the fascist Aesthetics of ICE

Sometimes, pictures are for people whose heads ache at the very thought of thinking. A school of art can be unifying for people of shared sentiment. The fascists of the prior century understood this well. They knew that where complex thought failed, unencumbered impulse could triumph.
The Trump administration and its enablers have offered proof of this villainous idea in the Department of Homeland Security’s mélange of memes and illustrations seeking to recruit not merely new hires, but the kind of new hires demanded for the accelerating roundup of immigrants. Here are a few examples pulled from the DHS Facebook page:
From white settlers trekking across the plains overseen by an alabaster guardian angel, to the Death’s Head imagery calling on young men to join the hunt for any immigrants that lack a hovering spiritual guardian, DHS and its cosplaying director Kristi Noem employ graphic arts in a way that would have been familiar to the political artisans of Mussolini’s Italy. They are doing this in an almost Proustian way: attempting to recapture the lost past through vivid sensation and force of will.
We cannot know if Jonathan Ross ever saw these images. We do know that the ICE he joined was shaped by the ethos that produced these recruitment ads. He went on to fire three shots into a car driven by a Minneapolis woman during an ICE raid that her spouse was protesting. The adolescent braggadocio of Noem's agency translated into a firearms death for disobedience.
Much of the art is not new. That’s almost the point. Those settlers are from an 1872 painting by – yikes – an immigrant painter named John Gast. Called “American Progress,” it was inspired by the Manifest Destiny movement that displaced native American tribes as we moved from one coast to the other. 
Uncle Sam meme has been around for a while, too. His iteration in the accompanying illustration comes from the account of a self-described Christian nationalist. It is no mystery that a number of the ICE videos showing helmeted agents sweeping across the landscape include Biblical verses on the screen. This is an exercise in going back.
 
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Consider the vintage postcards displayed on the DHS site, depicting iconic Washington locales in the 1940s. That is to say, they are showing the nation’s capital city not only in the pre-homeless encampment days, but also in the pre-integration days. The southbound travelers from the Union Station imagined in these cards would have ended up in towns where stations had segregated waiting rooms.
Another card offers the view from The Hotel Continental, accompanied by the DHS message, “We Can Return.” The view from the Hotel Continental, by the way, looks grand because it is a painting and reflects the sort of unrealistically idealized Washington to which the current administration aspires. “We Can Return” is a dispiriting choice of slogan for an illustration dating to the days when Washington’s schools and many of its other institutions, including its armed forces, were segregated.
The unifying theme is a rejection of the modern, an appeal to simpler times, if not in the real world, then in the imaginary one where established norms are unchanging, the flag has 48 stars and all the kids are white. 
Cults of tradition need a touchstone. Those postcards are a veritable Rock of Gibraltar on which we can mind-graffiti any needed slogan.
The impulse to act has displaced the need to discern. One need only read Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” to comprehend how the least merciful elements of the current regime are employing art in the service of unifying cruelty. The willingness of Trump’s acolytes to embrace the denunciation of those they hate was on display July 31 in the Beaver County borough of Ambridge. After a massive sweep across the town, stopping brown-skinned motorists, invading a Latino grocery, and arresting anyone who dared protest, a group of officers was walking away as angry onlookers cried, “fascist.” One of the officers threw up what can only be described as a dismissively half-assed Nazi salute.[1] The regime is no longer afraid of being seen as cruel. They embrace it and they have the pictures to attest to their devotion.
This fusing of bro culture with political ideology is not merely a tidy fit. It’s a means of justifying the least noble impulses of humans by inverting the language of morality. Think of Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is Good” speech in the movie “Wall Street.” Nobody thought it would make a great recruitment ad for a stock brokerage. Yet, that’s the message we’re getting from the graphics of DHS. You speak to your target audience. The one Kristi Noem and her posse are recruiting might someday find themselves deleting their Internet search histories while awaiting a knock at their own doors.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/reel/3932245497036189

Sometimes, pictures are for people whose heads ache at the very thought of thinking. A school of art can be unifying for people of shared sentiment. The fascists of the prior century understood this well. They knew that where complex thought failed, unencumbered impulse could triumph.
 
The Trump administration and its enablers have offered proof of this villainous idea in the Department of Homeland Security’s mélange of memes and illustrations seeking to recruit not merely new hires, but the kind of new hires demanded for the accelerating roundup of immigrants. Here are a few examples pulled from the DHS Facebook page:
 
From white settlers trekking across the plains, overseen by an alabaster guardian angel to the Death’s Head imagery calling on young men to join the hunt for any immigrants that lack a hovering spiritual guardian, DHS and its cosplaying director Kristi Noem employ graphic arts in a way that would have been familiar to the political artisans of Mussolini’s Italy. They are doing this in an almost Proustian way: attempting to recapture the lost past through vivid sensation and force of will.
 
Much of the art is not new. That’s almost the point. Those settlers are from an 1872 painting by – yikes – an immigrant painter named John Gast. Called “American Progress,” it was inspired by the Manifest Destiny movement that displaced native American tribes as we moved from one coast to the other. 
 
Uncle Sam meme has been around for a while, too. His iteration in the accompanying illustration comes from the account of a self-described Christian nationalist. It is no mystery that a number of the ICE videos showing helmeted agents sweeping across the landscape include Biblical verses on the screen. This is an exercise in going back.
 
 
 
Consider the vintage postcards displayed on the DHS site, depicting iconic Washington locales in the 1940s. That is to say, they are showing the nation’s capital city not only in the pre-homeless encampment days, but also in the pre-integration days. The southbound travelers from the Union Station imagined in these cards would have ended up in towns where stations had segregated waiting rooms.
 
Another card offers the view from The Hotel Continental, accompanied by the DHS message, “We Can Return.” The view from the Hotel Continental, by the way, looks grand because it is a painting and reflects the sort of unrealistically idealized Washington to which the current administration aspires. “We Can Return” is a dispiriting choice of slogan for an illustration dating to the days when Washington’s schools and many of its other institutions, including its armed forces, were segregated.
 
The unifying theme is a rejection of the modern, an appeal to simpler times, if not in the real world, then in the imaginary one where established norms are unchanging, the flag has 48 stars and all the kids are white. 
 
Cults of tradition need a touchstone. Those postcards are a veritable Rock of Gibraltar on which we can mind-graffiti any needed slogan.
 
The impulse to act has displaced the need to discern. One need only read Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” to comprehend how the least merciful elements of the current regime are employing art in the service of unifying cruelty. The willingness of Trump’s acolytes to embrace the denunciation of those they hate was on display July 31 in the Beaver County borough of Ambridge. After a massive sweep across the town, stopping brown-skinned motorists, invading a Latino grocery, and arresting anyone who dared protest, a group of officers was walking away as angry onlookers cried, “fascist.” One of the officers threw up what can only be described as a dismissively half-assed Nazi salute.[1] The regime is no longer afraid of being seen as cruel. They embrace it and they have the pictures to attest to their devotion.
 
This fusing of bro culture with political ideology is not merely a tidy fit. It’s a means of justifying the least noble impulses of humans by inverting the language of morality. Think of Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is Good” speech in the movie “Wall Street.” Nobody thought it would make a great recruitment ad for a stock brokerage. Yet, that’s the message we’re getting from the graphics of DHS. You speak to your target audience. The one Kristi Noem and her posse are recruiting might someday find themselves deleting their Internet search histories while awaiting a knock at their own doors.