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. ICE agents 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.

As if to demonstrate this, Trump, in September, posted an image to social media casting himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the avatar of sanctioned bloodlust from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” In the accompanying text, Trump had altered Kilgore’s famous line—“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”—to suit his fantasy, replacing “napalm” with “deportations.” (He also supplied a new theatrical title: “Chipocalypse Now.”) The shoddy edit shows a fleet of Huey helicopters flying past the unmistakable skyline; the sky, meanwhile, is yellowed by explosions. This is Chicago as your average Fox viewer, including millions who live beyond the city’s limits in what Illinoisans call Chicagoland, imagines it—our lake as a lake of fire.

That the mayhem would be of outside, rather than of local, origin is in keeping with the image’s source material. I am thinking of a scene from “Apocalypse Now Redux,” the director’s cut, released in 2001, in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard and crew come upon what remains of a plantation occupied by holdover French colonists and their Vietnamese waitstaff. Over a fine dinner, the Frenchmen grind their axe against their American guests, whose nation they blame for creating the evictors whom the U.S. then tasked itself with defeating. That history, though as biased as its Francophone source, imparts a truer, universal lesson: America’s enemies are so usually of American invention.

As late summer saw the White House further embellish its pretext for invading Chicago, a cheeky homegrown joke was making the rounds online. Those on the ground shared visual dispatches from the city’s “killing fields”: the greenery of Lincoln Park, captioned “Chaos & Anarchy”; the lake’s turquoise-meets-cerulean horizon as seen from the “war-torn” city’s eighteen and a half miles of waterfront trail. Short videos laid the President’s sound bites over montages filled with boat parties and outdoor concerts and drone shot after drone shot of the handsome skyline. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, got in on the gag, “reporting from war-torn Chicago” wearing army-green body armor in a segment that aired on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “As you can see, there’s utter mayhem and chaos on the ground,” Pritzker shouts from the heart of downtown, as people go about their business on the La Salle Street bridge behind him.

The taunt—a tack—isn’t new, only reinvigorated under the current regime. Assuaging the anxieties of folks who are not from around here is a rite of passage among Chicagoans who did not grow up here. The moniker “Chiraq,” for instance, is made risible by the many picturesque scenes from the riverfront and the West Loop restaurant scene found in “day in the life” vlogs, which like to display the city as a last American bastion for yuppies without inherited wealth. (The best parody of this genre, created by the comedian Mike Schwanke, shows a “weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” as an interminable cycle of prosaic hangs—brunch, happy hour, dinner, repeat.) Whereas New York arrivistes romanticize difficulty, Chicago transplants humbly take pride in ease. Chicago, in our image, is well managed and ripe for play. It’s serene and safe enough, if an outsider is asking—benign.

Can we chide this well-meaning posture without tripping into the usual slippery claims about authenticity—that what’s genuine about a city isn’t found near its famous landmarks, or that life must be difficult to be real? Maybe we laugh, as the Chicago poet Britteney Black Rose Kapri did in a video over the summer: “I know them motherfuckers ain’t never been south of fucking Hyde Park and that’s just because the university is there. West? Baby, O’Hare. Like, I get it, but it’s just also so fucking funny.” I get it, too: the sociology behind what gets counted as violence in Chicago, and why that violence is visited upon some areas and not others, is incompatible with peacocking of this sort—and, anyway, nuance hasn’t ever meant much to conservatives, either within or outside the city, except insofar as any violence can justify policies that prolong inequality. But I don’t expect that their feathers are much ruffled by the pleasant images meant to combat their histrionics. Those images of the city, soothing in their homogeneity, seem to assume that any defense against fascist occupation must assume the grammar of tourism. They call to mind what the author and activist Sarah Schulman has described as “spiritual gentrification,” a way of looking which replaces “complexity, difference” with “sameness.” They are harmonious with a conservative outlook that would have no problem transforming the city into a playground for those who can afford it. That is the reactionary dream for any city, the city as the suburbs—whose pastoral image, by the way, is its own illusion. Chicago is beautiful, but pastoral? Ha!

Pastoral is the pretext. Reaganite conservatism accomplished its mission of reimagining the exemplary American citizen within the “Dick and Jane” fantasy of the American family. Today, that family is the lingua franca of politics: liberal and conservative politicians alike articulate policy in terms of what it will or won’t do for “American families,” as if looking out upon a sea called “America,” populated by so many private islands. Even as the “American Dream” has been leached of its credibility by blatant inequality, we can’t shake its logic of individualist striving, whereby, as the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant put it, “if you invest your energies in work and family-making, the nation will secure the broader social and economic conditions in which your labor can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity.”

That’s “you” and “your,” crucially, not “we” and “our.” The exemplary citizen, the thinking goes, seeks signs of public good in private places—and especially in that heralded place of privacy in America, the family home. The exemplary citizen is discouraged from identifying with the sort of masses who demand that their government do things for people en masse; such organizing of multitudes menaces the tranquil familial portrait by which the citizen understands himself. In his quest for an American life well lived, he should excuse contradictory state behaviors—for instance, that health care will not be a universal given but that bodies should be monitored and punished under the law when they endanger the picket-fence ideal.

Examples abound in this nation of ours, but the mere existence of something called the Department of Homeland Security—the recipient of heaps of money to monitor, detain, maim, and kill people who live here in the name of public safety—is one place to look. Since January, D.H.S. propaganda, broadcast on social-media platforms such as Instagram and X, has adopted the President’s characteristic penchant for shitposting and slop. The department has been releasing “Cops”-style clips of ICE seizures, doxing citizens, and memeing with the sweaty intimacy of a corporate account. A post from July shows a Chevy Silverado wrapped in Border Patrol branding, parked to appear as though its passengers were staring wistfully upon the open desert at the golden hour. “ ‘You Look Happier,’ ” an observer imagined in the text says. The response: “Thanks! ICE is deporting all criminal illegal aliens & there is no crisis at the border.” Another post describes a “one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation,” beside footage of a chain gang being forced onto a plane. A piece in The Drift by the writer Mitch Therieau has given such messages the apt name “agit-slop.” On the video of the chain gang, one commenter remarks, “I thought this was a meme account at first.” Another is left to point out, “THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS WITH FAMILIES JUST LIKE YOU!!!!!”

D.H.S., appointed in 2003 as the nation’s protector, speaks the lingua franca of the American family, but we surely have an idea of which families it means. Live-action promos are interspersed with illustrated notices defining who represents America: white-and-rosy personifications show Lady Columbia and her patriarch, Uncle Sam, respectively beckoning and commanding their men, in the old recruitment style, to “Defend the Homeland” and “JOIN ICE NOW.” (As in any case when masculinity is made a fetish, the muscular patriotism in these virtual posters exudes a certain homoeroticism: in August, D.H.S. bragged about “taking father/son bonding to a whole new level” and attached an illustration of an older and younger man shoulder to shoulder, armed to the teeth, above the words “NO AGE CAP.” Father and Son or Daddy and Boy?) These adverts sit alongside screenshots of art works by the likes of Howard Chandler Christy, Norman Rockwell, John Gast, and Morgan Weistling, artists united in the ideological availability of their imagery: peach-tinged children and adults having what appears to be a pleasant time living the American Dream. One 2020 painting by Weistling transposes the Holy Family into a covered wagon, the land’s expanse unfurling outside; another, from 2013, by the Missouri-based illustrator Andy Thomas, shows a crop of boys chasing a pigskin in a back yard dense with autumn color. The curation is unsubtle in its inclusions and exclusions, manifesting a white Christian nation with a nakedness that almost repels any critique—for what sort of person, what sort of American, could find issue with such idylls?

One painting by Thomas Kinkade struck some as especially emblematic, and perhaps even too on the nose. On July 1st, D.H.S. posted a painting of Kinkade’s called “Morning Pledge,” which depicts an American street from somewhere in the past as two pale boys with book bags make their way toward a schoolhouse with its Old Glory raised high. The work is a typical Kinkade, dreamy and pastel, with buildings lit by an eerie fire from within. The artist, a self-described crusader for “family and God and country and beauty,” admitted to painting “not the world we live in” but “the world we wished we lived in,” an aesthetic that proved compelling enough to the American public to make him the most commercially successful painter of the nineties. What his customers were buying was contrived in more ways than one: the works were not paintings, usually, but assembly-line reproductions made to emulate a human touch. In a 2001 profile of Kinkade, my colleague Susan Orlean toured his production site and witnessed “a crew of Hispanic workers peel images off wet paper and smooth them onto canvases, then slide them onto racks like pies set out to cool.” But it was Kinkade’s personal life, shadowed by allegations of sexual harassment and assault, that soured his reputation in the end; as a 2006 investigation by the Los Angeles Times put it, his history of alleged misdeeds “belies the wholesome image on which he’s built his empire.” How shocked one is by that contradiction depends upon how much truth one granted his scenes to begin with.

For those who define “family” in legislative, executive, and judicial terms, it is as exclusionary a concept as manifest destiny. When former President Barack Obama referred to “Israeli families” but to “the people of Gaza,” as he did in early October, he was, unwittingly or not (and I have my guess), excepting Palestinians from a sympathetic category in lockstep with U.S. policy. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, recently taunted Vice-President J. D. Vance for enjoying a family vacation while ICE was tearing families apart, but this rhetoric can shame only a target who believes that families can exist outside the law. Conservatives believe no such thing. (“Had a great time, thanks,” Vance responded.) In September, an ICE officer shot and killed a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. D.H.S. has claimed that Villegas González had attempted to flee, causing “serious” injuries to an ICE agent in the process, but there is no footage to corroborate their claim, and the agent in question later described his own wounds as “nothing major.” Villegas González was reportedly killed after dropping his two young sons off at school. He is not, however, the sort of person whom our politicians relish calling a family man. Not two weeks after his killing, D.H.S. released a statement decrying alleged “violence and dehumanization” toward its agents: “The men and women of ICE are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters,” the department said, cloaking its inhumane mission in the righteousness of domesticity. The big fat lie, though, is that the image of the all-American family, which is maintained at the expense of the rest of the world, will protect those within it. In reality, the American family is not a safe place in America, and everyone knows it. The family firearm raises the chance that a family member will die by gunfire. The family S.U.V. has a good chance of killing kids. The family man is, with grim frequency, the greatest threat to the health and safety of his wife and children. The American family tucks its violence away. Trump, boasting last month, without evidence, that his unleashing of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., had reduced crime to “virtually nothing,” complained that “things that take place in the home” might count as criminal activity: “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,” he said. Leaving all that aside, he added, “We are a safe city.”

In almost no time, videos of Chicago life posted in poor taste have been made obsolete by other sensational scenes from the city. An apartment building raided in South Shore; a family grabbed in Millennium Park; tear gas deployed in Lake View; a teen girl body-slammed in the suburbs. An elementary school near my home went on “soft lockdown” last week, the euphemism all the scarier for trying to sound less severe. Every school in every neighborhood is officially or unofficially bracing itself daily, given ICE’s predilection for school grounds. One parent told ABC News, “The kids aren’t playing outside because there’s been a huge amount of ICE presence in the neighborhood, just driving up and down the streets, just kind of terrorizing the neighborhood.” The sky fills with the noise of helicopters. I leave the house and listen for other unusual sounds, for whistles and for honks that seem too insistent or too long—the same sounds of locals warning locals which one hears in videos of masked men given license to abduct and kill. There is a certain irony in seeing the paranoid vigilance of neighborhood watch replicated now toward reverse ends. Open an online forum for Chicagoans and you’ll find debates over the threshold between doing enough and doing too much under the gaze of a federal government that is eager for reasons to rain war upon its citizens; Kristi Noem, after all, has said that D.H.S. plans to buy up local real estate and plant snipers on the roofs of its buildings. At present, we are called to cause a cacophony, not as members of our respective nuclear units but as something older and hardier—as community, a term that has become too ubiquitous to take seriously, but which nevertheless still exists. The cacophony warns and witnesses. On some days this suffices as a show of strength. ♦