Supporters of Donald Trump were encouraged when the former president raised his fist about a minute after being shot in the ear. But creepy Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott warned this "powerful photograph" by AP photographer Evan Vucci was going to stoke America's Dark Side, you know, the ones who make Democracy Die in Darkness:
Vucci’s photo will create a reality more real than reality, transforming the chaos and messiness of a few moments of peril onstage in Pennsylvania into a surpassing icon of Trump’s courage, resolve and heroism. Densely packed with markers of nationalism and authority — the flag, the blood, the urgent faces of federal agents in dark suits — it will encourage some of the darkest forces in American civic life. People who preach violence, who revel in its political potential, can now say that one of their own is a victim, and he was. From that, more cycles of violence are almost inevitable.
Political violence can only degrade democracy, never advance it, and this photograph is painful proof of that corrosive power. Violence creates victims who must be avenged, and it very often strengthens the power of the people it targets, making heroes of them if they survive and martyrs if the violence achieves its terrible ends.
Kennicott even suggested the image is violent: "Vucci had an instant to make his image, and in that instant, that frenzied moment after a moment of real violence, new violence was done."
Then Kennicott focused on an image of a shoe left behind on the podium, which may have been Trump's. Guess where his mind went? "Shoes are bound up with their own rich stew of analogies and symbols, closely connected to death, as in devastating images of piles of shoes left behind by victims of the Nazi death camps." You can see them at the Holocaust Museum in DC.
PS: Back on July 2, Kennicott ripped into Trump with another photography critique, headlined:
Trump is already numbing us to the horrific images his plans would create
Outrage never lasts. That’s why Trump wants to show us the worst before he does it.
Phil compared the promise of mass deportations of illegal immigrants to...the Holocaust. Somehow, Americans killed by illegal aliens are a "fable."
Trump is now so bonded to his base that he need merely allude to “the snake” or MIT or names like Rachel Morin and Laken Riley for the crowd to know that these stand for, respectively, a fable about immigrants and misplaced trust, a Trump relative who taught at MIT decades ago and victims of crimes allegedly perpetrated by men who entered the country illegally.
