October 17, 2011

Eclipsing the Drones

Just as soon as this stimulus from photographer Kenneth Dickerman’s Tumblr site hit my retina, associations started pinging around the command-and-control center inside my head. Pentagon’s drone war meets the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? AfPak boomerang? Then again, who’s to joke about weaponized aircraft screaming through Manhattan?

Between the Occupy protester and the killer mosquito, however, I think there is symbolism here that goes beyond mere spectacle. What the photo also seems to capture is the sense that the energy and will emanating from these OWS protests might be a game-changer, reaching a moral intensity equal to the strength and authority that the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex has, for the past ten years, expressed alone.

PHOTOGRAPH: ©Kenneth Dickerman