporting progressive leaders to serve on the Democratic State Central Committee in the next election. … A vote for Cynthia Santos is a vote to fight the Trump agenda.” In case I was wondering whether Santos is a true progressive, Sen. Durbin’s call explained: “This message was paid for by friends of Michael J. Madigan.”

I want to thank Michael J. Madigan — the chair of the Illinois Democratic Party Central Committee and Speaker of the Illinois House was the last person I could imagine helping me identify the real progressives in the election. But knowing whom Madigan is promoting sure helps — after all, he should know – he is the Democratic machine’s boss of all bosses (capo di tutti capi, if I remember my Godfather grammar correctly).

Friends of Bernie Sanders are progressives too. I guess I’m not in their rolodex because Our Revolution didn’t call me to tell me to vote against the machine’s Cynthia Santos and elect their progressive challenger, Melissa Lindberg. (more…)

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The Women’s March: Not just about women, not just about voting

February 10, 2018 Comments (2) Activism, Politics

This year’s Women’s March was as beautiful and astonishing as last year’s. Surprising many, it created an even broader coalition, bringing out more people, and was more inclusive of women of color and queer women. I want to look at the problems of this coalition building — how to understand the alliances the women’s movement is making and the difficulty of maintaining identities within them.

2017 Women’s March on Washington. Photo by Mobilius in Mobili, Wikimedia Commons. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Trump, the Great Uniter

Trump was not only the great divider, but also our great uniter, bringing together in one anti-Trump coalition every progressive movement. The first women’s march exploded in numbers out of shock, outrage and enormous energy for action after Trump’s election.

It was called a “women’s march,” but it was also a march about nearly everything wrong with America, since the Trump regime promised to be reactionary in the precise political sense of the term. The regime aims at breaking down every progressive change since the deep cultural shift of the 1930s Depression years. That was when vast mass movements ushered in the real New Deal, creating a new cultural consensus that society was responsible for the care of all its citizens and government’s role was to ensure the public’s welfare.

The meaning of the march: Not just a “March to the Polls”

The Women’s March in 2018 again was clearly an anti-Trump march, branded as a “March to the Polls,” and there were many Democratic Party officials among the speakers. But the marchers’ signs told a different story. (more…)

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Burns and Novicks’ ‘Vietnam’: History as written by the losers

November 19, 2017 Comments (3) History, Media

“History is written by the victors”? Not Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s'”The Vietnam War,” which is a lesson in how to see history as written by the losers. Whether a history is written by the losers or the victors, beware of the mythmaking. If only Burns and Novick understood this, their series might have been as enlightening as it is artful, fascinating, and moving. Perhaps it is an excuse that they are story-tellers and not historians. But the stories they tell and the ones they decide not to tell, the people they interview and the people they overlook, all impose framings and interpretations that charge their narrative with political meaning. Come for the stories, stay for the ideology.

“Love the warrior not the war” is the perspective of the filmmakers. Marines in Operation Hue City, 1967. US Marine Corps photo, Wikimedia.

I am thinking here about the myths, the unlearned lessons as the US continued to march its warriors into defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how a brilliant documentary can mix shocking truth and soothing lies, and still move viewers. When I look at art politically, often I am looking at how the artists’ explicit messaging can be contradicted by their images and storytelling.  Burns and Novicks’ images and interviews sometimes tell a truer story than his narration, but even those select out disturbing testimonies, such as the Winter Soldier Investigation and a truer story yet is untold. (more…)

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Reading Homer in Harvey Weinstein’s world

November 6, 2017 Comments (0) Art, Culture

Just when our art-school student newspaper staff was having fun planning a sex-themed issue, we read about Harvey Weinstein … and then, closer to home, Artforum publisher Knight Landesman, driven out amid the shambles of the art world’s establishment publication. And then, thousands of artists and art workers who signed an attack on sexism in the art world, “We are not surprised.”

It may be too much to hope that the tsunami of exposés is bringing about a cultural shift, but at least now we have an improved filter before our eyes. These stories have been at the back of my mind whenever I read the news, so I could not help thinking about the Knight Landesmans and Harvey Weinsteins when I read this other front page story in the Times about Emily Wilson, “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English.”   The story raises that ageless question about ageless art — how can we look today at art shaped by patriarchy, after we ourselves have been shaped by generations of women’s liberation?

 

Maybe thinking about Homer is an odd association. After all, Homer’s Muse hasn’t gone public, though there have been rumors that Homer abused her — just look at the stereotypical roles for women in “The Iliad.” Women are abducted in war and enslaved, and then – alas! — when a woman is a central character, it’s Helen. Helen, over whom the Trojan war was fought, is the iconic scapegoat, blamed for a war as long as our Afghanistan disaster. And, for another twist of the knife, she is also the subject of that male chauvinist chestnut: “True, she’s high maintenance, a real disaster … but just look at her!” (Iliad III 156ff)

So how do we look at “The Odyssey”? Odysseus, “sacker of cities,” epic hero, another of Homer’s male fantasies? Odysseus, celebrated in an epic about the wonders he’s seen, his sufferings and the suffering he caused, through years of wandering among witches and cannibal giants. And if that’s not enough of an epic — he also has to  come home to find his house invaded by Ithaca’s princelings, eating and drinking his wealth away, partying with his maidservants, while demanding his wife Penelope marry one of them.

So he slaughters them all.

And wins back his wife and property.

And this is all heroic, of course! He is famously introduced as the polutropos, “the man of many twists and turns,” Twisty Odysseus, an ambiguous epithet suggesting his twisty cunning mind, but also the many twists and turns in his wanderings — including, curiously, some flings with goddesses.

1. Homer’s Muse reading “The Odyssey,” and not happy about the poet’s excuses for Odysseus’ philandering.

Emily Wilson jokes that polutropos can even be translated as “straying husband.” (“It was all consensual,” whines Homer. But Muse mutters, “Yeah, that’s Homer’s version. Yes, Homer, goddesses just can’t resist your hero!”)

Not your feminist poster girl

But Penelope, for feminist scholars, poses a bigger challenge than Odysseus. Penelope, proverbial for the devoted, long-suffering wife, faithful while her husband plays the field, just waits by the phone for him to call. Really, Penelope, for 20 years?!!

No, not your feminist poster-girl.

(more…)

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The Politics of “Dunkirk,” and what every war movie is about

August 23, 2017 Comments (0) Culture, History

No safety on a hospital ship, hundreds sinking with it, in one of Christopher Nolan’s visions of terror in “Dunkirk.”

What every war movie is about

Every war movie is both a movie about one war, and a movie about war itself. What does Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” say about each? The second should matter more in the US today, a country always at war somewhere, with a trillion dollar “national security” budget;  a country now recommmitted to the “forever war” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen; a country threatening war against North Korea and Iran; and, on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a country barely remembering it launched history’s only nuclear attack. We have a war party in the government with plenty of support from editorialists and pundits, liberal as well as conservative — and a president promising “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to an approving audience.

We have a culture permeated with militarist values — count the images ennobling warriors and armed combat in movies and TV, not to mention comic books and toys, and the cop shows with urban warriors fighting urban terror.*

What we don’t have is an anti-war movement. So it matters whether films like “Dunkirk” show us an inspiring image of war redeemed by heroism and meaning, or the terror of desperate men helpless under bombardment. (more…)

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Gaius Julius Trumpus? Is this Caesarism, or just Orange Julius?

July 27, 2017 Comments (1) Art, History, Politics

“Is this Caesarism?”

 

Caesar’s body lies covered in a bloody toga, his murderers exit swords raised, and the senators all skedaddled. Jean-Louis Gérôme (1859) rejects the conventions of academic history painting, his figures off-center, not idealized or ennobled, seen not in  the dramatic moment of the murder but moving off in the distance afterwards. Meaning, please? 

“Is this Caesarism?” ask the pundits. Trump’s rise has been explained as Caesarism for over a year now (“An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh,” wrote the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf;  just google “Trump” and “Caesarism” for thousands of results). Authoritarian Populists often get compared to Julius Caesar, and “Caesarism” has become a term for rule by an authoritarian, charismatic ruler, claiming to come as a savior and embody the popular will. Trump?

Was it a burlesque waiting to happen when the Public Theater mounted Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” — a Trump-like Caesar with preening vanity and a red tie and blond hair, a Calphurnia speaking with Slovenian accent? Actually, the burlesque was in the right-wing media enrage by the image of Trump murdered; the Trumpenproletariat fulminated in social media and sent hate mail and death threats to the Public Theater and Shakespeare companies elsewhere — regardless of whether they were producing the play. Guilt by association with Shakespeare.

Facts don’t matter. Shakespeare’s play showed the assassination of Caesar not so much as an attack on tyranny as the beginning of chaos, civil war, and mass murder, concluding with a restoration of order by far more ruthless and murderous tyrants. Together after the murder, Shakespeare has Caesar’s avengers raising money for their army, coolly “proscribing” wealthy Romans they could murder for their property — and even including their own relatives on the hit-list.

(more…)

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