Think First

 As I’ve said many times before, if liberals remain confused about Islamic extremism, the appetite for right wing authoritarianism is going to continue to grow throughout the West. We need to do everything we can to avoid this.

Hold on to that thought.

That is how Sam Harris wrapped up a recent podcast the transcript of which you can find here in which he castigates in no uncertain terms the lack of thought (my term, Harris is more direct by using terms like sheer ignorance and outright stupidity) that pervades the current movement at college campuses, protesting the ongoing war in Gaza.

I have a few gripes with Harris's piece, namely that, as in previous podcasts, he does little more than pay lip service to the unspeakable humanitarian crisis that has befallen the people of Gaza. No matter which side you are on in this debate, or like me you take no sides between the Israeli and Palestinian people (if not their respective governments), it is impossible to ignore the pain and suffering of the millions of Gazans who want nothing more than to simply live their lives.  

As I've stated in earlier posts, the argument of who has the moral high ground is meaningless when it comes to tens of thousands of innocent people killed, and many, many more injured, displaced, their lives forever altered and their future seriously in doubt. The fact that probably half of these innocent people are children compounds the tragedy logarithmically,

Every decent human being should mourn their loss and grieve over the bloodshed that goes on to this day.

Nonetheless, I have to say I agree with more of what Sam Harris has to say than disagree.

To put it simply, as brought up by a friend, "Why is no one protesting against Hamas?"

On October 7th of last year, Hamas was, and continues to be, the de facto government of Gaza. Therefore, the unprovoked and unspeakable attack they carried out that day against the people of Israel, besides being vile and reprehensible in every sense of the words, was an act of war, no different than Germany's unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, no different than Japan's unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As such, Israel had every right to declare war against Hamas.

Today, people of good will all over the world are calling for a cease fire, for an end to the killing, for the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas, alive or dead, to be released and for both sides to come together and negotiate peace. 

That's all well and good, but there's a big problem.

The stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel, it always has been, and continues to this day.

We could argue all day and all night for the rest of our lives about the merits of the creation of the State of Israel three generations ago, after the Holocaust, but the fact of the matter as I've also repeated over and over again since last October is that Israel, a sovereign state since 1948, is not going away. 

Neither are the Palestinians.

Therefore, some reasonable compromise must be negotiated in order for there to be any semblance of peace in the region, a long shot at best but what other choice do we have?

It is impossible to negotiate when one side in a war is unabashedly devoted to the complete destruction of the other side. Hamas is not interested in making peace with Israel in the slightest.  As long as Hamas continues to have any teeth left, we can expect acts like what took place on October 7, Israel's equivalent of 9/11, to be commonplace, obviously, unacceptable for the Israelis.

Therefore, from the Israeli point of view, which is not unreasonable in the slightest, Hamas must be destroyed or at the very least, its ability to wage war, eliminated.

Make no mistake, Hamas knew exactly what they were doing in the planning and carrying out of the October 7th attacks. They understood full well that Israel would respond with deadly and overwhelming force and that the vast majority of its victims, fellow Palestinians, would be innocent civilians, including children. They knew that because Hamas routinely uses its own people as human shields, intentionally placing them in harm's way between their fighters and the Israeli military. Any chance of taking out Hamas fighters in battle inevitably leads to civilian casualties. And Hamas understood all too well that the outrage over the carnage would cause support for themselves around the world among otherwise well-intentioned people who refuse to look beyond their own biases, or simply won't bother to dig any deeper than the proverbial ten second soundbite.

It was all by design, the blueprint for the slaughter of 30,000 and counting Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023 was brought to the world courtesy of Hamas, pure and simple.

For their part, Israel is continuously lambasted for not having responded "proportionately" to the Hamas attacks, as the current toll of Gazans killed is well over 30,000, while around 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7.

But what does a proportionate response even mean? Should Israel's response have been tit for tat, in other words, would the war have been OK if they had stopped at 1,200 dead Gazans?

To put it into perspective, 2,403 U.S. military service members died as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the event which resulted in the U.S. declaring war on Japan, thereby entering World War II.

By that war's end nearly four years later, in the words of retired U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley:

…we (the United States) destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered people in massive numbers – innocent people who had nothing to do with their government – men, women, and children.

I would add that during World War II we also fire-bombed German cities, causing the pain and suffering of innocent civilians some would argue, far more agonizing even than that caused by the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This in no means is to minimize or trivialize the suffering and death of innocent civilians in fact, quite the opposite.

During a recent conference at the Carter Center in Washington, General Milley, who brought up other examples of civilian casualties caused by the actions of the U.S. military, including those in which he participated said: 

War is a terrible thing, but if it’s going to have meaning, if it’s going to have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose, and it must be achieved rapidly with the least cost, and that you do by speed.

Here I would question as in the case of Sam Harris, Milley's use of the term "morality", as that term when applied to war is fraught with much difficulty. A war can be just, it can be a fight for survival, but can there ever be a moral war? The answer to that question is way out of my pay grade. 

But Milley got to the crux of the matter when he commented on the overt support for Hamas on American college campuses:

They’re out there supporting a terrorist organization, whose very written charter calls for the death of all Jews – not just in Israel, worldwide. I mean, come on now. If you’re going to support that, you’re on the wrong side.

If you have doubts about Milley's remark about the "death of all Jews" as I did, please refer to the last sentence in Article Seven in The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas's 1988 manifesto) which you can find here.

Article Six of that document gets to the real motivation of the group, which can be heard in the popular chant heard on university campuses throughout the U.S.: 

Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.

In other words, the entire land that is now occupied by Israel. But not to fear says the text:  

(Hamas) strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the one wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned.

That last part sounds all well and good until you talk to residents of other utopian Islamic theocracies such as the biggest supporter of Hamas, Iran. 

Truth be told, many of the Jews who represent about one hundredth of one percent of the population of Iran, (that number was a lot higher before the Islamic Revolution of the 1970s), claim to be free to practice their religion in Iran without much governmental interference. 

The same cannot be said of members of non-Abrahamic faiths such as the largest religious minority in Iran, the Baha'i, whose members have been routinely persecuted ever since the Ayatollahs took over. 

The same certainly cannot be said for members of the LGTBQ community.

Nor for women who choose not to conform to the dress code of Iran's morality police. Just ask Mahsa Amini when you meet her in heaven, or the nearly 500 people killed there while protesting her death.

The saddest part is that Iran is a paradise for those groups and others who don't toe the hard line of the religious zealots, compared to places like Afghanistan under the Taliban, and portions of Syria and Iraq under the control of the Islamic State.

Now you might say I'm just cherry-picking extreme examples of radical Islam that have little relevance to the political group that is currently in control of Gaza who are merely "fighting to bring justice to the Palestinians". 

Well, the following is Article Eight of the Hamas Covenant in its entirety:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

If that doesn't send shivers up your spine, I guess nothing will.

Quite difficult it is to negotiate with people who are not only willing and eager to kill you and annihilate your people, but are also willing and eager to die themselves, or at least send their underlings who are more than willing to die for them.

Yet here we are.

I disagree with Sam Harris when he intimates that what we've been seeing on college campuses since October 7 is driven primarily by antisemitism, equating it say with the tiki torch carrying, swastika wearing mob in Charlottesville, VA chanting "we shall not be replaced." 

Rather in my opinion anyway, what's driving these protests beyond a genuine concern for the people of Gaza, is the myopic point of view held by many in contemporary academia and in the Left of hostility towards and rejection of the dominance of western culture, manifestly expressed through colonialism. 

That said, the widely reported harassment and assaults of Jewish students by protestors and the faculty members who support them is, if not outright antisemitism, then a good impersonation of it. So is openly calling for intifada. And so is calling for an end to the State of Israel. 

Beyond the lack of thought, (I'll be generous and leave it at that), beyond the catchy radical chic chants and slogans, beyond the misguided efforts of many Americans to address the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with a one-size-fits-all solution, is a profound failure to look at the big picture. 

As I wrote above, the war in Gaza is an unspeakable human tragedy. But innocent lives will not be spared by the efforts of protestors however well-intentioned, who haven't thought the whole thing through.

As Sam Harris suggests capping off his podcast, the movement on U.S. college campuses to condemn Israel and only Israel in the war in Gaza, is a godsend to right wing political extremists who exploit the chaos and lawlessness of the demonstrations, which they greatly exaggerate of course, the tacit support for an extremist, terrorist organization which cannot be denied, and most of all the antisemitism, both real and perceived, to gain a foothold among American voters who are not on the margins of the political spectrum, by claiming the moral high ground on this issue.

Far more serious is the perilous division it is causing among Americans who honestly value the rule of law as proscribed by our Constitution, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, the separation of church and state, the promoting and nurturing of ethnic and racial diversity, reproductive rights, the freedom to marry whomever you wish and to live your life however you see fit, and all the other rights made possible by a liberal democracy, which is currently under threat by extremists, both at home and abroad, with a much different agenda.

We've come too far as a nation to let that happen. From time immemorial the modus operandi of totalitarianism is divide and conquer. To those of us who cherish living in a democratic republic and the values that have held this nation together, flawed as it may have been for nearly 250 years, we can disagree on any number of issues but in the end, we can't let ourselves become divided over the big picture. 

If we do, we'll only have ourselves to blame when it all comes to a screeching end. 

Think about it.

Time Stays, We Go

I just finished working on a remarkable set of photographs. They are the group of 48 portraits known collectively as The Brown Sisters, technically the work of Nicholas Nixon. I use that qualification because it would be remiss not to mention that all like all portrait photography, this group perhaps more then most, is the collaborative work of the photographer and his subject, in this case the photographer's wife Bibi Brown Nixon, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie.  

The photographs, one per year of the four women together, without break, span the years 1975 through 2022. 

I have heard it said it was the sisters who decided in 2022 to bring an end to the series, as they did not want the project to conclude with the death of one of them. 

Therefore, the collection of photographs currently displayed on the walls of The Art Institute of Chicago, is the complete, definitive set.  

Matting and framing these pictures inspired me to contemplate the inevitable; that is, all of us lucky enough to have been given the chance to live through many decades, have also been given the opportunity to grow old. 

It shouldn't come as a surprise that like many people, I feel a little ambivalent about that.

In an interview, Nick Nixon observed that we are all aware of the passage of time, at least from a philosophical standpoint. However, in the day-to-day course of living our lives, we haven't a clue.

I might add, that is until we see a recent photograph of ourselves.

It was a little jarring to see these pictures all together for the first time as the Brown sisters are my contemporaries, the three oldest and I were born in the same decade. I fall in age between Laurie, the third sister, and Mimi, the youngest who was born in 1960. 

I first became aware of this project when I was a student of photography back in the late seventies. The first two photographs were published in a book that accompanied an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. The book was written, and the show assembled in 1978 by the influential curator of photography, John Szarkowski. It was one of the first books on photography I bought.

Szarkowski, as much a taste maker as anyone in the history of the medium, championed among others, street photographers such as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, all of whose work displayed a cool, dispassionate view of the world. I'm leaving out perhaps the most famous of the group, Diane Arbus, who was an outlier among them in that respect as her work was anything but cold and dispassionate. Incidentally one of her pictures graces the cover of Szarkowski's book.

There is a certain coolness to those early iterations of The Brown Sisters as well. which makes them fit in with much of the spirit of Mirrors and Windows. Not your typical family photographs, in the first five pictures of the series, Nixon stood the sisters in a row in front of his 8 x 10" view camera much as if they were in a police lineup, sporting expressions to match. 

That changed abruptly in the 1980 entry where the eldest sister Bibi, has both arms wrapped around Laurie to her left. In turn, Laurie, who up to this point appeared to be the most aloof of the four, places her left hand tenderly around the forearm of her older sister. In this portrait, for the first time Nixon moves his camera in on his subjects so they fill the entire frame. Instead of lining up equidistant from the lens, the sisters overlap one another, each at a slightly different distance from the camera. All four gaze into the lens intently as they had not before, and even a trace of a smile can be seen on each of their faces. In this, perhaps the most intimate portrait of the entire series, it seems the sisters have finally become one with the project.

With work like this I think it's best not to know too much of the backstory, allowing the photographs to speak for themselves. What I will say is that Nixon would make about ten exposures every session and allow the sisters to decide which image would represent the group. I also know the sisters allowed the photographer one major concession, that is to keep the order in which they appear in the photographs consistent throughout the series. 

So, from left to right we have Heather, Mimi, Bibi and finally Laurie. The only time that formula was broken was the 2020 entry, the year of the Pandemic, when it wasn't possible for the four to get together in one place. Instead, each sister's image is taken off the computer screen and arranged in a grid, Zoom style, on the photo negative used to make the prints.

While imposing the order of the subjects seems contrived, it works as keeping simple things like that consistent, makes everything else all the more apparent.

Whether they be family photo albums or published photos of celebrities, we've all seen photographs taken over a period of years that document people growing older. It took me a while to figure out what separates this series from other photographic records of aging. 

Then it came to me.

Generally speaking, photographs that span a person's life are made with a variety of equipment common at the time, lighting, printing materials, and most important, the photographers themselves. On top of that, fashions change usually making it easy to date a picture by what the subject is wearing, their hairstyle, and even their pose, styles of which vary over the years. 

Consequently, old photographs by their nature tend to look old on their own, so when we typically see a picture of someone made say, fifty years ago, by nature we expect them to appear different than they do today.

None of that is true here.

In the Brown Sisters series, besides the consistent positioning of his subjects, Nixon uses the same camera, film stock, processing, and printing technique throughout the project. As the prints are made to archival standards unlike prints we typically see in a photo album, the nearly fifty-year old vintage prints in this series show no signs of deterioration such as stains or fading; they look no different than the ones made practically yesterday.

Despite a few fashion accessories such as the appearance of an alligator logo stiched onto a polo shirt, or a flip phone holster that scream a particular decade, there are few hints that place these photographs in any specific time.

The only thing that dates them are the sisters.

Which makes the aging of Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie all the more stunning.

If this project were only about aging, we'd look at it for a few moments, say how interesting, then move on. What makes this work so compelling and memorable is that it is the story of the dynamics of one family, of the bonds that holds its members together, of more general themes such as love, kinship and forgiveness, and in the end, of the medium of photography itself, its possibilities and its drawbacks.

It takes an extraordinary group of people to pull off a project like this. The fact that all four sisters showed up together to participate in this project every year for nearly fifty years is nothing short of remarkable.

What's the big deal, you may ask, they're family after all. 

My point exactly.

Nixon claims that being an only child attracted him to the idea of exploring the relationships of a large family. I can relate having been raised as an only child, (I hadn't met my half-sister Eva until I was an adult.)

As such I've been particularly interested in the dynamics of big families and can honestly say that for of the vast majority of large families I've known intimately, including those of two wives and my own extended family, the mere act of gathering every sibling together in the same place, every year for forty-eight consecutive years, would by itself have been a non-starter. Even more remarkable is subjecting each family member to being photographed together in a photographic format that requires a good deal of patience, and is less than forgiving, especially to those of us beyond a certain age.

All it would take would be one individual, driven by some conflict, either petty or otherwise saying "no, not this year", to grind the whole thing to a halt.

One other piece of backstory I'll share is that in 2018, Nixon abruptly retired from his long-held post as professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design after allegations surfaced of inappropriate behavior with his students, thereby "violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender." I'll let you fill in the sordid details yourself.

One can imagine that if anything would have put an end to the project, perhaps even the Nixons' marriage, that might have been it. Nonetheless, the group of five got together to create four more entries after that episode.

As I mentioned above, the project really took off after that 1980 photograph when the four sisters appear to have taken over the reins of the project. From that point on, the poses vary, the women relate to one another differently, and the expressions change from photograph to photograph.  

It's tempting to attribute personalities to each of the sisters, even though we know them only superficially through their portraits. For me, through their facial expressions and body language, Heather appears the most vulnerable of the four while Laurie seems the most independent. Bibi the eldest seems to be the most loving and caring, as one might expect. Mimi the youngest, is the hardest to pin down as her appearance changes the most throughout the series. In the first few pictures she was still an adolescent and looked the part. In one photograph she sports a punk haircut, in another she is pregnant, the only obvious appearance of fertility in the entire series. But as the youngest, she does seem to be the object of the most attention from the other three. 

Of course I could be dead wrong in those assumptions. Part of that is a result of the imposition of the consistent order in which the sisters appear in each photograph. The two middle sisters in age are placed at either end of the group resulting in their inability to be in physical contact with each another. This makes them appear to be the most distant twosome of the group. In the middle, the alpha and the omega of the sisters, Bibi and Mimi by contrast are in close enough proximity to everyone else, to appear more connected to the entire group.

The story told in the pictures isn't complete as no story in photographs can ever be complete. As such The Brown Sisters displays the limitations of the medium of photography as much as the wonder of it.

They say that beauty is only skin deep. If that's true, so is aging. Naturally that applies only in a superficial sense. Non-superficial inner beauty is difficult (but not impossible) to capture in a photograph. In much the same way, a person may physically look old, but their spirit may be as young as that of a teenager. That can come across in photographs as it does here, especially in the case of Bibi, the eldest sister, as demonstrated by the constant gleam in her eye, not to mention perpetually keeping her hair long and flowing, well into her seventies.

What also can be easily conveyed in pictures is the feelings these women have for one another. Unless they are trained actors, which I have no reason to believe they are, the love they share for each other has been apparent in the pictures I'd say from the 1980 iteration until the last picture in the series from 2022.

As I said at the top, this is a remarkable, and I'll add here, life affirming body of work.

The Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon and Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie Brown, will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until August, 2024.