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Anatomy of a photograph ...



Two men extend weapons: one is the Confederate flag, furled, hiding its retrograde design, and the other is an aerosol can, modified to eject fire. The figures stand in a classical configuration, on the diagonal, as if a Dutch master has placed them just so. The white supremacist, a little stout, is dressed in a sloppy kind of uniform; his mouth is puckered as he strains to threaten his adversary. He waves his flag strenuously, an incoherent blur. The mob behind him looks on, seemingly timid.

His opponent, a black man who was recently identified as the twenty-three-year-old Corey Long, is, by contrast, a figure of elegance. (In an interview with the Root, Long said that the protest had seemed peaceful until “someone pointed a gun at my head. Then the same person pointed it at my foot and shot the ground.”) Long is shirtless; movement serves only to define his muscles. The line from his leg to the fire he sprays is unbroken. The bottom half of his face is obscured by a mask, but his pose telegraphs confidence: he seems almost relaxed. An old man hunches behind him, as if taking shelter. Compared to his foe, Long handles his instrument easily, and wittily—when that flag catches on fire, the supremacist will be carrying the sacrilege that he fears. The photo recalls the mysterious serenity of historical images of self-defense: Gloria Richardson eye-rolling in the direction of a National Guardsman’s bayonet, in 1963, her palm pushing his weapon away; Edward Crawford returning a cannister of tear gas to Ferguson police, in 2014. And Helber’s picture avenges, in its way, the same-day image of Deandre Harris, a twenty-year-old black boy who lay prostrate on a garage floor, shielding his head from a beating by gleeful Nazis.

The composition of this photo is fiercely theological. The black man is wielding what the black theologian James Cone, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, might call the “burning fire shut up in my bones”; what James Baldwin would have identified as “the fire next time.” (Cornel West, a student of Cone, has advanced the liberatory concept of “black prophetic fire”; West travelled to the city to march with members of Charlottesville’s faith community on Saturday.) It is a pose that upsets a desire for docility; it’s a rebuke to slogans such as “This is not us” or “Love not hate.” This graceful man has appropriated not only the flames of white-supremacist bigotry but also the debauched, rhetorical fire of Trump, who gloated, earlier this week, that he would respond to foreign threat with “fire and fury.” The resistance has its fire, too.

An Image of Revolutionary Fire at Charlottesville

 

She made some joke that she would give Clinton a bj for keeping abortion legal. Was during the night of the Lewinsly scandal if I recall.

 

#manysides

BPD: Person in custody after Boston’s Holocaust Memorial is vandalized

 

I'd be curious to tabulate your ratio of Nazis to anti-Nazis outrage posts. I suspect the slaughter rule is in effect.

 

"It was an accident." "He was only joking." "Don't take him literally."

This act is getting really,really tired, the way those around him have to cover for his junior high school behavior.

 

You're hard AF right now just thinking it.

 

Why does a man who has the money he does always look like a corpse?

 

God damn ... that alt.right life's a hard one.

 

How many ways can you say that Nazis are terrible, and that their ideology is bankrupt?

How many times do you need to say it to get credit for saying it?

How much credit do you deserve for stating the obvious, multiple times?

 

For the same reason that Lena Dunham purposely tries to look awful sometimes: because it provokes a reaction.