A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it.
When the camera shutter blinked inside a jail in downtown Atlanta on Thursday, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunk drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second.
