Button-Down Protest
Man in Suit Changes the Face of Revolution

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007

From the annals of public ire, a new image, a man in a suit, throwing something at police, surrounded by clouds of tear gas. It is an image of revolution, a lawyer dressed in the usual business uniform, participating in angry street protests against Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf. Similar images of protesting lawyers in Lahore ran in both The Washington Post and the New York Times.

Men in suits don't throw things. If they confront police, they do it politely, in letters, in words spoken softly, reasonably, between reasonable men. Brooks Brothers doesn't tailor the revolution.

If you begin with this assumption, the photographs take on a surreal quality, a dreamlike strangeness. And this is precisely their appeal and their danger. As the power of the United States wanes, as the events of the world proceed according to their own course, undirected by our will, the imagery of the world becomes increasingly strange to us. There is a tendency to choose and engage with images that present the world as incomprehensible. An incomprehensible world is dismissible and disownable. Let this chaos sit, indigestible, on the horizons of our attention.

Images of political strife fall into two basic categories. There are crowd images, which emphasize the magnitude and collectivity of the sentiment; and images of individuals, which emphasize the personal drama of the events. Very often, in American magazines and newspapers, both categories of images amount to the same thing: a study in anger without context. Crowds seethe with terrifying and inexplicable rage. Individual faces are distorted by anger into masks that don't always seem human.

Man in Suit confounds the usual revolution images. In one photograph he is wearing glasses, his jacket is buttoned, he has something pinned to his lapel, and his cuffs peek out from his sleeves. These details make him an individual, even as a crowd is barely visible through the haze behind him. That individuality puts his anger on a different plane, it requires an interrogation of the image that we might not otherwise make.

He is in a suit because he is a lawyer, he is in the newspaper because it is Pakistan's lawyers who have taken the vanguard of protest against Musharraf's suspension of the constitution, his roundup and incarceration of opponents, his firing of Supreme Court judges. It would be comforting to dismiss the image this way: If lawyers are running the revolution, how bad can it get?

But bad news is not kept at bay so easily. To that effort to dismiss the image, the image answers back: If lawyers are this angry, then the trouble is serious.

And indeed, the trouble is very serious. The United States has backed a dictator, while proclaiming democracy our loftiest goal. Within Pakistan, moderates and democracy advocates and much of the professional, educated class have been marginalized, while the United States has poured money into Musharraf's regime -- now exposed as nakedly ambitious, corrupt and banal, in the manner of authoritarians everywhere. Meanwhile, a cache of nuclear bombs sits in a country in turmoil, a country that very likely harbors our No. 1 enemy.

The people Musharraf has cut out of the political process are now making their anger known. In the image that ran in this paper, Man in Suit was captured from the front, seemingly directing whatever projectile has just left his hand at the camera. At us. The image that ran in the New York Times was stronger visually -- the man throws something out of the frame of the picture, at war with something unseen, like fate -- but less complex in its potential readings. The most important thing about images of anger is that one knows who is angry, at whom and why. Generic anger -- seething crowds, faceless stone-throwers -- can be poetic, but is rarely useful for understanding the world.

Man in Suit also raises the question of power and uniforms. Does power wear a suit, or military regalia? Musharraf, over the years, has appeared in both. Standing behind President Bush, smiling and laughing with him, at a White House meeting in 2002, Musharraf opted for a suit, a blue one with a maroon tie.

"President Musharraf is a leader with great courage and vision," said Bush.

But Musharraf is as familiar in a military outfit as he is in a suit, and it is Musharraf's ambition to exchange the uniform for a suit that has brought Pakistan to its current crisis. The Man in Suit in yesterday's newspapers was throwing something at another Man in Suit, who knows one thing clearly: Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.