The folksy charm of some Tea Party events belies a seething fury

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Political Rhetoric in Black and White
By Matt McCann, November 8, 2013

Even in these ferociously partisan times, Mark Peterson finds it staggering how the national conversation about politics has gone so over the top. Fervid comparisons to Nazis, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, totalitarianism, communism, Muslim extremism and terrorism are tossed around so casually that the words seem to lose their edge; the history becomes fuzzy.

But politics is theater, so when Mr. Peterson was photographing the recent podium-thumping surrounding the Affordable Care Act’s messy debut and the government shutdown that preceded it, he hoped to restore some of the theatrics — and meaning — visually.

“On both sides the rhetoric is very heated,” said Mr. Peterson, 58. “But I think there’s certain words being used on one side, and I’m trying to show in the pictures what those words really are.”

In one photo, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is at a fund-raising dinner, cast in light that makes him look maniacal. In another, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas resembles Charles Foster Kane or Joe McCarthy, eerie and out of time. During a “hijacked” veterans’ rally on Oct. 13, a glimpse of Sarah Palin’s tonsils.

Mr. Peterson, a photojournalist who has covered politics since Walter Mondale’s 1984 bid for the White House, used his iPhone to hyper-process these pictures, as part of a project he works on between assignments for his various clients. In conversation, Mr. Peterson is soft-spoken and modest. He doesn’t see himself as extraordinarily partisan — and like 84 percent of Americans, he disapproves of the behavior of Congress, which is in recess until Tuesday.

He just confines his sharp-edged opinions within the borders of his frames.

“Personally, I’m very frustrated with the political system we’re in, and that things seem to be like a soccer game — like a kid’s soccer game,” Mr. Peterson said. He said he is not singling out Republicans, but that the bulk of the images taken before and during the two-week government shutdown in October captured the dysfunction and vitriol that was largely coming from one side. Nevertheless, it takes two heads to butt, and though the government may enter the game with its eye on the ball, he said, as soon the ball moves, everyone scatters and nothing changes.

Of course, the commentariat will point a million outraged fingers at how and why we got into this intractable mess, but one change that Mr. Peterson has noticed over the years is how the anger seems to have calcified. He said the folksy charm of some Tea Party events he has attended recently belies a seething fury.

“There’s like your grandma and grandpa sitting in a lawn chair and you talk to them, and they’re very nice and everything’s good,” he said. “Then Ted Cruz or another speaker, Sarah Palin, gets up and speaks and all of a sudden this person is standing up from their lawn chair just screaming, you know, ‘Socialist!’ And suddenly your grandmother is so angry it’s scary — you’re worried for her.”

That’s part of what’s different — it seems that for him, nearly all expressions of political belief are suffused with anger. It permeates the culture, spreading from the fringe, and the result is not the appearance of hope, but disgust and fear on both sides. “You used to see that anger in a marginal politician like David Duke,” the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who served in the Louisiana State Legislature in the early ’90s. “You’d see that in his audience but now you see that in the mainstream audience.”

Although maybe it’s not cultural — maybe it’s tactical. If Congress is a Greek chorus, perhaps an ambitious individual, with hemlock in his spittle, is just doing what it takes to get attention. “When you look at somebody like Ted Cruz, he’s a very mild-mannered-looking person, a very average person — you have to search for him in a crowd,” Mr. Peterson said.

He paraphrased a speech delivered by Mr. Cruz, who told the attendees of a gala hosted by the Family Foundation in Richmond, Va., that he didn’t want his grandchildren to wonder, “What is freedom?”

“That’s an incredible statement to make and it’s an incredible visual thing to think of,” Mr. Peterson said. “You know, this guy sitting there having to answer to his grandchildren that he, he’s the one who stopped fighting for freedom. But then you look at him and he’s a very normal-looking guy, he doesn’t look like somebody who’s going to charge up a hill, you know, leading a revolution.”
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