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Urban photography favors amateurs. Any magnificence forfeited through excessive brightness or an evident viewpoint is made up for by bystander zeal, which endears itself to residents similarly to tourists. This holds true for any cherished metropolis, but since I reside in Chicago, my pertinent instance is Chicago, the Windy City, situated on a vast lake, boasting a skyline observable from a human perspective.
The city’s portrayal has been on its own mind lately, as President Donald Trump is executing his pledge to occupy it. Two hundred National Guard soldiers trudged in from Texas the previous month. ICE operatives slink daily from their hiding place in the suburb of Broadview to frighten and seize residents. The justification for their presence and the absolution of their brutality are noisy and stale, mirroring the way Chicago has consistently been discussed, if it’s discussed at all, as a combat zone needing to be rescued from itself. That fabricated state of affairs, naturally, hinges on a degree of obliviousness to (or lack of regard for) how the world’s conflict zones originated, and where the United States features in their blaze.
As if to highlight this, Trump, in September, shared a photograph on social media portraying himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the epitome of sanctioned bloodthirst from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” In the attached text, Trump had altered Kilgore’s renowned phrase—“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”—to accommodate his vision, substituting “napalm” with “deportations.” (He even provided a fresh theatrical title: “Chipocalypse Now.”) The clumsy edit displays a squadron of Huey helicopters soaring past the unmistakable cityscape; the sky, meanwhile, is turned yellow by explosions. This is Chicago as your typical Fox viewer, including millions who dwell beyond the city’s limits in what Illinoisans term Chicagoland, envisions it—our lake transformed into a fiery inferno.
That the chaos would stem from outside, rather than from within, aligns with the image’s origin. I am recalling a scene from “Apocalypse Now Redux,” the director’s extended version, released in 2001, where Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard and his team discover what’s left of a plantation inhabited by lingering French settlers and their Vietnamese attendants. Over a lavish dinner, the French individuals voice their grievance against their American guests, whose nation they accuse of creating the evictors whom the U.S. then entrusted itself with vanquishing. That narrative, albeit as skewed as its Francophone origin, imparts a more genuine, overarching lesson: America’s adversaries are so often of American making.
As late summer witnessed the White House further embellishing its justification for invading Chicago, a spirited local jest gained traction online. Those on the ground disseminated visual dispatches from the city’s “killing fields”: the greenery of Lincoln Park, labeled “Chaos & Anarchy”; the lake’s turquoise-meets-cerulean expanse as viewed from the “war-torn” city’s eighteen and a half miles of lakeside path. Brief clips superimposed the President’s sound bites onto montages brimming with boat gatherings and open-air concerts and countless aerial views of the handsome horizon. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, participated in the prank, “reporting from war-ravaged Chicago” donning military-green protective gear in a segment aired on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “As you can observe, there’s utter disarray and pandemonium unfolding,” Pritzker proclaims from the core of downtown, as individuals proceed with their routines on the La Salle Street bridge behind him.
The jab—a strategy—isn’t new, simply renewed under the existing administration. Soothing the worries of those unfamiliar with the area is a custom among Chicagoans who didn’t grow up locally. The term “Chiraq,” for example, is rendered preposterous by the numerous picturesque vistas from the riverfront and the West Loop dining scene highlighted in “day in the life” vlogs, which tend to portray the city as a final American haven for affluent young professionals without inherited wealth. (The finest spoof of this genre, crafted by the comedian Mike Schwanke, depicts a “weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” as a never-ending loop of mundane outings—brunch, happy hour, dinner, repeat.) While New York newcomers romanticize adversity, Chicago transplants humbly relish in ease. Chicago, in our perception, is well-run and primed for recreation. It’s peaceful and secure enough, if an outsider inquires—harmless.
Can we critique this well-intentioned stance without stumbling into the customary ambiguous assertions about authenticity—that the genuine essence of a city isn’t discovered near its iconic sites, or that existence must be challenging to be authentic? Perhaps we chuckle, as the Chicago poet Britteney Black Rose Kapri did in a video over the summer: “I know them motherfuckers ain’t never been south of fucking Hyde Park and that’s just because the university is there. West? Baby, O’Hare. Like, I get it, but it’s just also so fucking funny.” I comprehend it as well: the reasoning behind what qualifies as brutality in Chicago, and why that brutality is inflicted upon certain districts and not others, is incongruent with showing off of this nature—and, in any case, subtlety has never signified much to conservatives, either within or beyond the city, except to the extent that any brutality can justify policies that prolong disparity. But I don’t anticipate that their sensibilities are significantly disturbed by the agreeable images intended to counteract their theatrics. Those depictions of the city, calming in their uniformity, seem to presume that any safeguard against fascist intrusion must adopt the language of tourism. They bring to mind what the author and activist Sarah Schulman has defined as “spiritual gentrification,” a manner of observing that replaces “complexity, difference” with “sameness.” They harmonize with a conservative viewpoint that would have no qualm transforming the city into a playground for those with the means to afford it. That is the reactionary aspiration for any city, the city resembling the suburbs—whose idyllic portrayal, by the way, is its own deception. Chicago is exquisite, but idyllic? Please!
Idyllic is the excuse. Reagan-era conservatism achieved its goal of reimagining the quintessential American citizen within the “Dick and Jane” dream of the American family. Today, that family is the commonly used language of politics: liberal and conservative politicians alike articulate policy in relation to what it will or won’t achieve for “American families,” as if gazing upon an ocean termed “America,” filled with countless private islands. Even as the “American Dream” has been stripped of its trustworthiness by evident inequality, we can’t abandon its rationale of individualistic ambition, whereby, as the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant stated, “if you invest your energies in work and family-making, the nation will secure the broader social and economic conditions in which your labor can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity.”
That’s “you” and “your,” critically, not “we” and “our.” The model citizen, the reasoning goes, seeks signals of public well-being in private spheres—and particularly in that celebrated sphere of privacy in America, the family residence. The model citizen is discouraged from aligning with the types of masses who demand that their government take action for people collectively; such assembling of multitudes threatens the serene family image by which the citizen perceives himself. In his pursuit of an American existence well lived, he should forgive contradictory state actions—for instance, that health care won’t be a universal entitlement but that bodies should be monitored and penalized under the law when they jeopardize the white-picket-fence ideal.
Examples abound in this nation of ours, but the mere presence of an entity dubbed the Department of Homeland Security—the beneficiary of vast sums to monitor, detain, injure, and eliminate individuals residing here in the guise of public safety—is one venue to examine. Since January, D.H.S. propaganda, broadcast on social-media platforms such as Instagram and X, has embraced the President’s signature fondness for provocative and crude content. The department has been releasing “Cops”-esque clips of ICE seizures, revealing personal data of citizens, and sharing memes with the awkward familiarity of a corporate account. A post from July depicts a Chevy Silverado wrapped in Border Patrol branding, positioned as if its passengers were gazing wistfully upon the open desert at twilight. “ ‘You Look Happier,’ ” an observer conceived in the text states. The reply: “Thanks! ICE is deporting all criminal illegal aliens & there is no crisis at the border.” Another post portrays a “one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation,” accompanying footage of a chain gang being forced onto a plane. An article in The Drift by the writer Mitch Therieau has appropriately named such messages “agit-slop.” On the clip of the chain gang, one commenter observes, “I thought this was a meme account at first.” Another is left to highlight, “THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS WITH FAMILIES JUST LIKE YOU!!!!!”
D.H.S., instituted in 2003 as the nation’s protector, employs the frequently used language of the American family, but we undoubtedly comprehend which families it signifies. Live-action advertisements are interspersed with illustrated notices defining who embodies America: fair-skinned depictions display Lady Columbia and her patriarch, Uncle Sam, respectively inviting and ordering their men, in the traditional recruitment manner, to “Defend the Homeland” and “JOIN ICE NOW.” (As in any scenario where masculinity is fetishized, the muscular patriotism in these virtual posters exudes a degree of homoeroticism: in August, D.H.S. boasted about “taking father/son bonding to a whole new level” and appended an illustration of an older and younger man side by side, armed to the teeth, above the words “NO AGE CAP.” Father and Son or Daddy and Boy?) These advertisements reside alongside screenshots of artworks by figures like Howard Chandler Christy, Norman Rockwell, John Gast, and Morgan Weistling, artists unified in the ideological accessibility of their imagery: rosy-cheeked children and adults having what appears to be an enjoyable time living the American Dream. A 2020 painting by Weistling transposes the Holy Family into a covered wagon, the land’s vastness unfolding outside; another, from 2013, by the Missouri-based illustrator Andy Thomas, displays a group of boys pursuing a pigskin in a backyard dense with autumn colors. The curation is blatant in its inclusions and exclusions, revealing a white Christian nation with a starkness that almost deters any critique—for what kind of person, what kind of American, could take issue with such idylls?
One painting by Thomas Kinkade struck some as particularly representative, and possibly even excessively obvious. On July 1st, D.H.S. posted a painting by Kinkade called “Morning Pledge,” which portrays an American street from a bygone era as two fair-skinned boys with backpacks proceed toward a schoolhouse with its Old Glory flown high. The work is a quintessential Kinkade, dreamy and pastel, with buildings illuminated by an unsettling internal glow. The artist, a self-proclaimed champion of “family and God and country and beauty,” conceded to painting “not the world we inhabit” but “the world we wish we inhabited,” an aesthetic that proved sufficiently compelling to the American populace to make him the most commercially triumphant painter of the nineties. What his customers were procuring was fabricated in more ways than one: the works were typically not original paintings, but mass-produced duplicates created to simulate a human touch. In a 2001 profile of Kinkade, my colleague Susan Orlean toured his production facility and observed “a crew of Hispanic workers peel images off wet paper and smooth them onto canvases, then slide them onto racks like pies set out to cool.” But it was Kinkade’s private life, overshadowed by allegations of sexual harassment and assault, that tarnished his reputation in the end; as a 2006 investigation by the Los Angeles Times stated, his history of claimed misdeeds “belies the wholesome image on which he’s built his empire.” How shocked one is by that contradiction hinges on how much truth one granted his scenes from the outset.
For those who define “family” in legislative, executive, and judicial terms, it is as exclusionary a concept as manifest destiny. When former President Barack Obama referred to “Israeli families” but to “the people of Gaza,” as he did in early October, he was, inadvertently or not (and I have my suspicion), excluding Palestinians from a sympathetic category in lockstep with U.S. policy. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, recently mocked Vice-President J. D. Vance for relishing a family vacation while ICE was tearing families apart, but this rhetoric can only shame a target who believes that families can exist beyond the bounds of the law. Conservatives believe no such thing. (“Had a great time, thanks,” Vance replied.) In September, an ICE officer shot and killed a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. D.H.S. has asserted that Villegas González had attempted to escape, causing “serious” injuries to an ICE agent in the process, but there is no footage to confirm their assertion, and the agent in question later described his own wounds as “nothing major.” Villegas González was reportedly killed after dropping his two young sons off at school. He is not, however, the kind of individual whom our politicians delight in labeling a family man. Not two weeks after his killing, D.H.S. issued a statement denouncing alleged “violence and dehumanization” toward its agents: “The men and women of ICE are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters,” the department said, veiling its inhumane mission in the righteousness of domesticity. The colossal falsehood, though, is that the image of the all-American family, which is preserved at the expense of the rest of the globe, will safeguard those within it. In actuality, the American family is not a secure place in America, and everyone recognizes it. The family firearm elevates the likelihood that a family member will perish by gunfire. The family S.U.V. has a good chance of killing children. The family man is, with morbid regularity, the greatest danger to the well-being and safety of his spouse and offspring. The American family conceals its brutality. Trump, boasting last month, without substantiation, that his unleashing of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., had diminished crime to “virtually nothing,” complained that “things that take place in the home” might qualify as criminal activity: “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,” he stated. Leaving all that aside, he added, “We are a safe city.”
In almost no time, videos of Chicago existence posted in poor taste have been rendered obsolete by other startling scenes from the city. An apartment building raided in South Shore; a family seized in Millennium Park; tear gas unleashed in Lake View; a teen girl body-slammed in the suburbs. An elementary school near my residence underwent a “soft lockdown” last week, the euphemism all the more alarming for attempting to sound less intense. Every school in every vicinity is officially or unofficially preparing itself daily, given ICE’s inclination toward school grounds. One parent informed ABC News, “The kids aren’t playing outside because there’s been a huge amount of ICE presence in the neighborhood, just driving up and down the streets, just kind of terrorizing the neighborhood.” The sky resonates with the sound of helicopters. I depart the residence and listen for other peculiar noises, for whistles and for honks that seem excessively insistent or extended—the same sounds of locals alerting locals which one hears in clips of masked individuals granted permission to abduct and eliminate. There exists a certain irony in witnessing the paranoid attentiveness of neighborhood watch replicated now toward reverse ends. Access an online forum for Chicagoans and you’ll discover debates over the boundary between executing sufficient action and executing excessive action under the scrutiny of a federal government that is eager for reasons to rain conflict upon its citizens; Kristi Noem, after all, has stated that D.H.S. intends to acquire local properties and position snipers on the rooftops of its buildings. At present, we are summoned to generate a commotion, not as members of our respective nuclear units but as something older and more resilient—as community, a term that has grown too prevalent to take seriously, but which nonetheless endures. The commotion cautions and bears witness. On certain days this suffices as a display of fortitude. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
