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Come gather 'round people | Wherever you roam | And admit that the waters | Around you have grown | And accept it that soon | You'll be drenched to the bone.| If your time to you | Is worth savin' | Then you better start swimmin' | Or you'll sink like a stone | For the times they are a-changin'.
I seldom read that bastion of American conservatism, Time magazine. A staple when growing up through the apartheid-cocooned Kennedy, 'Nam and Apollo years, it died a slow death. Parents dropped their subscriptions as its irrelevance and insularity grew and, after several years, outdated copies in doctors' waiting rooms gave way to glossy magazines extolling the virtues of the great African outdoors.
As far as I was concerned, it was the thinking man's Reader's Digest. And the less said about that odious publication, the better. Actually, I'll tell you one story of which I'm rather proud. Visited at journalism school one evening by a Reader's Digest editor proudly proclaiming his publication the benchmark of traditional, Christian, and family values, I freaked. Watched from the back of the theatre by my irascible tutor, an imperious man of letters I greatly respect, I tore into the RD guy for a full five minutes. My lecturer smiled and said nothing. The fool from the Reader's Digest made no further inflammatory statements.
Umm... Time. Yes, it differs from Reader's Digest in that it employs people capable of damned good journalism. And it employs damned good photographers. But seldom does the magazine include stunning work in its annual round up. This year, for some reason, and perhaps unwittingly, it's a different story. The pictures shown here—best viewed on the Time Web site—are phenomenal. Open to many types and levels of interpretation, they are stunning works of photographic art. The photograph of a drowned man lying face down in a flooded New Orleans street reflects an international view of the United States. Domestically, I suppose, it could reflect the failure of the United States government to protect its people from even the most common and expected enemy, the weather. It could reflect developers' greed, racism, or even the conscious withholding of aid from poor people living in the world's so-called richest country.
To me, it represents America today, a country that is socially, economically and politically poverty stricken. To a point where it no longer matters.
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The picture immediately above ("Here is your son back | Thanks for the loan") deserves international recognition and the widest exposure. It is awesome in its scope and depth. It is a photograph from the heart of a dead country. Where does one start? The lighted humanity of the three uniformed marines administering to their dead comrade (bending, touching, caring...)? Perpendicular (opposed) to the lines of the flag draping the coffin, the layers above the silver'd belly of the cargo hold—coloured red white and blue—and into which are frozen a multiplicity of waxen, glass-cased faces and attitudes of suited... what? Corporate America? The average citizen? Corpses? Like faded stills, their TV faces caught in subdued perspex, it is they who are trapped mute, dumb, and lifeless in their casket of tubular steel. And yet the hydraulic power of that door is evident; good to disgorge such remains (perhaps processed from the asses six feet above) into perpetuity.
From the livery, I guess this must be American Airlines. It figures.
I have seen the U.S. Constitution and international war crimes laws invoked so many times, I'm able to recite them verbatim. George W. Bush, the 'president' who speaks only to the military audience he commands, rules by martial law. The American people are powerless, reduced to whey-faced complicity in his multifarious crimes.
Illustrating what Robert Fisk calls a "...total failure of the human spirit," Time has published a photograph that should be viewed and considered worldwide. I do not envy my many American friends having to live with the mix of vanity, oppression and death suffusing the carefully conditioned air they now breathe. Their willingness to fight their suffocation is admirable.
Come mothers and fathers | Throughout the land | And don't criticize | What you can't understand | Your sons and your daughters | Are beyond your command | Your old road is | Rapidly agin'. | Please get out of the new one | If you can't lend your hand | For the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan | The Times They Are A-Changin'
