guardian.co.uk,
Xeni Jardin, Wednesday 23 November 2011
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| Police lieutenant John Pike pepper sprays students at UC Davis. Photograph: Brian Nguyen/Reuters |
Nature
abhors a vacuum, it is said; and the internet abhors unexplained dissonance.
When photographs emerged of police lieutenant John Pike pepper-spraying University of California Davis students, it wasn't just the violence in those
images that captured the world's attention – it was the surreal juxtaposition
of that violence with Pike's oddly casual body language and facial expression.
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| Picture: Lalo Alcaraz/laloalcaraz.com |
Photoshop
out the students from that picture with your mind. Forget about Pike's uniform,
let's say he's just wearing street clothes. Now, instead of a policeman
spraying a less-lethal chemical weapon down the throats of peacefully seated
20-year-olds, you might be able to interpret this tableau as a figure
sauntering through a garden, spraying weeds. Or maybe he's your paunchy,
moustached uncle, nonchalantly dousing bugs in the basement with insecticide.
One way the
internet deals with that kind of upsetting dissonance is to mock it. And that's
what the internet has done with Pike. The "casually pepper-spraying cop" is now a meme, a kind of folk art or shared visual joke that is open
to sharing and reinterpretation by anyone. This particular meme has spread with
unusual velocity – in part, I imagine, because the subject matter is just as
weird as it is upsetting.
Even Kamran
Loghman, one of the men who developed pepper spray as a weapon with the FBI in
the 1980s, had a hard time reconciling it. "I have never seen such an
inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents," Loghman told the New York Times. And Loghman might add "insouciant" to that list of
adjectives. I mean, look at the guy. He's not braced for imminent attack by a
foe; he does not move with tension as if navigating a hostile environment. He's
administering punishment, and his face says: "Meh."
An
investigation, to be led by former NY and LA police chief Bill Bratton, into
whether there was police misconduct may take a while to reach a conclusion, but
Photoshop justice has been delivered to Pike. And the expressions keep
multiplying.
You can
find them at Boing Boing's "Occupy Lulz" post, at Know Your Meme, at
a Facebook page and at Reddit.
Pike's
dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the
photos from Abu Ghraib; Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a
thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion,
some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very
photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and Pike, two "bad apples" taking the
fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent.
Violence is
nothing new, of course, and there are plenty of classic art and history images
in which to insert Pike. A print of American revolutionary war figure Crispus Attucks, Picasso's Guernica for instance.
Classic
album covers like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band get the treatment, too.
Pop culture
and fine art images in which sympathetic figures are seated, supine or
vulnerable are another frequently spotted base for Pike's shenanagins. Grandma
at the holiday table is going to have some extra pepper on her turkey this Thanksgiving. Eeyore is not safe. Nor are the ladies of Seurat. And
forget about the American constitution.
Still, none
of us jaded internet chroniclers were prepared for the ultimate act of
Inception-like recursion that came this week, when students at UC Davis printed
out some of the meme images as posters, and carried them to a protest at the
very site on the UC Davis quad where the pepper-spraying incident took place.
Images of the casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop, held up as an act of protest
on the same spot where Pike casually-pepper-sprayed-everyone. Good news: looks
like there will be T-shirts for them to wear soon, too.
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