I am as worldly as the next dreamer, but the scales fell from my eyes, the same ones that keep finding their way back to my eyes, when I opened The New Yorker a few weeks ago and found, in a portfolio of “portraits of power,” Mussolini’s full-page face piggishly staring at me in chicly lurid detail, the very emblem of brutality made aesthetically acceptable. And when I turned the page there was Franco, in full generalissimo kit gazing coldly forward, every hair on his heartless mustache uncannily vivid in a miracle of photographic verisimilitude. Is nobody any longer beyond the pale? Is moral judgment now bad form? Is repugnance a thing of the past? I’m lying, of course. Neither Mussolini nor Franco appeared in The New Yorker’s exciting feature. But Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Chávez, and Qaddafi did. They were shot--sorry, I’m dreaming again--they were photographed by Platon at the United Nations in September, where, according to an unsigned editor’s note, he set up a little studio not far from the General Assembly. “For months, members of the magazine’s staff had been writing letters to various governments and embassies”--imagine some of those letters!--“but the project was a five-day-long improvisation, with Platon doing his best to lure the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, and Muammar Qaddafi to his camera.” I guess Omar Al Bashir was out of town. The photographer made things worse with an unbelievable audio account of the adventure. “To get Chávez was a big, big deal,” he exulted. And “Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. He’s short, shorter than me, I think. He giggles like a little boy. I didn’t want to paint a caricature of him: tough and mean. I wanted to show this irony that there’s an innocence about his eyes. So that’s what this picture is about.” Actually, that’s not what this picture is about. It is a perfectly familiar photo that conveys, in unfascinating close-up, only the sitter’s trademark smirk. The picture is about the art of the get, and nothing more. The editor’s note compares Platon’s project to Avedon--and alludes to Velázquez, like any undergraduate discussion of portraits of power--but these pictures display none of Avedon’s revelations, or interpretations, in portraiture. Avedon’s distortions were at least the evidence of a temperament; but there is no temperament in Platon’s people, there is just a pushy frontality and a phony intimacy, as if you capture a person when you capture his pores. These pictures are exercises in a stylized neutrality, a willful indifference to everything we know about their subjects. There is not “an innocence” about Ahmadinejad’s eyes, or ears, or nose. He is, in his every detail, guilty. He represses his society and subjugates its women and shoots its young people and steals its elections and threatens to incinerate another country. Fuck his giggle.
Today was arguably the United Nations at its best. I know that sounds odd, since the day was dominated by the insane musings of Muammar Qaddafi. But while there is plenty wrong with the United Nations--and while liberals tend to overestimate both its moral legitimacy and what it can realistically accomplish--the international body does serve at least one genuinely valuable function: It provides a place where leaders and their representatives can gather in one spot and speak their minds--clarifying for the world who these leaders are and what, exactly, they believe.
This morning the Scottish government released the only person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, after only serving eight years of a minimum 27-year-sentence for his role in the terrorist attack that killed
Life can be surreal at times. Earlier this year, I spent nearly three hours in a tent in Tripoli, sitting by a fire and drinking tea. The first surreal thing about this experience was the setting: a tent located in a grassy park where horses, camels, and goats grazed, walled off by a series of gates from the city that surrounded them. The second was the backdrop: the ruins of a building U.S. warplanes had bombed in 1986. The third was the identity of my host: Libya's longtime ruler, Muammar Qaddafi--the very man many believe those planes were trying to kill.
On February 11, just days after a supposedly penitent Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed on Pakistani television, President Bush appeared at the National Defense University to describe how the father of Pakistan's atom bomb had for years run a global network that sold nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Bush praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for "assur[ing] us that his country will never again be a source of proliferation," even though it was not clear Musharraf could promise any such thing, and lauded the U.S. intelligence community for its "hard work and ... dedication," even though for years it had idly watched as Khan became one of the most dangerous men in the world. Perhaps realizing that these reassurances were insufficient following such frightening revelations, Bush also announced a series of proposals intended to "strengthen the world's efforts to stop the spread of deadly weapons."
