The Lincoln Memorial is a remarkably open space at the heart of Washington, DC. Itâs possible to stand at the foot of the steps and look west across the reflecting pool towards the Washington Monument and beyond towards Capitol Hill and, on a clear day, imagine that the world is all blue sky and white marble. People move through the space slowly and deliberately, in much the same way that tourists and visitors move around stately monuments everywhere. The atmosphere is similar in Westminster, at the Reichstag or on the hill at Parliament House in Canberra. We visit mausoleums with the same reservation, deliberately and quietly, spending a little longer on each moment. Itâs almost as though democracy and death give us similar pause, as well they might.
There is a rhythm to these places, a gentle pulsing of the crowd against the slow grinding of the state. They open at nine and they close at five,1 and those hours are managed in orderly queues, snaking between pleated ropes and chrome bollards, signposted and directed. When I visit, I become a little unlike myself: more serious, affecting something I think is gravitas. I suppose I try to be in the place in a way that I think the place demandsâto behave appropriately, as it were, naturally normative. I think I learned at school the game of becoming more serious through acting more serious. Nevertheless, even acknowledging the educational and social conditioning through which we learn to submit to power, I do think that these serious places have a way of impressing their seriousness upon us. They bear down on us through the weight of their stone, the depth of their echo, the wash of their light. No doubt this is exactly what the architects intendedâthese are buildings that remind citizens of institutional immovability.
An architect may have intentions for a building, but it is a complex process to make those intentions material. All sorts of influences shape what happens during construction and then, once brick and mortar have settled, the building itself undergoes transformation and interpretation. When people visit things become exponentially more complex. How we feel and how we act once we spend time in a place can depend on so many things: the place itself, the wider environment, its history, its current use, how it is managed, when we visit and why, where we came from and with whom we make the trip. These things are so obvious they hardly need saying. When people come to a place, they bring complexity with themâand 25 million people visit the memorial grounds each year according to the National Park Service.2 Thatâs 25 million people staring up at the 16th president, wandering around the plaza in front of the pool, gazing across at the Washington Monument and feeling something about the place and their experience of it. Given those numbers and the human variety that they must represent, it is remarkable that most of us behave so similarly.
Not that everyone always behaves the same, of course. Partly through design, partly through history and partly through intentional practice, the Lincoln Memorial is a profoundly political space, and political spaces are also performative. People bring their different politics to them. I suppose that my own behaviour is political, in its wayâI assume a posture that signifies a type of deliberate seriousness that I must believe is politically appropriate. That, in turn, must reveal something about my learned respect for the Enlightenment or some âgrand narrativeâ of western liberalism. Itâs hard not to be impressed by the memorial; it is a place to be political and to be impressed by politics and the potential of political power. These are the steps where Martin Luther King stood and spoke of his dream in 1963; this is where a huge crowd gathered to oppose to the Vietnam War in 1967, where citizens have headed year on year to be heard or, at least, to attempt to be heard. Hollywood has lionised the space and it stands at the centre of an American political imaginary. It is one of those places where people congregate, where speeches are made and where flags wave, a central plaza in the public sphere.
The plaza in front of the memorial is therefore, frequently, a confluence of sorts, towards which different marches and processions aim themselves, as though to arrive is, in itself, a statement of political intent. It is a political place in a political city. Marches happen here all the time. One of them, the March for Life, takes place annually in January, when a coalition of religious and socially conservative groups meets to reassert their opposition to abortion rights. They first marched in 1974, a year after the supreme court voted seven to two to decide Roe v. Wade, and in the intervening years the march has become a rallying moment for a particular type of demonstrative conservatism. In 2017 Mike Pence addressed the crowd and in 2018 Donald Trump spoke via a satellite link from the White Houseârespectively the first vice president and president to do so, which in itself says something about the tenor and the signalling of the event.
As a general rule, the March for Life hardly registers in the wider political consciousness. It runs on Fox News, of course, but political attention is normally elsewhere in late January, anticipating the State of the Union address and the start of the legislative calendar. In 2019 the march took place on a freezing cold Friday before a long weekend, almost exactly two years after Trumpâs chaotic presidency began with crass warnings of American carnage. Itâs been a remarkable and wearying two years, during which every event, large and small, has come to feel somehow both politically significant and immediately forgettable.
In mid-January, most of the media was preoccupied with Trumpâs government shutdown, which was well on its way to breaking records. If the story of the 2019 March for Life is unfamiliar to you, Wikipedia features a comprehensive account of the events that happened on 18 January. On Friday evening, a short video was uploaded to Instagram and quickly began circulating on social media channels, particularly on Twitter, where an account called @2020fight featuring a profile picture of a Brazilian blogger and with 40,000 followers, first shared it at 11:13 pm. Youâve almost certainly seen the video, even if youâre not a Twitter user, because it was soon streaming on TV news stations and websites globally and continued to do so for days. On those websites, the video is usually paused on a particular scene, in which a teenage boy wearing a red âmake America great againâ (MAGA ) cap stands opposite a man with long greying hair and glasses, who is striking a hand-held skin drum with a stick that looks a little like a conductorâs baton. In the video, the man is singingâor, perhaps, chanting is a better verbâand whatâs notable about the boy is that he is not moving. He stands quite still facing the man, less than a metre between them, and he stares at him smirking.
When I first saw the video, I thought of the way that Anglo rugby players stare down the MĂŁori haka before a test match with New Zealand. It can be a hard attitude to describe. I say that the boy is smirking, but that is just my judgement and it may be unfair; perhaps it would be better to say that he is smiling or keeps his expression fixed. He glances down briefly and there is a flicker of his expression changing, but when he looks back to the chanting man his face assumes the same mask, with the steady stare and the lips curled slightly upwards. I would say that the look is expressive in a way that feels familiar. Itâs an expression I suspect Iâve made myself. It speaks to me of defiance and nerves at the edge of confrontation, an assumed superiority but an uncertainty of how to express it. It is a white and male attitude, and it requires moneyâor, more specifically, itâs an attitude to confrontation that comes from being unfamiliar with confrontation because of money. The smirk is a defence against the unfamiliarity, the sense that if the world performs for our amusement, then we are safe. The joke is our security.
Or maybe itâs the hat? The hat grabs the attention. Is there a more divisive piece of clothing in America in 2019 than the cheap red MAGA baseball cap? No doubt libraries will eventually be written unpicking the cultural, racial and economic prejudices embroidered into that particular piece of headwear. I have to admit that when I see it worn by a grinning, white teenager, I assume all sort of attitudes that may be desperately unfair. Then again, if I had chosen to wear that hat, I think I would know that it is demonstrably political and antagonistic, and I would want to insert myself into that cultural polemic. The hat is the archetypal Trumpian symbol: gaudy, âAmericanâ in some entirely arbitrary and self-serving sense, mass produced somewhere far from America, ill-fitting andâso we assumeâworn less to please the wearer but more to offend another.
The video is remarkable for many reasons, not least because it seems to capture so many of the antagonisms of the American moment. As one journalist responded on Twitter: âThis era is just a series of extremely heavy-handed metaphorsâ (Serwer, 2019). There is the boy in the MAGA hat and there is the man with greying hair, whose clothing and instrument suggest that he might be Native American, an impression that his singing appears to confirm. The video is filmed from over the manâs left shoulder, and so we can see that behind the MAGA boy there are many more boys wearing the same hat or a version of it in white, and Trump emblazoned scarves. They are massed on the steps of the memorial, rising above and around the angle of the camera, so that the viewer feels surrounded by them, like the singing man is, in a way that feels threatening. Some of the boys are laughing and some are chanting, and some are looking like they donât know quite what they want to be doing. They are crowd, both discontinuous and uniform, and in many different ways unappealing.
Certainly, that was overwhelming view when the video was first released and picked up by the media. CNN described the boys âharassing and mockingâ the man in its Saturday morning coverage, NBC News called them âtauntingâ teens and Variety reported that the internet âerupted in outrage Saturday after a video of young men wearing MAGA hats and attempting to intimidate a Native American man at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington D.C. went viralâ (Nyren, 2019). Of course, itâs always ridiculous to describe the internet doing anything, as though it becomes homogenised and anthropomorphised by the action, but the distaste and the condemnation was remarkably widespread. For many people, no doubt, the video confirmed an already entrenched view that Trumpâs brand of aggressive conservatism was both repugnant and, increasingly, a threat on Americaâs streets.
It is also obviously problematic to claim proof of an internet âeruptionâ, as though evidence of an internet pile-on were somehow a distinguishing mark of a critical or important social moment. It is incredibly difficult to measure rage or revulsion and far too easy to perpetuate a polemic when the intent is to interrogate it. The initial short video reached two million views in a couple of hours on YouTube and currently has nearly five million views, but then Gangnam Style by K-popstar Psy currently has three and half billion views, or near enough. Scale is a difficult construct online. Itâs may be more productive to reflect on the mass media (broadcast, print and online) response and the political fallout from the event. It soon transpired that the boys were one of many school groups bussed into Washington to participate in the March for Life. The school was quickly identified: Covington Catholic High School is a private, all-boys school in Kentucky. The school issued an apology and the administering diocese was quick to condemn the behaviour and promise an investigation, but condemnation of the school generally and the smirking boy, in particular, was already overwhelming. The school shut for the week.
Both the boy and man were named by the press. The man, Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder, was attending the Indigenous Peoples March. He was already a prominent figure in the long-running battle to prevent the government from running an oil pipeline through indigenous land at Standing Rock in North Dakota. Commentators contrasted his history (and his activism) against the assumed ...