This is a photo by Nicolas Asfouri, AFP, from 2005 July 4.
“Police officers in riot kit block a street as a protester participating in the ‘carnival for full enjoyment’ rally stands in front of them in Edinburgh. The demo was to pressure leaders of the Group of Eight most industrialised nations who will stay in Gleaneagles hotel 40 miles (65 km) north west of the capital for the G8 summit. Around 10,000 police officers are preparing for the huge security operation when the summit starts 6 July.”
I had been looking at the photo and thinking of Jean Charles de Menezes. Who was said to have attracted police suspicion because he was in a bulky winter jacket, then jumped the gate at the Stockwell Tube. And as it turns out he was instead in a jeans jacket and he used his travel card at the tube. But the police shot him 8 times, 7 times in the head, just in case he was a suicide bomber. I’ve posted a couple of times previously on this and won’t go into it again here.
Anyway, I came upon this photo and thought of not only Jean Charles de Menezes while looking at it, but thought of those who say, “Why aren’t we doing something?” re: Bush et all the murderous thieving lot of liars who are running the show.
Innocent people have been dying all along, in Iraq and elsewhere. But even for those in the US, Jean Charles de Menezes brings it home in a different way. An innocent civilian executed by the police.
I don’t know actually how the carnival-styled protestors at G8 and other protests are viewed by progressives/lefties. But the photo, if one looks at it while thinking of Jean Charles de Menezes, says quite a lot. And I wonder if it says something about, “Why aren’t we doing something?” The clown gets hissed and booed a good bit, I think because of the way this bit of theatrical commentary has been turned into a simple kid’s ice cream cone side dish, when clowns are more than that. The protestors make use of the “Everyman” aspect associated with this type of clown, highlighting the condition the general public finds itself, or the position it will realize it’s in when it wakes up eventually. And that is in a police state guarding corporate interests that have raped the economic health of the nation, turned its citizens into serfs, corporate interests and their guardian governments raping the earth and pocketing for a few resources that belong to all and should be used judiciously and with a respect perversely absent in capitalist, corporate culture.
In the early 1900s, when we weren’t in near the police state we are now, there were some horrific police/National Guard actions taken against protestors of corporate interests.
The clown has historically been given a certain safe margin of expression that the man in plain clothes has not, because of his ridiculous, foolish appearance and behavior. But clowning is serious business. I don’t know the story of the gentlemen before the riot police in the above picture, but he’s a performer in that moment. If there had not been photographers there, he would have been performing for his peers, the sidewalk onlookers, and the police. But the photographer is there and takes a center stage shot of the clown miming panic. Which is something to meditate on, when he is in a position of confrontation with a formidable foe, and you don’t know in what condition you’ll be when the day is done. He’s miming for us the predicament in which we all find ourselves.
And the predicament of Jean Charles de Menezes. An innocent individual who was executed by the authorities because they believed him, some how, some way, to be a threat. Or maybe his only a terrible lesson to us all. At least that is what he has become, a lesson to us all as to what we face in our governments, as they carry out their empirical corporate interests, remote and alienated from our interests, those of the general public. And that includes Republicans as well, if they would look ahead and realize it, that the future painted for the next generations will be vaguely hospitable only to a very few.
Even if the authorities were operating in absolute conviction that Jean Charles de Menezes was a suicide bomber, a tragic and inexcusable assumption that either saw a reality different from what it was, or at first chose to depict it to the world as different from what it was, Jean Charles is still that lesson as to what we face. It’s a very short distance between Jean Charles de Menezes and the horizon where the face of terrorism resolves into a broader portrait of greed and all its self-interested operations.
Point a camera at a clown, a good clown, and though you look at it you end up seeing though its eyes. In this way, clowns are invisible as few other performers are. The clown has framed the above scene so that when one looks at it, one may not only observe but participate in his vision.
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