BAGnewsNotes

Serpentine Days

This was  yesterday's "last visual word" on the Petraeus testimony offered up by the NYT.

Since I'm currently in Rochester, participating on a panel at the RIT Kern Conference on Visual Rhetoric, I had the occasion to gather some thoughts on the image from a crackerjack team of visual academicians, including Northwestern's Bob Hariman and Indiana U.'s John Lucaites (co-authors of No Caption Needed), and Cara Finnegan from University of Illinois and first efforts.

In the dead-tree edition, in which you can see all the shoes on the floor, John's first take was: "boots on the ground."

As for the committee, they saw the General representing the serpentine head of of a military institution which has been cut off but for the one spokesman, who is marginalized and dislocated.  Checking out the hands under the table, the school boy quiescence demonstrates that assessment has been silenced.  Also noted was the fact that Petraeus's mug is actually blocking a symbol of one of the service branches on the wall -- more evidence that Petraeus has become a branch unto himself.

With that, Lucaites slithered in the direction of the biblical, coming back with: "Anyone for an apple?"

Iraq’s Military Seen as Lagging (NYT)

(image: Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times, April 9, 2008. Washington. nytimes.com)

The Coming Of Age Of The Blast Wall

(click for full size)
In this newswire shot -- just outside a bomb shelter in Sderot, the town in the Israeli north infamously known as a target for crude and occasionally lethal Palestinian rockets -- I think a unique thing happens, the foreground lending new weight and meaning to the background.  The presence of today's most famous war veteran, and the war-obsessed potential next President of the United States, begins to elevate the blast wall to a new level of recognition.

Given that McCain is in Israel, there might be a tendency to associate this background with the Israeli separation wall.
Can anyone argue, however, that these harsh, more portable and yet disarmingly grayish-white half-militaristic, half-political human dams have become the defining post-9/11 symbol for authoritarianism, culture war and the lost art of diplomacy?

The Petraeus Insurgency

This week, I happened to come across the Newsweek cover having just read the LAT front pager titled "It's a Pentagon divided."  (The more direct title inside read: "Joint Chiefs, commanders in Iraq at odds over troops.")

The Times article puts this cover photo in an interesting new perspective.

In essence, the Times piece details how General Petraeus and his "supporters" (wink, wink) have somehow managed to do an end-run around the military chain-of-command, including the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs and their Chairman, Adm Mullen.  (As you know, Adm. Fallon, the former U.S. commander in the the Middle East was knocked out of the box last week.)

Whereas Mullen and the top brass have had a plan in place to reduce the force levels in Iraq, and thus saving the military from coming apart at the seams, Petraeus seems to have somehow magically acquired a veto over his superiors.

Which brings us to the Newsweek cover.

Practically identified as Petraeus' boys, these guys -- armed to the teeth and standing their ground -- actually give off an impression (led by the aptly named Captain Wright as head of the General's posse) that they aren't going to budge.  (And, for reinforcement, check out the shot, left, from the table of contents where Wright has it all mapped out.)

What became codified as "the surge," having evaded Congress, appears to have morphed into a large-scale insurgent force within our own military.

Pentagon divided on Iraq strategy (LAT)
Scions of the Surge (Newsweek)

(image 1: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/Getty for Newsweek.  image 2: Seamus Murphy for Newsweek.  April 2008.  Iraq.  Newsweek Magazine)

"Newsweek Doesn't Hate Clinton" - Part 1: Girls Cheating On Hillary

This is the first in a series of posts focusing
on images from the Mar 17, 2008 issue of
Newsweek featuring essays by 13 different
women about the Clinton campaign.

I'm not sure why Jessica Bennett's article in the latest Newsweek is titled "Am I Betraying the ‘Sisterhood’?"  In light of the rhetorical question, the last line of the piece speaks of her "womanly satisfaction" with each Hillary victory.

The title does, however, speaks to (or rather, for) the alleged guilt of Bennett's "millennial sisters" who have "been sold on the Obama rock-star brand."  "I voted for Obama and I felt like I was cheating on Hillary," a friend confessed to the author just last week.

Writes Tina Brown in a sister article in the same issue:

What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twenty-something daughters don't share their view of her heroic role. Instead they've been swept up by that new Barack magic. It's not their fault, and not Hillary's, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House.

Bennett's article and its thesis (much like Tina Brown's dovetailing observation) makes the accompanying image that much more interesting.  Sandwiched between two older women (reflective of Hillary's most "loyal" constituency), we see two younger women in matching head bands engrossed in conversation.  The woman on the left stares at Hillary with her head down and out of the shadows, while the other seems to be giving the first woman an earful.

In the context of the article, the image -- less like than a political photo than a shot conveying a more cinematic quality -- reads as two women, turncoats to their gender, dishing on Hillary.  Applying the opprobrium of guilt and "cheating," Newsweek equates marital fidelity with gender loyalty.  Except, in this image, at least, it's even worse.  Her "twenty-something daughters" are not just going behind her back, but defying Hillary to her face.

Am I Betraying the ‘Sisterhood’? (Bennett/Newsweek)
The Hillary Issue (Newsweek)

(image: Win McNamee / Getty Images.  via newsweek.com)

The Recruiting Center Bombing: Who's Making A Point?

Maybe the blast at the military recruiting center in Times Square was perpetrated by a "foreign terrorist group," as Senator Clinton's office suggests.  And maybe the bombing is tied to two other bombings -- one from October outside the Mexican consulate, and another dating back three years outside the British Consulate -- as reflexively and conspiratorially mentioned in many of the news reports.

On the other hand -- although nobody seems to have considered the possibility -- maybe someone (maybe even domestic!) got out-of-control over the way America has exercised it's military might in a massive, thoroughly unilateral and unprovoked way in Iraq, and (just two weeks short of the 5 year anniversary of the invasion) decided to target an armed-forces recruiting center (re-branded a career center, by the way) for the specific reason that it happens to be an armed-forces recruiting center.

Rods from God

(This post is based on a book in-progress, titled:
“Visible Wars and American Nationalism:
Militarization and Visual Culture in the Post-Cold War Period.”)

by Wendy Kozol

Despite long-standing debates about the viability of missile defense technology and the ramifications of “weaponizing” space, a range of websites -- from the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency, to lobbying or advocacy groups, like Missilethreat.com -- use powerful visual rhetoric to sustain the economic, political and military investment in this still questionable technology.

Computer-generated pictures, diagrams, and video scenarios depict satellites and sensors orbiting in space around a peaceful globe. Threat and defense are completely disembodied.  There are no “viewers”; no “people” making decisions about when to send out interceptors; and no face of the “enemy."  Devoid of any constraining conditions, everything functions to plan 100% of the time.  And, because every "kill" is a clean kill, free of impact on populations or environments, nobody ever gets hurt.

This illustration, appearing on the Global Security website, extends U.S. military technological power to a wider universe by positioning planets and stars in the composition.  The beauty of the blue planet, so common in popular discussion of Space travel, provides the color scheme for the picture by bathing the technology in the same reassuring tones.

Against the racially empowering function of threats from rogue nations, pictures like this imagine American interceptors destroying enemy missiles in Space.  The illustration prominently foregrounds the American flag on the satellite, while a laser emanating from the satellite furthest in the back successfully hits its target.  A small white light in the background appears as the attacking missile, thus diminishing the threat while emphasizing the omnipotent power of the satellites to protect not just America, but the entire globe.

Importantly, missile defense advocates also rely on moral claims to justify these defense systems (which these "almighty" and "heavenly" visual objects reinforce, as well).  For instance, “Rods from God,” is the nickname for an Air Force Space Command missile defense program.  Technology and religion combine in this label to invoke an image of omniscient power by the U.S. military to protect the nation and its allies from space.

In claiming Space as an extension of national territory, the Air Force Space Command describes themselves as the “guardians of the High Frontier.”  Mobilizing an imperialist logic of military dominance, such references invoke a moral geography based on a mythic ideal about the founding of the United States.  As General Lance Lord, former head of the Air Force Space Command states in this NYT article:

“Space superiority is not our birthright but it is our destiny. . . . Space superiority is our day-to-day mission.  Space supremacy is our vision for the future”

Unlike spectacles of violence and suffering more typical of war imagery, Space is a blank screen for clean technology that never hurts and always protects.  Images from the war on terror -- including photographs of suicide bombings, American casualties, Haditha, and of course Abu Ghraib -- have provoked enormous attention and an occasion for many to critique American Occupation policies.

When we ask the question, how is it that people can look at pictures of suffering and then look away, perhaps it is because they are finding something easier or more comforting to look at.

Wendy Kozol is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Oberlin College.  She teaches courses on feminist theories as well as visual culture.  Among her publications, Wendy is the author of LIFE's America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism.  I warmly welcome Wendy to BAGnewsNotes.