A Picture Is Worth A Few Words

January 23rd, 2015  |   

When people ask me what photography equipment I use, I tell them — my eyes.                Anonymous

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping-stone to other things.   Pablo Picasso

Nine Snapshots

Have you noticed? How could you not notice? Everyone is taking pictures. Everyone is being photographed. Morning, noon and night. Willing and unbeknownst subjects. Still pictures and pictures in motion. Videos and movies. And now, there’s a device that can see through a wall.

People frequently share pictures with me. So, I will share nine snapshots with you. They are unadorned, snapped here and there, without being photoshopped. Honest, even raw, they are what they are. Here, take a look.

-1-

While visiting my daughter Katherine, and Jesse and Eva, my grandchildren, for Christmas, I discovered I was in a “select city,” Minneapolis. That meant I could see a film, American Sniper, beginning its run at local theaters on Christmas Day, prior to a wider release in January. I was familiar with the book, now I would be able to see the film, sort of like a Christmas present. A Christmas present? Why would I want to see a film about Chris Kyle, a U.S. Navy Seal sharpshooting sniper who’s being heralded as an American hero for having killed 160 Iraqis?

I knew that Kyle had said in his book, before being shot to death back home by an Iraqi veteran, that he said it was “fun” to kill Iraqis.

I decided to have my fun opening presents, and then eat breakfast with my family, and take a long afternoon walk along the Mississippi River. Just down that walkway is the Minneapolis Veterans Home, formerly called the Old Soldiers Home. Words come to mind: Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Perhaps they were sold down the river.

-2-

The question repeats itself over and over again on television news and in newspapers. “Why are these terrorists doing this?” The question rings in my ears like Samuel Barber’s repetitious, melodically taunt Adagio for Strings, that haunting theme from the 1986 film, Platoon, about the Vietnam War.

Why are these people, particularly the young men, who claim to be Muslim followers of Mohammed, doing this—the beheadings, the suicide attacks, and the improvised explosive devices? The question bounces around between the synapses in my brain like a ball rebounding around inside a pinball machine.

Likewise, why are our young men and women, Kyle having been one of them, doing what they do—shooting people, dropping bombs, and torturing people?

How did Chris Kyle, a guy from Odessa, Texas, who grew up playing football and going to church, a believer in God and Jesus, wind up shooting people.

-3-

No one in my family ever served in the military. My dad, during WW II, worked in a defense plant, building Navy B-26 Marauder’s at Middle River, Maryland. So, I graduate from college, I marry Judy, and I am the first in my family to march off to the military. 

I’ve got a Marine Corps Dress Blue uniform for special parades and celebrations; field utilities (green trousers); shirts; boots; dress shoes; green field covers (hats); bayonet; canteen; belts; USMC handbooks. I’ve got a head full of basic training. I’ve got a sword to wear on special occasions. I’ve got a house, on the base, at Camp Pendleton, California, where Judy and I live. We’ve got rattlesnakes in our backyard.    

I’ve got an assignment with the Third Battalion Fifth Marines, as an infantry platoon commander of forty men. I’m soon on my way to Okinawa for Southeast Asian duty. I know nothing about our “enemies” in Laos and Vietnam. I should know who these people are, just in case I, and my men, have to kill some of them. I know damn well the sword will be of no help at all, It will take heavy duty airpower, artillery, flamethrowers, napalm, bullets fired from rifles and automatic weapons and machine guns.

Why was I doing this? Because I’m a man, and this is what men are supposed to do?  Be willing to present myself as a blood offering, a sacrifice, to a God dressed in red, white, and blue? One I must salute with my whole body?

-4-

The Lascaux Caves in southwestern France are the repositories of nearly 2,000 figures of animals, human figures, and abstract signs, painted on the walls with mineral pigments.

Now, 17,300 years later, in the Paris office of a magazine, twelve people have been murdered because of a series of sketched satirical cartoons, ink on paper images of Mohammed. One man’s art, it seems, is another man’s blasphemy. Satire equals sacrilege in the eyes of the two gunmen, two brothers who demand blood, on behalf of Mohammed.

Writer and cartoonist, Joe Sacco, whose work I prize, has done astute and unflinchingly honest work in books about Palestine—Gaza in particular, World War I, and Appalachian coal devastation in West Virginia. In a recent cartoon, he turns his attention to the tragic crime in Paris (http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks). It is a cartoon that will offend some for sure, yet welcomed by someone like me who desires an adult conversation about the tensions that exist between artistic freedom of expression and hateful expressions of art.

In one of the panels of Joe’s sketches, these words are informative: “In fact, when we draw a line, we are often crossing one too. Because lines on paper are a weapon, and satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target?”

Poking around for someone’s funny bone, a target for humor can produce dire results if the person being poked feels like he or she has been punched in the gut. Let’s not kid ourselves; a satirical cartoon is an angry fist inside of a velvet glove. A satirist fills a pen with poisonous ink. A cartoonist with a cause compares pencils with guns, writers with fighters. “La plume est plus forte que l’epee.” The pen is mightier than the sword. But a man with a cause and a Kalashnikov rifle sees things from another vantage point.

The late Molly Ivins was a superb satirist. I loved it when she unsheathed her trusty rapier on the powerful poultry industry, by citing the work I was involved in on the Delmarva Peninsula. She sided with powerless poultry growers, chicken catchers, and plant workers. A worthy target!  

I like the critical eye she brought to her own satirical work, affirming, yet aware of the dark side of satire. “There are two kinds of humor. One that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity—like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that’s what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful.” Then her warning: “When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel—it is vulgar.”

The difficulty with Charlie Hebdo’s harshest cartoons was that they belittled the people who are already stereotyped as terrorists, the targets of racist diatribe, scapegoated, and minimized by the way they are looked down upon because they are Muslims. 

-5-

Saïd and Chérif Kouachi are the killers. They saunter around the getaway car in the alley in a chillingly calculating, calm, robotic way, as if they’d just had coffee with the people whose blood they’ve spilled. It has been said, more than once, that these brothers did this evil deed “in cold blood.” I wonder, who takes the temperature of blood? Cold blood, hot blood, is there such a thing as lukewarm blood?

Cold Blood? No way. Hot blood, spewed like lava from the mouth of a volcano, the mouth of the man waving an AK-47 Kalashnikov, screaming “Allahu Akbar,”—Arabic for “God is Great.”

CNN analyst Tom Fuentes said that theses brothers, with their robotic, automatous demeanor, after having killed 12 people, moved about like they were drones. Like drones? That’s a sour, off-target analogy, one that brings to mind the thousands of U.S. drones that have killed thousands of people. Drones, which are convincing people to respond violently toward us, and our allies.

I wanted to ask my bloodless television set: What is the blood temperature of the man who sits in a climate-controlled military base just outside of Las Vegas, one of some 60 CIA and military facilities around the world, and, with his electronic joystick, fires drone weaponry down on people halfway around the world who may very well be innocent civilians and even children?

-6-

“Make love, not war,” was a mid-1960s anti-war slogan. Nevertheless, every inch of my body and soul felt those words when I came home to Judy in March 1961. I still hold the memory of her waiting for me at the airport gate in Buffalo, New York. God, she looked good. How good it was to hold her, not in my mind, as I had done from a distance for over a year, but flesh and blood in my arms.  

Before going to Judy’s parent’s home in Batavia, New York, to see our fourteen-month-old son, Stephen, there had to be time for just Judy and me. We drove 45 miles to Prudhommes Inn, located in Vineland, Ontario, close to Lake Ontario.

I only remember two things about the time there. The intense love we made after not having seen or touched one another for so long. And what else? The second thing was the prizefight between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson for the Heavyweight Championship of the World we listened to on the radio while there.

I know why I can’t forget the lovemaking, but why does a fight stay with me? Why does that stick in my mind after all these years? Maybe it has something to do with love and war — making love and getting the hell away from the violence in Southeast Asia, yet still engaged with a bloody fight in Miami Beach. As if any one of us can escape the fascination with violence.  

-7-

Daughter Deborah gave me a book for Christmas, Flora, by Gail Godwin. In it, an adult Helen reflects back on when, as a ten-year-old, after her mother died, she had to live with Flora, a relative, while her father was away doing secret work on the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  

Helen remembers when, as a child, she knelt, with the Episcopal congregation, to say the General Confession. One’s sins were not dealt with lightly, as they said: “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.” Those words took me back to my own remembrance of praying with the old Book of Common Prayer. Helen bemoans, the way remorse has gone out of fashion, and those words have now morphed into a watered down, “we are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

“Remorse,” says Helen, “went out of fashion around the same time that ‘Stop feeling guilty,’ and ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ and, ‘You need to love yourself more’ came into being.”

Three years of Latin in high school and I am back looking at the word, remordere/remorse. It means: to vex, bite, sting again. As the penitential season of Lent creeps up on my church calendar, I must find the grace to embrace remorse. I hate the way guilt and remorse have been kept out of sight, as if they were the crazy aunts hidden in an upstairs room. I want them out in public. They may have something to teach me.

“I’m sorry about that,” doesn’t quite cover the multitude of sins—the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; the lies from our politicians that sent our people off to war, believing they were doing the right thing; the dead, maimed, and homeless refugees our weaponry created; the torture; the international law we have shattered; the drones that deliver death indiscriminately; the broken and twisted veterans and their families whose lives have been destroyed; the faux patriotism camouflaged with “support our troops slogans; the billions of dollars spent on weapons.

If the remembrance of all that, and so much more, isn’t grievous unto us and intolerable; if it doesn’t vex, bite and sting us; if it doesn’t awaken remorse from beneath blankets of denial, apathy and fear; then there will be no confession, no repentance, no cure for us, blinded as we are by the beams of violence embedded in our eyes.

-8-

The battle rages over American Sniper. Fox News has made Chris Kyle a pontifical icon, an appendage to the Trinity. Michael Moore has shown up mouthing inconsiderate remarks about snipers. Meanwhile, people are showing up like lemmings rushing into theaters for popcorn and a chance to see Bradley Cooper play the role of a bearded Kyle, who wrote, “I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying f**k about them.”

Here’s how I see it. Chris Kyle went into the military because he wanted to help his country fight terrorism by killing bad guys — “savages.” That’s what drives a lot of us to enlist. The identification of a designated enemy, a threat to our nation, a force we’ve been told to fear. They did a 9/11, now we’ll do a number on them. Four times he returned to Iraq to kill people in a war that should never have been fought. We get in trouble, big trouble, when we start thinking in good-bad categories, death for them, and life for us.

Looking down a rifle sight to target the enemy, Chris Kyle was able to utilize “the gift of aggression” his father had given him. What he failed to see was that the people he was killing in Iraq were the products of his own country’s aggression.

The film has Hawks zeroing in on the necks of Doves. Clint Eastwood, the director of the film, epitomizes the image of a hawk. Those little white doves that choose to fly to the starboard side of Republicans will tend to tar the film as pro-war because Eastwood flies to the right. I say, judge the film on its artistic merits, and don’t be afraid to bring moral and religious questions to the film. But be alert to the fact that the film is being used to advance the political goals of the National Rifle Association. Watch Kaya Kyle, Chris’ widow addressing the National NRA Convention. I mean it; watch this clip! (http://home.nra.org/home/video/2013-nra-annual-meetings-taya-kyle/list/2013-nra-annual-meetings)

-9-

Christmas breakfast finished, presents opened, my walk along the Mississippi River completed, there is now time after dinner to read the newspaper. I am reminded as I read that not only has Minneapolis been a “select city” for an early showing of American Sniper, it is, also, one of the cities picked for an early screening of the movie, Selma. Both films, after a three-week hibernation, will reemerge in theaters all over the country on the weekend of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday. Ah, the theater of the absurd, right before my very eyes.

“Selma,” the story of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led some 600 civil rights activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge into a violent confrontation with the police.

Selma versus American Sniper— It’s high-noon at the box office.

The neurological distance between various cells in my brain may be responsible for the connection between King and Kyle that leaps out at me and calls for attention. My cranial molecular machinery responds to the fact that a rifle plays a key role in both of these stories. Kyle, the shooter, and King, on the other end of a bullet, both share cinematic space as heroes. Both are enveloped in violence, King, the victim of violence, Kyle, the perpetrator of violence. And both men, one black, the other white, were committed to disparate paths of action that, as it turned out, resulted in both of them being killed by a gun. 

The Christmas decorations have been put away. MLK Day paeans to Dr. King, speechified praise to the power of nonviolence—make love, not war—are past history. Box office numbers for the two films, through the weekend performances, have been tabulated. Selma —  $29.1 million. American Sniper — $107.3 million. The previous best opener—are you ready for this?  Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of Christ — with $83.8 million.

The words from the Bible book of Deuteronomy come to mind — “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. So choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.” 

 

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