Jimmy Carter’s Funeral and the Postmodern World

The photo you see here has been making the rounds of the leftie press of late.  It shows the VIPs—Joe and Jill Biden, Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Barbara Bush, Barack Obama, Donald and Melania Trump, Al Gore, and Mike and Karen Pence—as Jimmy Carter’s coffin is carried past them at yesterday’s funeral service.

Why did Curmie specify the leftie press?  Look at Donald Trump.  His hand isn’t on his heart, but it appears to be on what a friend of Curmie described in a Facebook post as “his prodigious gut.”  Mr. Trump is not exactly renowned for his respect for literally anyone outside his inner circle, so the photo seems to play into his pattern of hubristic petulance.  But is that interpretation accurate?  Perhaps, but Curmie has his doubts.

Notice that Mike Pence’s, Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s hands are also a little lower than heart-high.  That suggests at least the possibility that at the instant the photo was taken, Trump was just a little later than the others to raise his hand or a little sooner to lower it.  (We can’t be sure exactly when this still was taken.)  If that’s the case, then Trump falls well short of being sinister in this instance.  Curmie has sought in vain to find video footage that would either confirm or deny his suspicions.

Certainly the leftie press is not above taking a cheap shot (more on that, and why Curmie believes they contributed significantly to Trump’s victory in a later post… probably).  Similarly, Donald Trump is unquestionably the politician least willing to adhere to normative practices of civility.  We’re left, then, with a question of interpretation, and it’s unsurprising that a photograph, something that might have a claim to being called an artwork, is at the center.

In modernist art, the artist would create and then inscribe meaning into the work, and the reader (the term is used in this context to include spectators, auditors, et al.) would ferret it out.  In the postmodern world, however, the roles change.  The artist no longer creates meaning, but rather catalyzes it; meaning is created by the reader, and therefore is different for each receiver.  This can be a function of personality, political perspective, or a host of other variables.

Postmodern artworks often bombard the reader with multiple simultaneous images, enough to prevent the complete reception of all of them, and perhaps even to the de facto exclusion of one or more.  Does it matter, for instance, that several of the people pictured above appear to have their eyes closed?  Perhaps.  And, if so, what does it mean?  The answers to those questions, Gentle Reader, are likely to tell us more about ourselves than about the folks in the photo.

This idea has, of course, appeared in countless works of art, from Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashōmon” to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”  As the latter would have it, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”  This, of course, is very much a function of confirmation bias: you despise Trump, so the photo proves that he was being disrespectful to the deceased at a funeral; you distrust the media, so they’re taking an instant in time out of context to further an agenda unrelated to truth-telling.

Curmie, of course, fits into both categories, so he’s particularly intrigued by the mystery.  Yes, he has a working hypothesis, but that’s it.  Curmie suspects that a lot of people—too many by far—will have made up their minds about the photo’s significance almost immediately. 

That tells us a fair amount about why the nation is as fractured as it is.  We (well, not Curmie, but you know what I mean) just elected the most divisive political figure of Curmie’s lifetime.  This recent election was decided more negatively than any other: millions upon millions of voters chose the President-elect based not on who he is, but on who he isn’t.  (A lot of people voted for Kamala Harris using the same logic.)

Someone is going to have to bring our perspectives together for the betterment of the citizenry, not just of “our side.”  It won’t be Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or Chuck Schumer, and it sure as hell won’t be Elon Musk.  Richard Foreman, the auteur and impresario whose recent passing affected Curmie more than he thought it would, is desperately needed right now.  He wouldn’t have made us all see the same thing, but he’d at least have reassured us that it was okay that we didn’t.