MCLC: Tank Man, Pepper Spray Cop

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Tank Man, Pepper Spray Cop
***********************************************************

Source: Miller-McCune (12/2/11):
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/when-memes-collide-tank-man-pepper-spr
ay-cop-38112/

When Memes Collide: Tank Man, Pepper Spray Cop
The similarities and differences surrounding two iconic images of public
protest ‹ from Tiananmen Square and UC Davis ‹ tell their own stories of
citizen-led struggles.
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

A doctored version of the Tank Man photograph, which shows Lt. John Pike
lending a hand to the soldiers of the People¹s Liberation Army, has been
showing up on websites.

Thanks to quick-thinking protesters and bystanders carrying cellphone
cameras, Web surfers around the world quickly learned the story of what
happened at UC Davis on November 18. The event began with students
concerned about local issues (university budget cuts and tuition hikes)
and a national struggle (Occupy Wall Street) staging a sit-down protest.
When they refused to budge, the day¹s most dramatic moments came, as
campus police wielding canisters of pepper spray gassed the unarmed
youths, then removed them from the area.

Still and moving images of this confrontation appeared online within
minutes. One of the still photographs, which showed Lt. John Pike spraying
students nonchalantly, went viral and has become the best-known icon of
the OWS movement.

Its popularity as a meme has inspired widespread comparisons to other
iconic images, including the so-called ³Tank Man² photograph of 1989. That
image, captured on film by a Western journalist using a conventional
camera 
<http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tia
nanmen/>(he subsequently worried that Chinese security forces would
confiscate the roll), was linked to a very different struggle that also
involved protesters occupying and then refusing to vacate public
spaces‹Tiananmen Square and the central plazas of other Chinese cities.

The iconic Tank Man photo, taken on June 5, 1989, captured the standoff
between a young Chinese worker and a line of armored vehicles‹a standoff
that was also shot by several other photographers and captured on video.
The standoff occurred in central Beijing, where a massacre the day before
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of students, workers and members of
other social groups. That photograph is now the first thing that many
people living outside of China think of when the word ³Tiananmen² is said.
And it is possible, as James Fallows
<http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/the-moral-power-of-an-
image-uc-davis-reactions/248778/> and other commentators have suggested,
that mention of ³Occupy Wall Street² will in the future bring the Pepper
Spraying Cop photo to mind in the same manner.

These two iconic images of protest and repression are being brought
together in various other ways online. For example, as Josh Chin noted in
a November 25 post for the Wall Street Journal¹s ³RealTime China² blog
<http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/11/25/chinese-internet-users-shrug
-at-pepper-spraying-cop/>, there is a joke circulating on the Chinese
Internet that has Obama being criticized for American police using pepper
spray against protesters and responding by asking rhetorically whether
using tanks would have been better. In the West, meanwhile, a doctored
version of the Tank Man photograph, which shows Lt. Pike lending a hand to
the soldiers of the People¹s Liberation Army, has been showing up on
websites.

In light of this, it is worth asking two things. How much do the images
really have in common? And did they become embedded in the popular
imagination in parallel or dissimilar ways?

A good place to begin this comparison is by focusing on two things about
the Pepper Spraying Cop meme that seem completely distinctive to the
21stcentury: the speed with which it took off and the varied forms it has
taken. Within minutes of the Davis students getting sprayed in the face,
the action was being described in innumerable emails and tweets, and
images of it had been placed onto countless Facebook pages. The first
YouTube postings of video and Photoshop parodies
<http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/>, showing Lt. Pike interacting with
famous historical and fictional figures, quickly followed.

In less than a week, the image was hard to escape. If you turned on your
TV late in November, you could see a Fox News commentator misidentifying
the noxious gas used at Davis as a ³food additive,²
<http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/fox-news-anchor-calls-pepper-spray-f
ood-becomes-popular-punchline_b45934> Joy Behar of The Viewlikening Lt.
Pike¹s action to those of the National Guardsmen responsible for the Kent
State killings, and Martha Stewart having fun with her image and the news
story du jour by appearing on the Today Show
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/23/martha-stewarts-pepper-spray-turk
ey_n_1109720.html>, wearing protective headgear and demonstrating a new
way to dress a Thanksgiving turkey ‹ by blasting it with pepper spray.
Online you could stumble on images of the Pepper Spraying Cop gassing
everyone from Jesus (in an altered version of da Vinci¹s Last Supper) to
Yoda.

Even a trip to a theme park did not guarantee a meme-free day. On a
November 23 visit to Disneyland, I was surprised to hear the wisecracking
Genie in the Aladdin show describe the villain Jafar
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney%27s_Aladdin_characters#Jafar>
as having a special compartment for pepper spray in his staff.

References to Disneyland, Martha Stewart, Kent State, and Fox News suggest
that the Pepper Spraying Cop meme quickly became entwined with
specifically American symbols, but there were international aspects to its
evolution as well. In early online commentary on the Davis event, much was
made of it having taken place at the same time that crowds and soldiers
were confronting each other in Egypt. And as Josh Chin noted in his blog
post, footage of the Davis violence even made its way onto Chinese
television newscasts. And the usually staid official newspaper of China¹s
Communist Party, People¹s Daily, ran a selection of Pepper Spraying Cop
mashups ‹ though not, of course, the Lt. Pike and the Tank Man one, since
all allusions to the June 4 Massacre and what occurred just before and
just after it remain taboo on the Chinese mainland.

The Tank Man image did not gain global traction quite as quickly in the
late 20th century, nor did modified versions of it proliferate as fast.
And yet, the contrast here is not as dramatic as one might assume. For
though the Tank Man photograph was taken before the Internet age, the way
that awareness of it spread and uses of it expanded was not unlike that of
an online meme. In 1989, much was made of how, thanks to satellite
television (one of the main ³new media² of that day), people in many parts
of the world were able to follow the Tiananmen protests in real time. And
when the Tank Man¹s actions were caught on film, this anonymous figure
became globally famous in what seemed then amazingly short order.

Turning to the Tank Man¹s varied uses, we see again a process that
parallels what has happened with the Pepper Spraying Cop photographs,
though in that case it took months and years to accomplish what transpired
this year in the course of hours and days. Within a few years of 1989, the
Tank Man image had appeared on T-shirts, been evoked in an episode of The
Simpsons 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:File-GooGooGaiPan_tankman.jpg>(that
showed one of Homer¹s sisters-in-law standing in front of a line of
tanks), and even inspired a dance routine performed by the late Michael
Jackson in one of his concerts. Modified versions of the image had been
used to sell products and incorporated into a wide range of political
cartoons, including one, inspired by a conflict between Beijing and the
Disney Corporation, which had Mickey Mouse facing off against the armored
vehicles.

The Tank Man iconography has even made its way into publicity drives for
struggles that have had nothing to do with China, including the pre-Davis
phase of the Occupy Wall Street struggle. Just before the confrontation on
the Northern California campus, the Huffington Post
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/17/occupy-wall-street-poster-art_n_1
100048.html> was polling its readers on the question of whether they
thought it appropriate or off-key that a poster calling for support of the
November 17 OWS ³Day of Action² had shown a lone man standing in front of
three tanks, one of which had ³Wall Street² emblazoned on its side.

These parallels are intriguing, but we should not let them blind us to
several things that make the Tank Man and Pepper Spraying Cop icons
fundamentally dissimilar.

For starters, the Chinese iconic image appeared after a large number of
innocent people died and as a movement was ending. The image of the Tank
Man inspired international sympathy for the Tiananmen activists, but with
the army out on the streets in force and large numbers of arrests taking
place, this act of individual bravery could not serve as a rallying point
for new protests in 1989. In contrast, the repression of OWS has involved
injuries but no massacre, and the Davis incident has energized the OWS
struggle. The Davis students of November 18 have begun filing lawsuits and
will surely remain in the public eye; the Tank Man, by contrast,
disappeared in the immediate aftermath of having his picture taken, and
just what happened to him remains a mystery.

Another important difference relates to domestic press coverage. The
Chinese government initially tried to put its own spin on the Tank Man
standoff <http://www.tsquare.tv/film/gateExcerpts.php>. State television
showed footage of the tanks pivoting to keep from running him over,
claiming that this ³proved² that the army had shown great restraint in
early June. Later, however, a complete ban on references to the Tank Man
was introduced. In the United States, on the other hand, the use of pepper
spray at Davis and in response to OWS protests in various cities has been
and remains the subject of a wide-ranging public debate in the press.

Last but not least, in the Davis case, there have been statements of
regret by university officials ‹ albeit ones that some students and
faculty (myself included) believe have not always come fast enough or gone
far enough in championing the principle of freedom of speech. And the
University of California has created a commission to examine the way that
the officers behaved ‹ albeit one whose composition has been criticized
for being headed by a former police chief. Needless to say, there were no
Chinese counterparts to these things in 1989. The only official
investigations carried out were ones that led to the persecution of
protesters. And the Chinese government denied that the PLA had done
anything wrong.

On the day of the Davis incident, Social Science Research Council
President Craig Calhoun ‹ an eyewitness to the Chinese protests of 1989
who wrote one of the best books about them
<http://www.ssrc.org/calhoun/2011/11/18/evicting-the-public-why-has-occupyi
ng-public-spaces-brought-such-heavy-handed-repression/> ‹ posted an essay
on his organization¹s website that criticized the strong-arm tactics that
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others were using to curtail the
OWS movement. ³It is disturbing,² he wrote, ³to see governments in
ostensibly democratic America taking actions reminiscent of the Chinese
government ousting protestors from Tiananmen Square.² We should not
forget, he continued, that ³democracy depends not just on voting and the
rule of law but on social movements and public expressions of dissent.²

I agree wholeheartedly with Calhoun, someone with whom I have co-authored
essays on Tiananmen in the past, and I¹m confident he would agree with me
if I added two things to his argument.

First, while the OWS social movement differs from the Chinese one of 1989
in many ways, there are parallel concerns that have tended to be
overlooked. Yes, China¹s activists were fighting for expanded individual
freedoms and greater democracy within a one-party state, but their fury at
corrupt officials and people with family connections to Communist Party
leaders getting a disproportionate share of the material benefits of the
country¹s economic take-off echoes in some ways the 1 percent vs. the 99
percent rhetoric we are hearing in the West today.

Second, though, it is one thing for state actions to result in protesters
being injured and shaken, but still able to continue to struggle for
change, as happened at Davis, and quite another for state actions to
silence forever the voices of large groups of people who were working to
improve their society, as happened so tragically in Beijing on the day of
the June 4 Massacre.