Photo by Ali Ali/EPA. Via No Caption Needed.

I really enjoy No Caption Needed, both as a source of remarkable images and as a source of useful perspective on those images — the latter quality being by far the more scarce in the blogosphere.

However, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this passage from a recent blog post about the photograph above:

The above image is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement,” marching at a rally in Gaza City to show “solidarity with the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” The toy guns and uniforms are clearly pronounced and thus underscore the potential militancy of the image, but they are not the key signifiers of the shift from romance to tragedy. To take the full measure of force of the symbolic transformation you have to look at their facial expressions, and more specifically their eyes, which teeter between being altogether vacant and deadly serious, and in either case are wholly dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.

What clearly marks this and other such photographs from the Middle East is their sheer otherness. These simply could not be “our” children for they lack any and all sense of the purity or carefree joy of childhood that presumes to define the western world. Their experience is not ours. The conclusion is wrong, or perhaps more accurately, wrong headed, but what is important to remember is that the idealized, romantic mythos of the relationship between worldly experience and youthful innocence is every bit as much a fiction as its tragic transformation, and that indeed, the former is ever at risk of morphing into the other.

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say this is incorrect — particularly the conclusion, “the idealized, romantic mythos of the relationship between worldly experience and youthful innocence is every bit as much a fiction…,” etc. Of course, anything we can recognize as an idealized, romantic mythos is pretty obviously a fiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pointing out — particularly in the case of childhood, since the idea of childhood has such a long and storied history of intellectual misuse.

However, I was a bit thrown by the starting premises. These children don’t seem so terribly other to me. In fact, brown kids toting toy guns looking forward to a pretty grim future is a lot more familiar to me than white girls selling lemonade or funeral-going Kennedys.

Of course, I suppose that’s just a way of saying that from the standpoint of the story of race and class in America, I’m part of the other — but that’s different from the “other” in the dichotomy of the Western world and the Muslim world. I’m aware that there is an idealized notion of childhood which mostly pertains to the affluent and comfortable, but it’s not really something I’ve ever shared in, so it’s hard for me to follow the path taken by No Caption Needed in its post. The post lays out a particular way in which a viewer may react to the photograph which is conditioned on an initial reaction to the otherness of these children, whereas for me (and I would imagine for a lot of people) my reaction as a viewer begins with their very familiarity.

I don’t see a fundamental difference between the gaze of these children and the gaze of children I’ve known. I don’t see either vacant or deadly serious expressions as being unusual on a child’s face; on the contrary, those are two of the most common facial expressions a child can have — because children tend to oscillate between conditions of boredom, entertainment/enjoyment, and total fixation on fulfilling their needs. (Whether those be physical, emotional, or strictly whimsical.)

In the case of these kids, the sense I get of them is not that of child soldiers or budding terrorists, but of kids who are a little nervous, a little serious and dutiful, and more than a little bored. They look like kids who have semi-willingly taken up roles in a school or church play — the one in front with his game face on, the ones behind looking offstage for reassurance or for a cue, or simply being distracted by someone because their minds aren’t entirely on the task at hand.

What I come away with after looking at this for a while is really nothing to do with ideas of childhood as such, but rather with something more akin to the notion of the banality of evil — not to say that what these children are doing is evil, but that struggles which are about ultimate values (such as good and evil, virtue and vice, freedom and tyranny) are not played out only or even primarily on battlefields or in courtrooms or in polling places, but also in the most utterly mundane and even tedious activities.

Of course, I do not mean to say that because my initial reaction is different, it is any less based upon a fiction. (And certainly an instinct to place members of a different cultural group in familiar categories is no less suspect than separating them as other, from an intellectual standpoint.) It’s just rather striking to me because I’ve not had this dissonance in the past relative to the “we” of No Caption Needed and its readers.