The helmets, especially in close-up, emphasize the smallness of the children. The protective capacity of the helmets is paradoxical. The fact that the children – children, mind you – are wearing military helmets intimates the danger of their situation, requiring protection. At the same time, the photograph relies on the reader’s recognition of a fundamental incongruity between the children’s timid innocence and the helmets’ grim associations. Cute in crisis is the theme perhaps.

For me at least, this photograph inescapably evokes two images of our contemporary iconography, overlapping elements of both:

Beyond the respective failure and success of these images in the construction of these men as the Commander-in-Chief, warrior president, it stands out to me that these images have such a place in the context surrounding the media’s presentation of our nation’s place in the world. Part of their power is, I think, an awareness that such images are risky, they are assertions made but subject to acceptance or rejection. Bush’s more successful representation on the aircraft carrier carries with it a strangely self-referential logic in which the culture considers the image, accepts the character created by a variety of visual and cultural markers, and in so doing re-affirms the reality in which Bush is a compelling warrior figure. He looks like a warrior because people already thought of him that way, and in turn, because he was able to successfully look like one, he became what we already was.

While the flight deck setting of the Lebanese evacuation photos catches a bit of the Bush photograph, the broader connections seem to be with the Dukakis image. The connection reveals what was already, I suppose, visible – an opposition between youth and the serious, adult world of the military. It’s meant to be cute in real children, emphasizing by association the benevolence of the US military in its rescue, but it’s infantilizing in the case of Dukakis. And because Dukakis was auditioning for the role of soldier (of course he had already served in the army previously, but no matter) that mismatch between child and war could be rendered as a danger:

There’s a nice key provided by a pair of images from abroad, featuring bonny Prince Harry, aged 8 (in 1993) and 21 (2 weeks ago):

As a boy, he is clearly playing soldier, with the benefit of access to real tanks. According to an article recounting Harry’s more recent and authentic tank exploits, “His mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, had earlier revealed Harry was fascinated by ‘all things military’ and soldiers' uniforms.”

(This fascination, of course, got young Harry into a bit of trouble last year)

At 21, he is no longer playing soldier, or at least only to the extent that we all play at being what we also are. But even in the picture, you can’t miss the youth of his apple-cheeked face. Yet, he is, of course, the age of an actual soldier, a young adult.

From this perspective, it is clear again how much Bush and Dukakis were playing soldier in their photographs, their actual military histories and positions notwithstanding. As older men, they gesture toward a virility that they promise to transfer into the office of the President. Here, youth as vitality displaces youth as innocence in the figure of the soldier (a displacement, though, never quite complete as “our sons and daughters” are worried over and mourned in the language of lost youth.)

Even when it is not literally rescuing children from danger, innocence currently plays an important role in the rhetoric of American military force, as our preemptive self-defense in Afghanistan and Iraq has been piggy-backed on a promise of liberating the innocent residents of those nations. Whether this insistence on innocence is necessarily infantilizing I don’t know. These images, though, seems to capture an ideal(ized) image of the object of benevolent American power, intertwined with a history of its own self-image.