American History X An Exercise Essay

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Vinyard's allegiance to the swastika is an allegiance to an idea that the America of today is perhaps not as equal, peaceful or harmonious as the average American would like to believe. The image is a shattering of the idea that the past was terrible, but the present is better. Rather, Vinyard's right hand pressed against his swastika-inscribed heart both repels and evokes revulsion. Iconic photographs stir a sense of nationalism and pride "they also illustrate the ways that visual communication can underwrite polity by providing resources for thought and feeling that are necessary for constituting people as citizens and motivating identification with and participation in specific forms of collective life" (Hariman & Lucaites, 2002). An iconic photograph can invoke a sense of inspiration and a commitment to collective ideals, and a sense of history, perhaps bloody and unjust a one time, but now reformed, improved and all together better. While it's true as Wrange points out, "Man's conscious declarations of thought are embodied in a mosaic of documents, in constitutions and laws, literature and song, scientific treatises and folklore, in lectures, sermons and speeches" (1947), iconic photographs are also forms of collective declarations of thought.

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Just as Neil Armstrong declared that it was one small step for man and one giant step for mankind, the image of Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon encapsulates this idea with just as much articulation.

The images of American History X do not allow such illusions to subsist. Not even when Derek Vinyard, free from jail and firmly reformed is the spectator allowed a sense of hope a sense of "that was the past and now it's over"; that is the moment when the viewer is left with the image of a shot, bloodied and killed instantly Danny Vinyard. As iconic photographs nudge the viewers to an idea of a heroic narrative of American history, the images of American History X forbid such associations to exist. Instead, it beckons and initiates the viewer to visit the dark underbelly of neo-Nazism in present-day America, a culture of violence and hate......

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