Losing Face

As they say in Texas about cowboy wanna-bes, Uncle Sam is [literally] “all hat and no cattle”.
Strangely, it also recalls the “the Emperor has no clothes” theme that critics of the administration have alluded to in the past. This theme reached a crescendo with Colbert’s smackdown of the President at the 2006 WHCA dinner, with Colbert playing the part of the little boy who dares to tell the Emperor that he’s naked… right to his face.
So, the New Yorker cover might be understood as saying, these are the clothes that the Boy Emperor likes to imagine he’s wearing. But while he may be the President, he is not the personification of the American ideal or spirit. Given his approval rating in the 30s, he does not have the support of most Americans. He does not speak for America.
Unfortunately, neither does anyone else.

All blame
No perception
All outward show
No internal substance
All alone
No friends to see or be seen
All air
No flesh
All about nothing
Now that no thing can be seen
but blame, show, isolation and hollow gestures

is he asking us to pull his finger? cause i’m not falling for that one again

Uncle Sam doesn’t represent the current President, though; he represents America itself.
Last night, I was reading the Rolling Stones article about how the last Presidential Elections were stolen – even though I was already cynical, reading exactly what happened was scary and sort of chilling. With the Patriot Act and the NSA wiretapping and Haditha and the other stories of civilians killed in Iraq… Bush is the Emperor with No Clothes, and an Emperor without much of an Empire.
At whom should that finger be pointing? At Bush and Cheney? At the average citizen? At the media? At the politicians? At all of the above?

Faceless with patriotic colors of Uncle Sam.
What is missing is the flag in the lapel.
What comes to mind Abu Graib, Haditha, and countless others which were never investigated, but instead were chalked up as collateral damage, or as terrorists killed in action!
Haunting ghost of the present!

There’s a ghost image in place of the face that reminds me of the Twin Towers.
…the 9/11 terrorists won because we allowed them to rob us of our good sense?
…they succeeded in that we fell for the provocation and wound up losing face?

thanks, thirdeyepushpin, for my first laugh of the morning.
I’m struck by a couple of things….the empty suitness of the drawing, first of all. If you look at the original recruitment drawing the fit of the suit isn’t different but, absent the head and anchored by a weak looking hand, there is a teenager-in-an-adult’s-clothing feel to it.
And the hand….in the original drawing, the hand is sinewy and strong and placed lower in the picture. This hand lacks muscle tone and enforces the weakness of the impression.

A core skill of this administration is the ability to project authority while concurrently deflecting responsibility. For example, our nation is committed to putting a man on Mars sometime in the 2020’s. Who made this decision? On what authority? For what purpose? Ask the Faceless One.
The picture combines Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman into one figure, says “I Want You. Don’t Ask What For.”
There’s an odd tug at a famous neo-haiku:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd …

Uncle Sam Wants You
To a young Canadian during WW II this poster represented an authoritarian figure albeit friendly. The Uncle now sans face is positively Orwellian. Interesting historical vignette, note past and present, Tony & W.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html

I immediately thought of two things: It is a long overdue E-front Page and a nice complement to Colbert. Second, it adds another image to Doonsberry’s Empty Roman Legionaire’s helmut. But, the “ask not” finger points squarely at US and our largely spineless elected officials.
Bush Republicans: The largest ever on-going criminal conspiracy.

Here’s another link to the “Uncle Sam wants you for the US Army” poster.
I’ve never really looked at the face on the original before. Uncle Sam is serious, honest, but intimate. The original face is learning towards me as he points, telling me, earnestly, that I am needed.
The contrast of the original with the New Yorker cover is striking. Here the empty suit is sitting straight up, the hand is supercilious. I don’t know if this is blame, a kind of “Hey-sport” hand signal, or a kind of mock handgun. And I have no idea who or what is filling out that empty suit. Where has Uncle Sam gone?

Brilliant cover, brilliant catch, brilliant thinking about the fingerpointing.
It is us. We are to blame.
Cheers.

I am with vetfordean: my first read of this image brought to mind Doonesbury.
If only this administration were so transparent! No face works here because it suggests the true motives are still hidden, but I think more appropriate would be a big blacked-out square in place of the face. I suppose either way it’s sad that we can’t get a read on the people dressing themselves up so patriotically.

Re: first commenter’s mention of the emperor having no clothes–
How about the inverse? All clothes, no emperor? Brings to mind the current Marshmellow-in-Chief, for sure.

Here’s what I see:
The empty suit says, “What are you looking at? You voted for me.”
In this war, no one is asking us to enlist in the Army.
Grover Norquist drowned Uncle Sam in the bathtub.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
– Bertrand Russell

The empire has no soul.

AmericaBlog posted a, I believe, related photo the other day:
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/06/bizarre-reuters-photo-of-bush.html
A presidency, a nation, without identity.

“If there’s nothing left of Uncle Sam, it’s YOUR fault, American!”

The “leader” is invisible. Corporations have hidden identities. Corporations run the US. Fascism.

Isn’t that the way a lot of us feel………that we have lost our country and thus our identity. Is this the face-i-ness of the future? The hand is placed so as to cover the emptiness of the suit and part of the missing face. Sleight of hand? Pay no attention to what’s missing, this is all about YOU!
As one who grew up during WWII, I saw that poster everywhere. It wasn’t just for the army, it was for everybody to make sacrifices. Children in school bought war stamps, grandmas took cooking fat to the butcher to be turned into ammunition, neighbors replaced sons with gold stars in their windows. Uncle Sam wanted everybody. Now we have empty heads telling us to just go shopping and everything will be okay. Help us someone, our country is missing.

here’s my take:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7528/1316/1600/samfinger.jpg

he’s pointing the finger at us. perhaps it is blame he is assigning.

It is just the upper torso (or the suit thereof) that is floating in space. It is all emblem – we after all recognize it as uncle sam but there is no there there EXCEPT for the hand.
The hand is the implementer of the human (read State) will – i.e. the pointing finger in a coercive jab of power.
The image is empty of everything but an unsubstantial symbolic stance of something called American. There is neither ideal nor humanity just some tribal totemic “beingness” bearing down on us with the will to force.

hmmm…given the all the nsa stuff and wiretapping and library card watching, what i get out of this is that our invisible shadow government that wraps itself up in (and lurks behind) the flag is still pointing a finger at us…and it wants us for much different reasons than the stern looking gent in the original poster.
they want us…and they’ll do whatever it takes to get us.

Many of us probably catch a whiff of Doonesbury here, but there is truth to the suspicion that the clothes have no emperor.
Bush is only a figurehead for Cheney, Addington, and the others who really determine and define Presidential powers. He can strut and posture and fly to photo-ops while they work behind the scenes to establish the real government.
If you separate the trappings of power from power itself, you might get better government (people who are diligent aren’t always diplomatic), but you might also get far worse government, where secrecy rules and the leader is only a distraction to draw attention from criminal activities. Are the Republicans going to find someone else equally vacuous to front for them, or will the cabal find a reason to declare martial law simply so they can continue operations?
What they haven’t yet realized is that power doesn’t equal authority. America lost that with the preemptive strike against Iraq and all of the resulting fallout.
“And so for you: You have shook hands with Reputation, And made him invisible. So, fare you well: I will never see you more.”
The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster

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