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Coming up tomorrow, "Given choice between Trump, Palin, most registered voters choose suicide."

A Day of Infamy

69 years ago today, Japan's forces attacked Americans at Pearl Harbor. The Big Picture has a collection of 34 photos from that day and its aftermath; some of them, like the above, seem very familiar to me, so I'm giving it the "Iconic Photos" label.

It seems downright impossible that this event was closer to my birth- by over 33 years- than my current age is.

It Was A Dark and Stormy Morning

The Big Picture has the definitive collection of photographs from the oodles I've seen so far today. As you might imagine, there are lots and lots of articles and blog posts on St. Helens today and over the last few days. I'll probably post several pieces myself today. The above photo (or a very similar one, or perhaps a crop of the above) covered 2/3 of the whole front page of The Oregonian on Monday. I bought two copies, and one was a wall poster for years. The other got filed.

It was shortly after noon today that I woke up for a second time, went out to the community room, where maybe 3 dozen people were crowded around the television, watching... something. It was a hazy, apparently black and white, writhing, seething mass between two walls of trees on either side. Trees would snap off and disappear into it.

"What is that?" I asked, of no one in particular.

Someone glanced over their shoulder and replied, "Mt. St Helens."

I didn't comprehend what I was seeing for quite some time, but I was witnessing a lahar on the Toutle River. I'll keep looking, but I haven't found any clips of those debris flows. But after the above image, my initial glimpse of the volcanic fury that day, ironically debris-choked water, mud and wood, remains, for me, the most iconic image from Mt. St. Helens.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming

40 years ago today...
these four young people died. For no particular reason that I've ever heard.

I was ten. I can't claim to remember the event very well. What I do remember is this: I was living in another town in Ohio, Athens, home of Ohio University. I don't remember the ensuing riots; we lived a ways from campus, and we stayed the hell away. I do remember seeing the damaged businesses downtown and the damage around campus: broken windows, smashed doors, debris in the streets, smoke stains from fires. I remember grim National Guardsmen everywhere. Being stopped by armed guards when we tried to drive back into town. Personnel carriers with guns pointed out over their tailgates.

It was a scary education for a ten-year-old boy.

But nothing like the education those Kent State students got on that spring day so long ago.
However disgusted I may be with politics in this country, my faded memories have put things in a different perspective today. Hard as it is to believe, things could be worse.

"Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio."

For a more substantive analysis of the context and lyrics, the source of the four portraits above is a gripping read. History largely saddles Nixon with this atrocity, but I'd like to give a special shout out to James Rhodes, Ohio's governor at the time, as a pigfucker of note.Sorry ma'am. Your kid won't be coming home. Ever. Governor Rhodes felt that carrying signs was too threatening to the stability of his government. So he had'em shot from a football field away. Have a nice day.

Followup, 12:03: Via EB Misfit, here's an essay by one mother whose child never came home from college.

The Man Who Tore Down The Wall

I'll try to add on to this post as I come across other articles that speak deeply to me about the events of twenty years ago today. Here's the first: an interview with the East German border guard who ordered the first barrier open, without orders from his superiors.

SPIEGEL: Would it have been possible to give the order to open fire?

Jäger: No, we had the order not to open fire even if the border was breached, unless our own lives were in danger.

SPIEGEL: So shooting at people in front of the barriers was not an option at any point on November 9?

Jäger: No, but people could have been injured or killed even without shots being fired. In scuffles, or if there had been panic among the thousands gathered at the border crossing. That's why I gave my people the order: Open the barrier!

Also, a few photos here, including the above.

Another gallery of about 30 amazing photos- I think the thing that strikes me is how these images represent a destruction of symbols and patterns of thought, more so than a simple dismantling of a physical entity.

As always, the Christian Science Monitor delivers a tremendous amount of information boiled down into an eminently readable and fairly concise analysis, with perspectives from a wide variety of observers. I found this passage important in showing the resonance of the day's events:

"We didn't realize how the world was changing because part of that change was held back by the cold war," Mr. Scowcroft says.

It was like a dam breaking, powerful ideas and technologies sweeping the globe.

"One of the important aspects of globalization was information technology," Scowcroft says. "What the radio and television was doing was politicizing the world's people. [For much of history] the population of the planet did not know what was going on past their own neighborhood, didn't much care; life went on. All of a sudden they saw what was going on in the world and they were energized."

Some took that energy and immigrated to the West in search of better lives, Scowcroft says. Others, though, were outraged by what they saw in the West, triggering a rise in religious fundamentalism.

It took Al Qaeda's strike on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, for the world to turn its attention to the currents that roiled the Middle East. Now, the US finds itself in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, battling terrorism – shadowy, stateless foes.

Indirectly then, the Berlin Wall's fall ushered in a new, more complicated era, one unimaginable to those who built the bedrock post-World War II institutions like the United Nations and NATO.

Chuck at Lounge of the Lab Lemming offers a wise geological perspective... I feel like I'm swiping a bit much here, but I really wanted to get his smackdowns of both the right and left. Obviously, I'm biased toward the left, but I appreciate on-target criticism of my own biases as much as I do criticism of others.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. In the 20 years since then, it has become easy to take freedom for granted. The idea that people would be imprisoned for pursuing their dreams and aspirations seems barbaric, and the idea that they would be shot for trying to see the rest of the world seems absurd. But 20 years is just an instant- one 200 millionth of the history of the Earth. For most of that time there were no people at all, of course. But the idea that our lives are ours to live as we please is a very recent development even when you only consider the 200,000 years that we have walked this Earth.

Sadly, communism does not appear to be as dead as it seemed to be headed in the early 1990’s. While military parades and red flags have fallen out of favor in most places, many of the fundamental ideas that made the Eastern Bloc so vile have become entrenched in Western culture. The left’s political correctness and the Right’s truthiness are both examples of communist style diktats demanding that the universe conform to a group’s bland paradigm.

Followup Tuesday, November 10: A very good summary of the history prior and subsequent to the fall at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit:

The preparation on both sides was deadly serious, as both sides regarded each other as the future enemy. The Western Berlin Garrison had a wartime mission that could be boiled down to two words: Die bravely. The NATO forces in Germany had a mission of to hang on until reinforcements could arrive (or things went nuclear). Both sides had enough chemical nerve agents to turn most of Europe into a dead zone. Life during the Cold War was to live with the knowledge, however much [one] wanted to bury it, that if things went horribly wrong, we all had less than an hour before civilization basically ended.

The Big Picture has a wonderful gallery of photos from the days around November 9, 1989, and celebrations and memorials from the last couple of days. Again, I'm struck by the expressions of various people- citizens and soldiers- of joy, confusion and dismay. For those who lived through it on site, it was truly a day the Universe changed. As I mentioned in a comment at EB Misfit's blog a little while ago, the event seems much more important and profound to me now than it did at the time.

Fallen Soldier

Another in the "Iconic Photos" series, this was supposedly shot during the Spanish Civil war. A soldier coming across a hilltop was captured at the moment of his death. This was one I was planning on posting eventually, but it is particularly timely today: an article in the NYT claims that recent research suggests the photograph was staged.

Staged or not, it still presents a riveting image of humanity and its strange predispositions.

Followup: Comment on the importance of this photo, photojournalism generally, and hopes that the photo is authentic, NYT, Thurs. August 20.

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

People tend to think first of the momentous achievement involved with putting a living person on the moon, and forget the equally daunting task of returning that person to earth alive. 40 years ago, human beings accomplished that second task. I seem to vaguely remember being woken for the landing itself, but not being able to stay awake to watch the first step. I'm honestly not sure. But I do remember being riveted by the event, and I was much more emotionally involved with the astronauts' fate afterwards. The days it took for them to return to earth were nail-biters, and the splash-down and recovery of the crew was a much more exciting moment for me than the actual walking on the moon. Picture from NASA's Image of the Day Gallery; front page here.

Iconic Photos

I've had some interesting reactions to my Tuesday post on this topic. It's been heavily discussed amongst folks here at my favorite coffee shop, and I've been interrupted a number of times by people wanting to show them to someone else, and see if they recognize them.

It has been really rewarding to see people looking at and considering these. I also got a couple of written comments. EcoGeoFemme said, "Those images are all vaguely familiar to me. I wouldn't have been able to say what they were exactly, but I could probably have guessed well in a multiple choice test. So I'd say they aren't iconic to me, but not completely unfamiliar. I'm 30."

Now I'm not going about this in any systematic way- I think that would be impossible in a blogging environment- but I haven't shown these to many people in their upper 30's and older. Is age really this issue? I suspect it's a component... the availability of enormous amounts of information may dilute the ability of younger people to be exposed to these sorts of images. However compelled to speculate I may be, I'm also compelled to point out that I'm just speculating.

Jim Repka suggested two others for the list- both of which I could picture immediately, and the second of which had already come up in conversation a couple of times by the time I received his comment. Here's the first:

Lyndon Johnson was the only president to take the oath of office from a woman, Federal District Court Judge Sarah Hughes, after the assasination of JFK. He took the oath aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963. (From Here)

This is Lyndon Johnson taking the Oath of Office in the immediate aftermath of JFK's death. This is the only time a woman has administered the oath of office- a task normally performed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The shock and sorrow in his widow's face is palpable; the nation couldn't help but share her emotions (You can get a better sense of her expression by clicking on the picture to enlarge it.) I'd be willing to bet this is the only time the oath has been administered in an airplane, as well.

This is an image of RFK immediately after he was shot on June 5, 1968

Photo taken by Boris Yaro for the Los Angeles Times (From here)

Though I was too young to really comprehend the impact it had, somehow I recall the assassination of JFK nearly as well as that of his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, less than five years later, as he was campaigning (and winning) during the presidential primaries. It's only as I became older that I began to fully understand the ramifications of this event, and I've never felt the same emotional impact as with the JFK shooting. But people just a little older than me still find this harrowing to recall.

And finally, one suggested by Bill, from an era in which most of my readers had at least been born:

Gulf War/Dead Iraqi Soldier, 1991, chromogenic color print, by Kenneth Jarecke. Courtesy Kenneth Jarecke/Contact Press Images. (From Here)

We were led to believe that the first Gulf War, Desert Storm, was being conducted as humanely as possible. Trouble is, "humane" isn't possible in a shooting war. I'd argue that "Rules of War" is an oxymoron. This image showed that war was, is, and always will be, hell. No matter how smart your weapons are.

Again, your comments and suggestions are deeply desired here. Do you recognize some or all or none of these? How old are you? What photos do you consider iconic? As an aside, do you think any particular photos from 9/11 are (or even could be) considered iconic? (There are so many, how do you pick one or two?) What explanations for this cultural void space can you offer?

Iconic Photos

We live in a culture that has become very dependent on visual imagery to convey a sense of itself. Photos in particular have become a major aspect of representing our history. Sunday a week ago, I posted a photoshopped version of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot. I thought at the time that maybe I should note the original source, or link to the image, but I decided, naah, everyone will recognize the photo, and see the humor- grim humor, but still funny.

I was wrong.

Most, not all, but most, of the young people I've showed it to don't recognize it or the original. I find this a little disturbing. I can understand that K-12 texts might find some of the following photos too graphic, or that publishers might be worried about turning off certain markets, but these are the kinds of iconic photos- however disturbing they may be- that show up in compilations of the best and most important in history.

After finding these missing from the mental library from many of my young friends- and keep in mind, these are extraordinarily intellegent, well-educated adults in their early to mid 20's, not information deprived dropouts- and discussing the issue with Bill and Iris, I started looking around for some others that I felt were of particular importance.

Many didn't recognize those ones either.

The issue here is not that I have lost esteem for these folks- I haven't- it's that despite their education and powerful intelligence, somehow they have not had the opportunity to see these photos and contemplate their importance. They may be horrifying and sad, but these pictures capture part of who we are, as citizens of the country, of the world, and simply as human beings. Below are three I've been showing around.

First, the image that brought this to Iris', Bill's and my attention:

Lee Harvey Oswald, the instant he is shot point-blank by Jack Ruby in Dallas, Texas on November 24, 1963, as photographed by Robert H. Jackson.

(image source here, Wikipedia article here) This is an original, unaltered image of the photo I posted nine days ago. Oswald was never convicted of assassinating Kennedy- he was dead before the trial started. This has led to inummerable conspiracy theories, but most serious investigations have concluded that Oswald was indeed the assassin.

The next two are from Vietnam; the first, from 1968, was among those that solidified widespread public opposition to the war, as opposed to simply protests by "crazy, hippie college kids."

© 1968 Wide World Photos. Copy found at BBC News

Description from Wikipedia (main article here): Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes Viet Cong Captain Nguyen Van Lem: February 1, 1968. This Associated Press photograph, "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon," won a 1969 Pulitzer prize for its photographer Eddie Adams. Film also exists of this event, but owing to the more graphic nature of the film, the photograph is more widely known.

The second is from 1972, toward the end of the war, and brought the horror of the situation to the front page, not for the first time, but perhaps more starkly and powerfully than ever before.

Nick Ut / The Associated Press

Description from Wikipedia (main article here): Kim Phuc Phan Thi, center, running down a road near Trang Bang, Vietnam, after a napalm bomb was dropped on the village of Trang Bang by a plane of the Vietnam Air Force. The village was suspected by US Army forces of being a Viet Cong stronghold. Kim Phuc survived by tearing off her burning clothes. Kim Phuc (aged 9) running naked in the middle with her older brother, Phan Thanh Tam (12), crying out to the left. Her younger brother, Phan Thanh Phuoc (5), to the left looking back at the village and to the right are Kim Phu's small cousins Ho Van Bo, a boy, and Ho Thi Ting, a girl.

I have tried to conform to copyright restrictions as best as possible (and that may part of the reason younger people have been deprived of witnessing these icons) but if anyone has comments about how to conform more acceptably, please let me know.

I have a number of others in mind for the future, but I have two requests: First, please let me know if there are photos that you think are of particular iconic importance. These three happen to be from a ten year window, but I don't want to focus on any particular time. Furthermore there are likely iconic photos that I'm not really familiar with, but should be. I'm all about teh edumacating thing.

Second, I'm curious about my readers' thoughts on how people could go through 25 years or so without having come across pictures such as the examples above. I've outlined a couple of possible reasons (textbooks becoming tamer over the years, aggressive copyright enforcement), but I don't feel like they're sufficient. And it appears, reasonably enough if you think about it, that my friends can't really explain why they haven't seen them either.