Image failure

Irritated this morning by failing to find a caption for this picture in yesterday's Guardian, in the two page spread about the attack in Charlottesville. We have what appears to be a middle aged white civilian in full combat costume, complete with what I take to be a very real combat rifle. Not the sort of thing one wants in one's streets.

So I thought I would see what google image search would make of it. First, I clipped the whole figure, which google announced was a soldier, but failed to source or identify this particular one. Second, I clipped just the head, which google announced was a human, coming up with various vaguely similar bearded humans. Third, I tried and failed to find a better quality version of the image on the Guardian web site.

All of which goes to show that google while powerful, is not yet all powerful. Maybe if it allowed me to combine the image search with key words like 'white supremacist'?

PS: also saddened rather than irritated by the current fashion for tearing down from public places long established statutes of people of whom we no longer approve for one reason or another. The god of war, Attila the Hun or Caligula, yes, but some lesser villain from the middle of the nineteenth century, no. While just irritated by the current but countervailing fashion for putting up expensive new public memorials to lesser heroes (or groups of heroes) from the second world war. From where I associate to all the statues of saints in the niches of Ely Cathedral, smashed up or at least defaced in an earlier fit of communal intolerance. Or were they just young drunks, out to have a pop at the establishment of the day?

PPS: quite by chance, the following morning, I turn up another version the same picture in the second part of the Guardian, the part mainly dedicated to its lady readership. Here we do have a caption, which tells us that the middle aged white man is indeed a member of a far right militia, who turned out for the rally at Charlottesville.