A few weeks ago my colleague DB passed along his copy of The New Yorker, bookmarking a photo series he thought I might be interested in seeing. I was.
So was Colin Powell, apparently, because he referenced one of the images in his interview on Meet the Press this past weekend. Powell pointed out that an image of Elsheba Khan at the gravesite of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, revealed the soldier not only to be the recipient of military honors such as the Bronze Star but also a Muslim. Powell stated explicitly that viewing the photograph crystallized his frustration with Republican attacks about Obama, terrorists, and Obama's supposedly "secret Muslim" faith:
I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
My current book project explores what I call the "textual residue" of people's historical responses to photographs. From a scholarly perspective, I'm greatly interested in Powell's explicit account of how viewing this image contributed to his political judgment about McCain. I would hope, though, that Powell also felt more than a little guilty when viewing some of these photos, given the way he's (ab)used photographs in the past. But, as far as I can tell, he has left no textual residue of that kind of response.
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