Two pics stood out for me from this year’s Fleet Week coverage in New York, the thirtieth year Navy vessels have docked in town for sailors to tour the city and civilians to tour the ships. (If the scenes aren’t new, what’s noteworthy is how ingrained the ritual has become. Bag first covered the event in 2007 with three post (1, 2, 3) featuring photos from Nina Berman.)

Beyond the maritime aspect, what’s always more blatant is the Fleet Week beachhead the Marines have established, bringing weapons and heavy equipment into Times Square and park spaces in the overt marketing of militarism.

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and with the 9/11 wars phasing out, you might think it made sense to start pulling back the hardware and the glorification of killing. Instead, that boy’s look of admiration scares me more than the M4 he can barely hold up, the military trappings — the troops, the uniforms, the weaponry — seeming as much a part of the landscape, now, as baseball.

I also liked this shot, taking the allusion of sanctity in a different direction. Applying war paint for a combat demonstration, the tightly-focused scene looks like an act of anointment. As battered from battle as the country is, war somehow remains Godly.

(photos: Andrew Burton/Reuters caption 1: Connor Kennedy, 7, from Farmingdale, New York, holds the M4 carbine rifle of a marine from 1st Battalion 9th Marines Charlie Company 2nd Platoon during a demonstration put together by the Marines as part of Fleet Week in East Meadow, New York, May 26, 2012. As part of the demonstration, Marines from the 1st Battalion 9th Marines Charlie Company 2nd Platoon flew in a V-22 Osprey from New York to Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York and stormed a field, where civilians could watch the demonstration. Marines spoke to civilians after the demonstration and civilians could tour various aircraft, including the V-22 Osprey.caption 2 (excerpt): A Marine from the 1st Battalion 9th Marines Charlie Company 2nd Platoon puts camouflage paint on his face before a tactical demonstration.)

The headline at The Huffington Post screamed “HOLY WAR.”  The subhead added “Notre Dame Sues Obama.”  And the story was illustrated as above.

I thought twice about saying anything: as a Huff Post junkie, I have little basis for faulting how they mash up images and stories.  Every story gets an image, no matter how distant in space, time, or topic it might be.  Some of these visual captions are clever and some are cheap come-ons that work even though I should know better, but what the hell, it’s free, right?

Well, yeah, but “free” usually means that someone else is paying the cost.  And in this case, we all lose something, for the mashup does just about all that can be done to misconstrue the issue.  Just for starters, the debate over extending health care coverage to include contraception isn’t a holy war, and the lawsuit is addressed to the United States government, not the Obama administration.  Nor is Notre Dame bringing the lawsuit by itself; instead, it is one of a number of Roman Catholic organizations listed as plaintiffs.  But these distinctions are small change compared to what is being said by the visual juxtaposition of Obama and You Know Who.

If this direct comparison of Obama with Jesus Christ doesn’t play to conservative invective, I don’t know what does.  The triumphant Obama stands in the place of Christ, while the movement from left to right suggests temporal succession.  Obama wants to replace Jesus, and doing so would replace Christian Civilization–signified by all the lesser figures in the religious image–with a secular society where the right values no longer constrain political power.  (This would be the semblance of a rationale behind the references to Obama as a dictator or someone hell bent on dictatorship–claims that are legion on the right and evident in the comments following the story.)  Thus, the legislation reflects not a difference of perspective about the scope of federal laws, but a struggle over who shall have the ultimate authority over all: God or this political leader defined solely by his ambition.

There’s even potentially a racist element to the comparison, if you see Obama as imitating Christ rather than acting on his own accord, but I’m not going there.  The fact is, it’s bad enough as it is, and not least because it obviously is intentional.  This was not what Obama was doing in response to the lawsuit or on the same day–instead, a photo from a campaign rally or political convention has been pulled out of the file precisely because of the iconographic similarity with the Christ figure.  And, of course, Obama loses legitimacy no matter how you make the comparison.  If he is like Christ, then he still is deficient in virtue: egocentric and awash in hubris instead of self-sacrificing and salvic.  And if he is not like Christ, then he has no prerogative to challenge religious authority.

But it gets worse yet.  The policy in question is in fact not the directive of a sovereign leader, but rather the result of routine legislative and administrative processes.  Likewise, the objections to the policy do not in any way, shape, or form come from Jesus Christ, but rather from the leadership of a religious denomination regarding its own administration of large bureaucratic organizations.  And it is not inappropriate to add that said denomination has had plenty of reason of late to question its own claim on moral authority, and that hubris and other abuses of power have been all too evident as well.  But you wouldn’t know that from these images.

Those who complain about “the liberal media” would like us to forget that all media are subject to the same vices.  Culture wars may be stupid fabrications contrived to mobilize voters for reactionary ideologies, but they also sell papers and keep eyeballs on the screen.  Fair enough, as we all have to make a living, but I still wish that the media claiming to represent my interests knew where to draw the line.

– Robert Hariman

(No photo credits are given, as none were provided.)

(cross-posted from No Caption Needed)

The background: Romney was so brave as to visit a charter school in a black, low income Philadelphia neighborhood.

Romney participated in an alliteration exercise at a Philadelphia charter school and this is the results of his efforts. Alas, he forgot his staff’s admonition to never bring up dogs (this video clip evidencing racial patronization around the allusion to canines) or dogs and cars. And a glance at the various galleries documenting his visit show a decided lack of excitement (see the young girl behind Mitt on the right).  Still, there’s a part of me that looks at achievement and says “Good Boy, Mitt!”

Grade: C-. Saved from the dog-driven D only because he managed to have a photo taken in a charter school with minority students and survived their lack of joy in seeing him.

– Karen Hull

(photo 1: Clem Murray/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT/Zuma Press caption: A TEACHABLE MOMENT: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney visited students in a sixth-grade language arts class at Universal Bluford charter school in west Philadelphia Thursday. The students were learning about alliteration.)

Is the War on Terror over? Not in Bushland anymore?

I did a double take seeing a Muslim country represented at the Air Force Academy graduation — especially with Obama in attendance in campaign season.  Must be some tradition as there is an airman with the Slovenian national flag (reversed) in the background.

Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais /AP Photo Caption: Riadh Hairi, stands up and waves a Tunisian flag after being acknowledged during the graduation ceremony of the 2012 class of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Wednesday, May 23, 2012, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

It’s youthful and energetic.

It intones the campaign slogan (forward).

It’s throughly optimistic: onward and upward.

It’s completely confident: Looking downfield. Playing offense. Going for it.

It’s completely singular. The leader.

It’s like crack to young football-crazed males.

It’s Chicago — home turf. But it’s the whole world.

It’s about staying the course for a second term: it says we just crossed midfield.

It’s completely unapologetic about playing to the media deck.

Foreign policy-wise, it’s elegantly balanced between cooperation and going it alone. Otherwise, the message is singular leadership. We’re on NATO’s team but we’re quarterbacking. Midway between English (United States) and French (États-Unis), it’s still all about us.

(photo: Pete Souza/White House caption: President Barack Obama throws a football on the field at Soldier Field following the NATO working dinner in Chicago, Illinois, May 20, 2012.)

Two weddings, two wedding pictures taken at inopportune moments. Given how far in advance the NATO Summit was scheduled, I have greater hopes for the tornado couple.

– Karen Hull

(Top photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images via Time Newsfeed. caption: Newly married couple Tim and Beth Alberts get caught-up in a protest in downtown Chicago on the eve of the NATO summit on May 19, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. Bottom photo: Cate Eighmey Photography via NBC Today Show. caption: Kansas couple catches tornado in wedding photo. When Candra and Caleb walked down the aisle for the first time together as husband and wife, the bride, a Nebraska native, also saw her very first tornado, and the photographer snapped her first wedding twister.)

Is this the killer meme of the Republican campaign?

This New York Times article is a good read in terms of outlining the Rove/Crossroads “good cop”-half of the Republican’s focused-group-finessed campaign strategy. So the GOP figures out that over-the-top attacks on Obama are just that? Maybe it’s news to the conservatives, but people like the “Hoopster-in-Chief”.

That’s not to say Karl hasn’t tapped into (John and) Jane Q. Public’s modern day terror: the domestic nightmare that the recession (and the health care crisis) for the middle class is never going to end, the kids never move on (or keep showing up again like the back entrances is a revolving door), and, holy gender gap! Louise is left to fend on her own with that lame daughter and ADD boy. (Maybe it was the growth hormone?)

(Crossroads ad: “Basketball.” Also: The Original “Harry and Louise” ad).

Although clashes between police and demonstrators led the news from Chicago, the main act Sunday was the massive protest march which saw members of Iraq Veterans Against the War throwing their medals away in a symbolic gesture against the Global War on Terror. At the start of the march which preceded the ceremonies, we see the inordinate distance the police insisted on between photographers and the veterans.

Marching in formation, we see the veterans wearing their medals for the last time. “The drill” has got to feel as dissonant as it is familiar given this ultimate and public demonstration that the military, as a unit, led them down a broken path. Echoing the lead photo with the policeman establishing a boundary, the yellow rope establishes the veterans’ own security perimeter. Given the stifling control established by the City’s corps, the rope forms both a physical and emotional space-within-a-space.

Steven Acheson, a 27 year old former Army Sergeant leads the row second from the right. He’s wearing the shirt and boots he deployed in as well as two medals. He grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, a conservative Christian. He watched 9/11 on TV and then wanted to join. Says Steven: “I was that soldier that really wanted to kill people.”

In this photo, a member of Afghans for Peace stands side-by-side with one of the veteran forming a connection that America’s government and military always imagined was achievable through military means. In the act of memory and grief, reciting his personal motivation for discarding his medals, an additional solace comes from the Afghan woman holding his words for him. There is also a curious geometry to the photo. To the left is Mary Kirkland whose son Derek committed suicide by hanging himself in his barracks at Ft. Lewis after two Iraq deployments. And though there’s no telling what’s going through the mind of the Chicago policewoman, the fact she forms a triangle with the veteran and the Afghan activist just makes it that much harder to understand what security really means anymore.

Finally, this composition, situated about a quarter mile away from the actual NATO meeting, is as complicated as the set of spikes. The police are but digits and lines on a barcode while these veterans engage in a symbolic act to recover their identity. The veterans shed their hardware while the paramilitary police brandish theirs. And while the police surveille, that vigilance is rendered empty and callous, the solemn ritual of the veterans entailing its own submission.

PHOTOGRAPHS by Nina Berman/Noor

Winston Churchill, in a time of war, saw that the arts were the voice of his people; the soul of his civilization, and the very expression of what is was to be a … citizen. If we as Americans are so willing to grossly over-fund our military and defund our arts, our deepest expression of ourselves both at home and abroad is simply an expression of war. Instead of cultivating unity and transcendence of boundaries throughout the world, we are propagating a world at war.

– from: Military Funding vs. Funding for the Arts: What Does the Difference Say About American Values? by Brendan McMahon (HuffPo)

Whether he’s the author of the quote or not, Churchill is famous for having rejected a WWII request to cut arts funding by his Finance Minister who was scraping every penny for the war effort, by asking: “Then what are we fighting for?”

I’m sure this photo of Chicago riot cops protecting the Art Institute of Chicago looks cool to some, but it couldn’t be more blasphemous. Just think about it. America, as a hyper-militarized state, having spent the last ten years engaged in a global war on terror, is hosting an international conference for NATO, the organization at the center point of that militarization. Further consider, one of the main attributes of that terror war has been the militarization of local police forces across the country. The agenda? Stifling public dissent in the face of the social need and humanitarian agenda sacrificed to the terror agenda. (Perhaps they were called in by Bank of America, the “global sponsor” hosting the blockbuster show?)

I think I need to go dust off my copy of Catch-22.

(photo: William DeShazer, Chicago Tribune caption: Chicago police line up outside the Art Institute as protesters draw near. May 20, 2012)