Despite its ubiquity in images, suffering is not a subject; it is an aesthetic. Viewing or imagining human beings in pain, often in decontextualized situations, is a visual solicitation of emotions. That reporters eagerly indulged certain details surrounding Shepard’s murder, such as the tracks tears had made on his face, or his height and weight, and omitted others, such as his alleged addiction to and distribution of crystal meth or his prior acquaintance with one of his murderers, betrays their aestheticization of an event: his death cut from reality like a clipping from a newspaper and pasted on the board of hate crimes. They focused on his suffering in the same register as that of James Byrd Jr., earlier that same year, who was beaten and tortured by three white men, chained to a pickup truck, and dragged for three miles along an asphalt road. Paraphrasing the Reverend Jesse Jackson, The New York Times reported that Byrd “had entered the pantheon of the nation’s racial martyrs and victims,” and suggested “a monument in his memory as a tangible protest against hate crimes.” Today, the James Byrd Jr. Memorial Park in Jasper, Texas, has 4.2 out of 5 stars on Google Maps. One reviewer has uploaded photos to document that “Charlee”—a young girl smiling on a swing set—“had a blast!”
Remembered properly, murders like these become atrocities. Like those killed at Columbine High School in April of 1999, or the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, they “enter the pantheon” of prescriptive memory, where we, as a nation, are taught to remember such violence as historical, as part of our education. And thus we are educated. We build the memorials. We “never forget” Shepard, Byrd, Columbine, 9/11. We promise: “Never Again.” Usually, similar if not eerily identical circumstances crop up again, with new victims and, ultimately, new memorials. Suffering is among the most instructive of forms, with a syllabus increasingly contemporary.
“Never Again,” as a slogan, has changed over the decades. Now hashtagged to nearly any protest against violence, the phrase originally referred to the Nazi genocide against Jews. As Emily Burack writes in The Jerusalem Post, “The phrase gained currency in English thanks in large part to Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi who popularized it in America when he created the Jewish Defense League in 1968.” Gradually, a sense of remembrance and a desire for peace eclipsed Kahane’s militancy. “Never Again,” Burack writes, “is a phrase that keeps on evolving. It was used in protests against the Muslim ban and in support of refugees, in remembrance of Japanese internment during World War II and recalling the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.”
In truth, Liss’s photograph is beautiful, and meant to be. The 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan—with its two black pools emptying into the foundations of the towers, the names of victims lining the railings of both fountains—is beautiful. In Chile, at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, there is a fifty-foot-high wall covered in 3,197 photographs, all faces of Chileans murdered under Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. In Montgomery, Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice contains “more than 800 stele-like, 6-foot-tall rusted steel mini-monuments,” as critic Holland Cotter describes them. Each is inscribed with the name of a county, as well as with a list of the names of African Americans (sometimes “Unknown”) who were lynched there. As the walking path gradually descends, these coffin-like structures, which initially surround viewers, are soon suspended overhead, suggesting bodies hanging from trees, and “so high that the inscribed names are unreadable.”
What all of these memorials do—and do well—is engage the senses. In size, in starkness, in beauty, in contrast of color or shadow, and in their mass deployment of names or faces, they overwhelm the eye. They offer an emotional experience that betrays what they really are: art. That is, they are not straightforward records of events as they happened, but stylized interpretations or translations. As art, they must be approached, discussed, and critiqued as objects or images with artistic intent: Who created this, and what do they want me to feel or to think? They must not be studied, and certainly not revered, as history.
Like photographs, memorials aestheticize suffering and atrocity. With their unique names and executions, each adapts a real-life event into a complete story; often, we call them tragedies. Commemorating tragedies we cannot change, populated by people we cannot save, memorials invite us to regard the fixed and motionless past from our mercurial present. Prescriptive memory, then, composed of curated atrocities, becomes a gallery instead of a sequence of related events: a canon of terrible images we’re supposed to understand simply by looking at them.
In any society, this gallery of pain highlights its obsessions, concerns, and fears. If one examines the way American society curates and archives its atrocities, one begins to understand the nation’s self-serving relationship to history, where the aestheticization of atrocity not only seems like a useless deterrent against violence, but actually to justify it, to encourage it.
In a 1995 interview, discussing the Serbian slaughter of Bosnians, Sontag remarked on the lack of action from other European nations, all signatories to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “‘Never again’ doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean, never again will Germans be allowed to kill Jews in the 1940s, that’s true.” Despite the phrase’s apparent universality, when it comes to its application, Sontag is right: Because we refuse to recognize atrocities for what they are, “Never Again” doesn’t stray far from its original connotation. Unfortunately, building memorials and planting gardens and reciting names is never enough. It’s not only ineffective but unethical to outsource our political engagement with history to commemorative beauty, to substitute thinking about real events with being moved by mere works of art. If art could speak the way we pretend it does, there would be no “again” at all.
This is, however, why art is taught. Despite the claims of several artists and writers throughout the centuries—nearly all in positions of immense privilege and power—artworks are more than aesthetic. This is what contemporary cancel culture is clumsily trying to untangle—that artworks have ethics, and that engaging, buying, and sharing art has ethical obligations. Cancel culture is not censorship but a protest against systemic injustice, against aesthetic supremacy—the lie that beauty trumps all in cinema, photographs, literature, and so on. It is anti-fascism as criticism, and once it maps the ethical and political obligations in its own language and tactics, it will address injustices in the arts, both historical and contemporary, on par with the greatest discursive movements against power—including feminism, Marxism, queer theory, and intersectionality—in critical history.
Americans, generally, aren’t so good at history. It’s tempting to think our propensity for dramatizing wars, disasters, and other so-called tragedies onstage and in cinema has been detrimental to our understanding of events, populating collective memory with individual stories, as if episodes from an epic. In episodic narratives, nothing ever changes—everything is normal in the beginning, terrible in the middle, and resolved by the end. Characters and settings are comfortably static. With respect to real-life atrocity, this is how the United States has lost its innocence at least half a dozen times, from the Civil War to 9/11 to Trump’s election. Everything that happens is a shock to the nation. This is how our never again becomes ever again: an innocence déjà perdu.
History, after all, is heavy. For many Americans, it’s something to leave behind. We say we’re post-race; we say same-sex marriage put an end to homophobia. To do this we tell stories of slavery and civil rights, of the AIDS epidemic. These are photos we snap and label as past. Indeed, history itself is something our nation, as an idea, tried to escape—the entrenchments of Europe, the legacies of kings, and whatever else the wealthy white men who created our country on paper promised themselves.
In a 1975 interview, Sontag quipped that the American relationship with history was one of disinterest, even fear: “The essential American relation to the past is not to carry too much of it. The past impedes action, saps energy. It
’s a burden because it modifies or contradicts optimism . . . You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence.”
In truth, we are history; our unique pasts exist only in the present. In forsaking them for prescriptive memory, particularly without interrogating who has prescribed us these memories, we place a tenuous hope in what writer and psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls “a redemptive myth.” We believe, he says in “The Forgetting Museum,” that “remembering done properly will give us the lives that we want.” In saying, Look what happened, there is an optimism that the image itself will carry the pain and do the work, all in a gamble that atrocity will look the same when and if it reappears. That, ultimately, is prescriptive memory’s weakness; even two real, literal photographs taken of the same person are never identical. To rely upon images instead of contextualized history is to guarantee getting lost.
Not that we’re always meant to find our way. Some memorials, for example, are particularly careful images of the past. Their aesthetics harbors a desired emotional, not intellectual, understanding: Viewers and visitors are meant to feel, not think. At the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the aesthetics of absence—two seemingly bottomless black pools surrounded by the names of the thousands who died—alongside recovered detritus, burned clothing, rubble, and the final voicemails of those trapped inside, all frame a narrative of destruction that points to a strangely opaque other: al-Qaeda. Absent altogether is Osama bin Laden’s long relationship with the United States government. To contextualize him among the names, faces, and voices of the dead—especially as a CIA-funded militant in the Soviet–Afghan War—would politicize something more easily remembered as tragedy. Yet there was nothing apolitical about the destruction of the World Trade Center, and to expunge politics from the memorial is its own political act, the effect of which is to stir grief, incite rage, and mobilize Americans against an ambiguous enemy. As I write this, what is still branded “the War on Terror” has surpassed its nineteenth year, its sixth trillionth dollar, and the end of anywhere between half a million and two million lives. Demanding that we never forget is laughable if, from the start, there’s no genuine history to remember; and “Never Again” means nothing when victims are aestheticized as propaganda, when our own government uses them to amplify retributive terror.
Americans are also bad at propaganda—that is, at recognizing it. As producers and consumers of propaganda, the United States outperforms every other nation in the world. For most of us, the word connotes negatively. It’s the odor to advertising’s scent, a reputation created by propaganda of our own: the way propaganda is portrayed, for example, in history and in fictions of the U.S.S.R. and the Third Reich, not to mention countless dystopian futures imagined by authors and filmmakers. But propaganda, as Andrew O’Hagan wrote for T magazine a few months after the 2016 elections, does not necessarily come from one man in power who “supplant[s] what is true with what they wish to be true.” Instead, propaganda stems from “an impulse to choose a side and press its case with wily elegance,” and what it “sells” is a way of life, or “a series of values, traits and skills that others might do well to emulate.” O’Hagan’s words are precise—“might do well to emulate”—and reflect how propaganda excels. It doesn’t demand or dictate so much as suggest, aggressively. “Manipulating human belief might sound like an alarming project for governments and designers to undertake,” he adds, but
it’s one of the oldest professions in the book, and corporations, religions, entertainers and doctors, to say little of politicians, are dedicated to the art of making you think what you ought to think. Populism is based on the notion that people can think for themselves, but most people can’t and don’t want to; they need team colors and a direction of play that is worked out by other people . . . For good or for ill, the art of propaganda must set out to persuade them of what they think.
Indeed, it’s this “for good” that has been most overlooked in the United States, even though we see good propaganda at work every day, and have for decades—in certain commercials, for example, when nearly every race and gender and sexual orientation is equally represented in its consumption, say, of heartburn medication; or in film after film where money, no matter how hard the rich man tries, can’t bring him what he wants, not even happiness.
It was a little more obvious, O’Hagan notes, during World War II, when it was “considered by most of the Allies to be something of a gentle and spirited approach to the survival of the species.” In 1943, the United States Department of War produced a short film called Don’t Be a Sucker. The film features one-dimensional Americans going about their lives, yet reminds us that this is a country full of “free people” of many different religions who go to their own churches and form their own opinions. But, the film’s narrator says, “There are guys who stay up nights figuring out how to take that away.” The film cuts to a middle-aged man, sour with anger as he preaches from the steps of a government building. “I’m just an average American,” this man says, “but I’m an American American . . . I see Negroes holding jobs that belong to me and you.” He rants about what must be done, who must stick together and who must be excluded, while two men in the audience debate his speech. “He seems to know what he’s talking about,” the younger of the two says, but his perception is quickly dismantled by the older man, whose Hungarian accent connotes an authority on “what this talk can do.” In America, he says, “we have no other people. We are American people.” He informs the younger man how the Nazis came to power, how their rhetoric divided the populace. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” he says. “Always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody is going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The film is a brilliant piece of anti-fascist, pro-American propaganda, appealing not to the sympathies of others but to the young man’s self-interests: the focus is not on the fate of minorities in fascism’s crosshairs, but on how fascism won’t bring prosperity to the young man, only those using him as a pawn.
After the War, however, American propaganda began to differentiate itself from state-driven efforts in countries designated as political enemies—an executive strategy seen as incompatible with the freedom of the individual. O’Hagan cites the CIA’s famous covert literary magazine, Encounter, as one example to “win the hearts and minds of the English-speaking world,” as well as Hollywood’s decades-long project to “churn out pro-war propaganda and sexist assumptions as if they were catnip to the people.” Whether funded by the government or not, these corporate propaganda systems reinforce the image of the United States the government has established, which in turn benefits wealthy donors and lobbyists whose funding influences legislation that complements this propaganda.
Lest we forget, the president made 2,140 observable false or misleading claims in his first year of office, or 5.9 lies per day.
During the Trump presidency, state-driven propaganda returned to the limelight, complete with slogans, an emphasis on loyalty, a racially based isolation of who is elevated as American and who is not, and a flagrant disregard for what is true in place of what one man in power wishes to be true. In fact, the phenomenon of Donald Trump embodies not only how propaganda functions in this country today, but how an image’s politics depends entirely upon context. Not only does one see the tenuous, even fragile relationship between images and language, there is an increasing acquaintance with the relationship of images with other images, whose juxtapositions become a language in and of themselves. I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign ad, in which the iridescently lit faces of children filled the screen while actual footage of Donald Trump played out on the televisions they were presumably watching. “What will our children think?” Clinton’s voice-over asks while Trump degrades immigrants and women and Muslims and persons with disabilities to enthusiastic cheers. It was a beautiful and earned work of propaganda, giving context to an
image (Trump) by placing it against another (children, shorthand for America’s future). But so too was the president’s lexicon of epithets (“Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz) a successful deployment of propaganda, and so too his talent for slogans. Above all—by focusing on crime in border states, Islamic terrorism, the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth, and “urban” violence—it was his aggressive suggestion that whiteness in America was under attack that proved most successful among a vicious and victorious minority of voters. Through propaganda, Trump overtly politicized whiteness in a way Americans had not seen in a presidential election since George Wallace’s pro-segregation campaign in 1968. Unlike Wallace, he won. This didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been learning to see “fascistly” for decades; it’s only now that our government reflects it so brazenly.
While details in images may not be political, images themselves, especially images of combat, suffering, and violence—images that aestheticize atrocity—are explicitly political. Images of war, especially those brought before “uninvolved” third parties, are meant to defend or demean those whose homes war has visited, whose streets war has walked. They are meant to solicit allegiance, be it to peace or to genocide. Identically political are photographs of poverty and sickness, such as Alec Soth’s portraits of opioid-addicted mothers and their children for The New York Times Magazine in May 2018. Soth’s photographs say what all photographs of persons struggling with opioid addiction published in mainstream magazines and newspapers say: namely, these drugs aren’t just killing anyone, they are killing white women and white children, and something must be done to stop it.
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