Americans love their martyrs. Within a day of the shooting, one of the many photos of Trump being hustled off the stage, one was taken that is so perfect it could have been photo-shopped. He knows when to grab a spotlight, even it was an accident. It is a photo that anoints Donald True as a political saint, a protomartyr. It will become an iconic American image, part of the canon of American myth-making.
The photo will be reused in awe, celebration, and proof of Donald Trump’s salvation by God so that he can do great things, his sins washed away by his own blood. And with the supreme court in effect separating an incumbent from the rule of law makes this man, should the majority of Americans decide, the first sainted King of America in all but name.
As a whole, the image is reminiscent of another iconic American image; that of American soldiers, raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, on February 23, 1945. The two photos share the same angles of sight, the flag above and a dramatic event below, indicating the triumph aspiration and glory of American civilization.
But that glory is dimmed when one knows the post-war story of Ira Hayes, one of those soldiers, an Akimel O’odham Indigenous American.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Hayes
The flag itself in the new iconic photo is waving in the wind against a blue sky, above the fraught scene below, but with a kind of stillness implying an unequivocal certainty that the scene over which it watches will be repeated, but the American destiny will not be denied. This image of the flag raises in the mind the famous line from Francis Scott Key’s poem, written after the a British attack during the war of 1812 and devastation of Fort McHenry. After the smoke and dust had settled and the sun had risen, the proud patriot could say, ‘that our flag was still there’.
In the American founding mythos, that sentence presents the image of a brave and honourable nation, challenged since its beginning by enemies within and without but through which its spirit and God-given mission will prove indomitable and just. But the backstory for this photo is that the sentence above from the poem/song in Key’s third verse is now obscured by what is not included when the poem/song is sung or quoted.
The original lines (https://amhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/pdf/ssb_lyrics.pdf) of verse three are these:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
These verses were a threat aimed at the Colonial Regiment of black persons who fought on the side of the British when the White House was burned and the Fort almost fell. http://Video: Do You Know the Star-Spangled Banner’s 3rd Verse? | The Nation (Jeffery Robinson, July 4, 2018)
The secret service. The image of selfless secret service men and women, protecting the protomartyr, is reminiscent of American calls for military service regardless of reason for war or sporadic military violence. The protomartyr draped in both the bodies and the symbolism of their possible sacrifice for one man who embodies the state, the American empire, and its manifest destiny is similar to how the soldiers at Iwo Jima draped themselves over the pole of the flag at its rising.
The Donald Trump image is where he always seeks to be: dead centre of the focus for audience and camera. We see more of the body in this one picture than in the others taken. Trump stands, the right arm fully exposed and raised above the heads of the secret service persons, fist clenched at the end of his right arm straight and proud, his whole chest exposed to view and to danger in defiance against those who would destroy the man and therefore the state.
And the face. The face is blooded, but open, confident. The mouth is formed in a typical Trumpian shape: declarative sentences ready to pour out, boastful, slippery, shadowy. The head is back and slightly lifted, challenging enemies and at the same time worshipping the flag.
The front story of Donald Trump since 2016 will soon become back story. The scandals, the convictions for various offenses, his personal sins, his use of high office for personal gain, his threats, his impeachments will be washed out of the immediate historical picture and the image of a modern political, if not near-religious, protomartyr will be complete.
How can Joe Biden and the democrats contend against a protomartyr, a near-saint?