.
At an Airport, Huntsville, Alabama: photo by Austin Granger, 5 March 2014
Viper Strike
a 44-pound
low-collateral damage
precision-guided
GPS-aided
laser-seeking
weapon system
that can deliver
a whole world of hurt
in less time than
it can take
that bad guy
even to begin
to think about
crossing that street
or coming out of that cave
whoever
and wherever
they are
Viper in attack mode. We stumbled over this really big viper (80 cm), and he or she didn't like it: photo by Jan Kroep, 11 June 2011
Windy night in Desert Hot Springs: photo by Jody Miller, 25 March 2014
Missiles with Saturn V Rocket, Huntsville, Alabama: photo by Austin Granger, 7 September 2013
Missiles with Saturn V Rocket, Huntsville, Alabama: photo by Austin Granger, 7 September 2013
Rocket Engine with Garbage Can, Huntsville, Alabama: photo by Austin Granger, 7 September 2013
Missiles with Saturn V Rocket, Huntsville, Alabama: photo by Austin Granger, 6 September 2013
Tom,
ReplyDeleteSnakes terrify me..I have dreams where I'm left, pensively feeling the end of my toes,purely by my subconscious..at times the discovery channel is the most beautiful and the most horrifying thing to watch on television...that is of course after the news..There was this thought however,I had when I read this..Man has traded in quite possibly everything,animals
"have had" the natural right to possess( teeth-skin-eyes-fur-hair-livers-blood-testicles too i guess)..I'm not sure if accessorizing can get any 'funkier'..but save us the misguided missiles..regal accessorizing indeed..
I would love to see this piece published as a feature in a large-format general interest magazine like Life used to be. I think it would attract a lot of attention, affect readers and cause them to be more thoughtful. Curtis
ReplyDeleteDo forgive the shameless product placement, which seems to have become almost a custom here. Alas hidden persuasion is not an easy vice to extirpate.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, in the interests of fairness, and without further ado, equal time for the products here on view:
Viper Strike in action (with interpretive heavy metal soundtrack brought to you by the manufacturer -- a European munitions consortium)
Good Humor Ice Cream Truck (including demonstration of compact stealth model with multiple modification capacity -- and the bells ring as it rolls along!)
I think there's a typo in that Good Humor popsicle shot--it should read "Dubl Styx," should it not?
ReplyDeleteIf advertising is the engineering of desire, then human beings are awfully confused about what they want. Could it be, Tom, that the damage you speak of, collateral and otherwise, was done long before we ever launched a missile? We watch death descending at high velocity and don’t notice that it’s our own minds being shredded. Everything in the foreground of that last photo says over, but the mountains in the distance say not yet.
ReplyDeleteThat bottom shot by Jody Miller says an awful lot. That's Owens Valley. A dust storm raging over the foothills of the ghostly mountains beyond.
ReplyDeleteAnd the top shot by Austin Granger, a meditation upon America. A miracle of composition, dense with compressed information. The airport concessions rack, with those cute skull masks, Chinese in origin and made of that truly scary gooey-stretchy rubber that disintegrates into sugar candy, and yes, talking of artificial sweeteners, the Good Humor freezer (possibly also filled with skulls)... separated by that monolithic-looking black column (bearing a certain resemblance to The Slab in 2001) from the large advert for the firm that employs 30,000 folk in Huntsville, crafting the lethal weapons that will be sold for the ultimate profit of megatech munitions and aerospace firms from Old Europe... think Airbus.
Always something like a miracle when a photo lays it out in one frame. Thank goodness there are still people who look about them.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when a "smart" weapon turns human beings into "bug splat"
ReplyDelete