Pictures matter. Visual images convey truths, and falsehoods, with an emotional impact that can amplify and sometimes completely overwhelm the messages imparted by words.
Consider the photo of the guy with the buffalo horn headdress and naked midriff standing at the Speaker’s podium in the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 6. Or the video shot of a CNN reporter standing in front of fires blazing around burnt-out cars in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August.
Web surfers could discover that the buffalo-horn-helmeted guy was always ready with an articulate line. Television viewers could see CNN’s chyron lamely characterizing the Kenosha protest as “fiery but mostly peaceful.”
But the pictures are what linger in the mind. The rationalizations and apologies some readily offer for these acts, the supposed stealing of the 2020 presidential election, the alleged epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men, have nothing like the force of those pictures of wackos in the Capitol or rioters in Kenosha and other sites, including Lafayette Square in front of the White House.
These pictures of ebullient violence in symbolic civic spaces will have reverberations in politics and public life for years to come.
The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol failed to achieve its apparent goal, preventing the announcement of the Electoral College votes making Joe Biden the 46th president. But that action, following Donald Trump’s speech to a crowd he had summoned to the Ellipse, led to his impeachment by the House. Not without justification: His words, as I wrote days later, “were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”
They have also led to the construction of an ugly fence around the Capitol complex and the continued mobilization of thousands of National Guard troops — a perhaps permanent militarization of our capital city.
We still need an explanation of why there were too few law enforcement and military personnel deployed to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now there appear to be more than necessary. The sight of the Capitol fenced off, temporarily and perhaps indefinitely, from the petitioning and touristic public is not a happy picture.
Neither is life on many streets in America’s large cities, particularly in the mostly black neighborhoods, and it hasn’t been a happy picture since the video of the death of George Floyd on May 25 prompted multiple and extended “mostly peaceful” protests across the nation. Not just protests, but murders.
With major police departments defunded as Black Lives Matter spokesmen demanded, or at least intimidated, and police officers avoiding the “hot spots” where intensive policing had sharply cut violent crime since the mid-1990s, murders skyrocketed — up 31% according to the Gun Violence Archive, from 2019 to 2020.
Academics placed some blame on the lockdowns, but there was no perceptible increase until Memorial Day weekend. And it’s not just a minor blip — the previous record for percentage increase in murders, in 1968, was just 13%.
Multiple increases of that magnitude resulted in almost tripling the national violent crime rate in the 1965-1976 decade. As a law student, I worked in the mayor’s office in Detroit during the 1967 riot, and I can tell you what happens to major cities with sustained increases in violent crime: Very large parts of them are destroyed. That’s what I fear could happen again.
It’s all the more likely if liberal mayors and their cheerleaders in the press act as many did during the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted that it was “shameful!” for federal police to use force to clear Lafayette Square on June 1. Those overrunning it tried to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson and started a fire in St. John’s Church, “the presidents’ church,” just to the north. That civic space was violated just as the Capitol was on Jan. 6.
Two days later, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton argued in the New York Times for sending in National Guard and federal troops to cities where rioting got out of hand, as had often been done from 1967 in Detroit to 1992 in Los Angeles. That common-sense suggestion sent young New York Times journalists into tears, and they demanded, and got, the firing of editorial page editor James Bennet.
It’s easy to make fun of the double standard here, with Bowser decrying “the active-duty military [being] used on American streets against Americans” in June and having no problem with it in January — or with Trump decrying rioters in June and spurring them on in January. But I fear we’re in for more unhappy pictures in the years ahead.
