Miss Amerika

Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured.

Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.

--Amrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce is a bit of a nutter (in 1913, after some talk of going to Mexico to euthanize himself in Pancho Villa’s revolution, he disappeared and might possibly have shot himself in the middle of the Grand Canyon), but his satirical cynicism aptly captures the prevailing mood that I, at least, feel tonight. Tomorrow we move from a contemplation of our future to a reckoning with our destiny.

In the midst of my anxiety, I was surprised to find the November 1 issue of The New Yorker: it is hands-down the best issue of a magazine and the best civic reporting I have ever seen. I say “seen” and not “read” because the editors acted with astounding sapience and decided purge the election issue of almost all its words. Instead, they reproduced 50 photographs commissioned from the photographer Richard Avedon for a visual essay on the state of American democracy. It is suitably titled Democracy. Avedon – almost even more suitably – died of a cerebral hemorrhage while working on the piece. The magazine reprints these photographs on 32 pages. It is an attempt to document a nation in the throes of trauma.

The image that captures you immediately is of a ruddy-faced young woman with a strangely-textured face and crossed eyes. She is either looking directly at the camera (although the sense that she is looking through the page, at me, is overwhelming) or in directions that only sort of hover around the camera. She has cloudy pale skin with flushed cheeks and long white hair, offset by a silver fabric Liberty crown that resembles a jester’s cap. She reminds me of an albino rabbit I once knew: transparent and not entirely animal. The basic human knowledge that is conveyed through the eyes, and confirmed in their symmetry, is difficult to acquire when looking at her. Her eyes are sort of the enigmas that come inside conundrums; her entire face is a cipher. She seems to carry herself comfortably but without confidence. She is androgynous, with a young face and wrinkles around her eyes. The crown on her head looks both spirited and optimistic, and flaccid and cheap. Her smile is a puzzle: expressionless, but somehow also hopeful, and grim. The impression that one has, given Avedon’s composition and the facts of this remarkable woman’s appearance, is of a face composed of composite parts, Miss Potato Head with an air of awkward wisdom. Avedon suggests her unfinished nature. She is Indecision, embodied not as the human failure to make choices about the world, but as nature’s failure to make choices about us.

Of course, nothing in this photograph is meant to be about her; it is about what Avedon finds in her that is about us. She is, pointedly, America. Her questionable ability to see straight, her two googley eyes competing for a line of vision, the lack of coherence in her face, the blankness that suggests she is everyone but, as follows, that all of us are incomplete.

And she looks, possibly, retarded. The optimism in her face may be because of the deformity, or despite it. It’s a brilliant way to introduce the series, because it begs the question we haven’t really been begging: Are we retarded? I’m not being facetious. Retarded means to delay or impede. We are failing, on a massive scale, to self-examine ourselves and our nation, and ask of both: Who are we? What is our vision? How do we fit into the puzzle? Even with the flurry of activity to encourage voters and to protect their interests at the polls tomorrow, we are not doing justice to our birthright. To do that, we need to begin asking, as individuals, questions about our present and future that peer 100 years down the line. We need to evaluate whether the choices we are making now reflect the kind of America we want to be the legacy of the future. We need to stop flogging democracy with our slow wit.

Avedon gives us a portrait of the body politic as a body—a face and eyes and crown. The photograph tells us, through this woman, that America is unfinished, youthful, profoundly unique, and perhaps sufficiently weary. Her face, and our condition, is a collection of questions about our fundamental constitution as Americans and as America. Questions that will not be resolved tomorrow at the polls (or a month from now in the courts). He gives a hint of an answer with the final spread—a portrait of an angelic Jimmy Carter abutting an ascetic Barak Obama. These two photographs have the tightest framing of any in the collection, bringing us closer to Avedon’s vision of the future: the elder statesman graciously giving way to a tired-looking young man with dignity and mischief in his eyes.

Twice: Once too often.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary


(I apologize for the quality of the photographs here. I strongly suggest buying the magazine. And then staring at it lovingly as you would at a paper ballot.)

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