POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

This photo taken by Alyson McClaran for Reuters should provoke immediate associations for most readers of this blog:

I know that I was immediately fascinated by and moved by the photo. I felt inspired by the nurse’s using his “down time,” which must be especially precious to him and most other healthcare workers during this crisis, to make a point that should be obvious to everyone but very obviously isn’t.

Yet, after attempting for about an hour to provide what I thought would be a sardonic catalog of all of the ironies in this photo, I have just given up. I would like to suggest, instead, that in the same way that one of the president’s commentaries seems to consist of sentences and yet defies even the most rudimentary explication, the seemingly obvious associations provoked by this photo almost immediately defy delineation.

Yes, the nurse in Colorado is standing in front of the SUV carrying protesters against social distancing much as three decades ago the student protester stood in front of the tank in the center of Tiananmen Square. But, having seen the video clip of this more current confrontation, I know that the woman shouted at the nurse that if he wants to be in a communist state, he should go live in China!

I immediately thought, “My God, how ironic!” But that shouted nonsense is only one of the most superficially mind-bending details that muddy the ways in which the two images might be seen as representing parallel moments–even very ironically parallel moments.

I have been left to chalk up this analytic dead end to the fact that this is the “coronavirus era”—and apparently a couple of months are now an “era” simply because just about everyone has lost track of days and weeks in much the same way as the years of a relatively long career seem to have run together as one approaches retirement.

And the only derivable insight might be that even the replication of a very iconic image no longer can be expected to yield much insight or even a coherent sense of its ironies. Instead, the image is ultimately inscrutable–provoking associations that are more puzzling for their being so automatic. Ultimately, I think that it may simply reconfirm our current sense that even at the level of our most basic modes of thinking, things have pretty much collapsed into a persistent muddle.