Upward Mobility: contact with celebrity affects everyone – whether it has electoral effect is questionable, Bubba’s handshake with JFK or John David Chapman come to mind, but iconographic and iconological meaning is important, like visits to Lourdes or Lenin’s tomb.In the case of Trump, WaPo has decided to give us a glimpse of the analytic, just like the paparazzi do for TMZ. And someone getting their child to receive an ex-germophobe’s touch could be miraculous. In Mariological image analysis, the study of details and to excavate their sedimented meaning is probably less useful for any Zapruder use of mass media and more like Trotsky’s icepick at Diego Rivera’s house.

The arm next to the woman in the pink hat

I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out whose arm that is. I never could.

UPDATE 2:46 pm: Mark Wallheiser,the photographer who started all of this, just called me. The arm in question belongs to the lady holding the sign. HUGE!

The most substantial damage to The Pietà (1498–1499) by Michelangelo Buonarroti occurred on May 21, 1972 (Pentecost Sunday) when a mentally disturbed geologist named Laszlo Toth walked into the chapel and attacked the sculpture with a geologist’s hammer while shouting “I am Jesus Christ, I have risen from the dead!” With fifteen blows he removed Mary’s arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids. Onlookers took many of the pieces of marble that flew off. Later, some pieces were returned, but many were not, including Mary’s nose, which had to be reconstructed from a block cut out of her back.

A woman says she found Donald Trump’s face in her butter. http://t.co/… (GIF courtesy of @pbump) pic.twitter.com/CV8bjgvL1c

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 24, 2015