The New Yorker:

The city has often been spoken about as a war zone in need of saving from itself. But at home, as abroad, America’s enemies are so often of American invention.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

Urban photography rewards amateurs. Whatever grandeur is lost in overexposure or an obvious angle is compensated for by lookie-loo enthusiasm, which charms locals on par with tourists. This is true of any beloved city, but since I live in Chicago my relevant example is Chicago, the Windy City, on a sea-size lake, with a skyline appreciable from a human vantage.

The city’s image has been on the city’s mind recently, as President Donald Trump acts on his threat to occupy it. Two hundred National Guard members lumbered in from Texas last month. iceagents wriggle daily from their hidey-hole in the suburb of Broadview to terrorize and kidnap residents. The rhetoric justifying their presence and exonerating their violence is loud and unoriginal, echoing the way Chicago has long been spoken about, when it is spoken about, as a war zone in need of saving from itself. That imagined state of affairs, of course, relies upon a certain ignorance of (or disregard for) how the world’s war zones came to be, and where the United States features in their conflagration.

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