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Exhibit A in Technocratic Arrogance
Yesterday, The Atlantic published an interview with the Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti, whose portraits of Americans posing with their guns have become a hot commodity on Twitter following the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. Galimberti’s work, like the work of most documentarians (such as Camilo José Vergara, Chris Arnade, and Mark Laita), is consumed mainly by journalists and Bryn Mawr Ph.Ds and people who listen to NPR. As if touring the Mütter Museum, they gawk at the fascinating and pitiful and deformed specimens of humanity and wonder, “Me, oh my. How could it go so wrong?”
But piling on his subjects is unfair, Galimberti thinks:
The success of my photos are the moment is because my photos are really easy to understand. You don’t need to be an expert in photography or even guns to understand the message. It’s impossible to look at these images and not see what’s there. And that makes my photos so easy to share and to be used for a certain, sometimes negative, communication. But I think when people use my photos to judge the people in them, that is a mistake. The real judgment in my work is on the society that allows this. The real problem isn’t these 40 people I photographed; it is the regulations and the culture that permits it.
Ah, there it is. If that isn’t the perfect expression of the technocratic frame of mind, I don’t know what is. Galimberti believes himself to be an empathetic observer, of course, but the message is clear: “These hillbillies are going to kill themselves. We, collectively, have failed them. We’ve failed to protect them from themselves.” It’s a cliché to say “This is why we have Trump,” but . . . this is why we have Trump.
Now, I can understand the documentarian’s appeal. I’m a product of the upper-middle class. I did my time in the service industry. I gaped at the strange and dysfunctional-seeming people in that world. Human spectacle is interesting. Without it, there would be no literature. But then, Galimberti isn’t documenting human spectacle. These aren’t prostitutes and meth addicts. They’re not mass-shooters. They’re hobbyists. They’re collectors. They’re tinkerers. They’re marksmen. “Nobody needs that many guns!” protest the Twitterati. Nobody needs a vinyl record collection, either. Nobody needs a 1955 Ford Thunderbird. Nobody needs a basement woodshop or a backyard forge.
The guns do not mean what the writers at The Atlantic think they mean. One senses, in the things the urban class says, a certain contempt for the grubby and dangerous hobbies of Middle Americans — and a belief that, with a little protesting here and a little lawmaking there, the rednecks, too, can become the nice, safe, responsible yoga-practicing, kale-eating, This American Life-listening citizens all of us were born to be.
Published in Guns
Thanks for the post.
I see your point, but I don’t know if “technocratic” is the right description for the folks with their panties in a twist over these American gun-lovers. You might be correct.
I tend to think of them as “Euro-weenies.”
But can they adapt to the high and increasing crime rates in the cities where they are expected to live?
By coincidence, I was just thinking about the “sound of snot” a few minutes ago. I was trying to think how to describe a certain type of academic voice of my generation — the type that called the local public radio station in 1991 to express how terrible it was that the Soviet Union had collapsed for good.
Nowadays, they all seem to talk like valley girls.
My wife and I noticed when we moved to New York state in 2000 from the then relatively free state of California how often New Yorkers, even in rural upstate, had “Is that permitted?” as their default response to new ideas. Instead of expecting people to be free to try things, they were programmed to look to bureaucratic “experts” to tell them what was permitted.
Someone should tell her fans that she is treading into a dangerous area here: the idea that one culture is better or lesser than another. No less an oracle than Ibrahim X. Kendi has expressly forbade the idea of cultural hierarchies, since it inevitably leads to, or is innately tied to, racist evaluations.
The very fact that these things stem from a Culture ought to signal that the debate is closed. Right?
I think the right answer is “Why not?”
The best response to “No one needs a 30-round magazine, or to pray in public, or drive pick-up trucks,” revolves around “No one needs Chablis or yoga mats or Pelotons, either. No one needs anything but the bare necessities of life; the rest is just life’s pleasures.”
Perhaps followed by something like, “What won’t you give up? Because your lifestyle shows egotism and class supremacy, and your personal wealth is due to unequal distribution of goods. And the want and misery you create in others is more harmful than my hunting and target practice.”
I often ask people who advocate for things like magazine limits why they do not advocate for governors on cars to prevent them from exceeding the posted speed limits. A decade ago the idea was to simply prevent any vehicle from exceeding 75mph, but now, with GPS technology and up to date maps, my apps tell me when I am going over the speed limit. Why not simply mandate that technology in all new vehicles. It looks at where the car is, it looks at the map speed limit, and governs the car to not exceed that speed limit. Just think of how much money we would save as a nation. First off, it would reduce gas use. It would also mean that the traffic cops could be greatly reduced in number because no one would be able to speed anymore, ergo, no need for traffic cops in their current numbers. Now, THAT’s a police defunding that I can get behind. It would reduce traffic fatalities and injuries because, well, speed kills. And lastly, there is no Constitutional right to driving over the posted speed limit. There isn’t a right to drive a car at all.
Does that not work for you? Why not?