Wartime Imaginary

In the Fall of 2007, I started to document numerous instances of the Middle East in San Francisco. Signs of the city’s burgeoning Palestinian and Israeli immigrant populations, the local Jewish community’s longstanding activism around the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the War on Terror, everything seemed to come to a visual head here during the final year of the Bush administration.

Imagine my surprise when, the day after returning from Milan, Jennifer and I encounter the image above. An archetypal ‘milk carton kid’ (for those unfamiliar, in the US, milk cartons used to carry pictures of missing children) the picture was taken on Valencia Street, in a spot normally covered with smarty-pants political posters. Notice, of course, the fact that this missing child is in fact Osama Bin Laden.

The following day, twelve blocks away, I found this image inserted inside a weekly newspaper bin. The cover of another American icon – a Chick comic – this one features obvious caricatures of terrorists. Judging from the execution, jihadis, in traditional garb, disingenuously posing as ‘friends’ while still flying the flag of Islam. Notice the sinister-looking guy holding up the flag. Its hilarious, albeit lame.

Chick publications, a hipster fetish (because of their obvious extremity) are too easy to pick apart. Rightist Christian pamphlets designed to deliver political information in the form of a religious comic book, the contrast of such publications with the imposition of Bin Laden’s likeness on an all-American beverage is a good way of summarizing the mental space the Mideast continues to take up here.