Local Theater: Counterinsurgency and Biopower in California

December 7, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The compassionate conservatism and faith-based initiatives proffered by George W. Bush as replacements for social programs seemed never to have appeared. But now they have, in Salinas, California. The current counterinsurgency operation there shows that the military is our only institution that works.

During the the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines — universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower.” — Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

Amidst the din of competing needs that make up domestic politics in America it can be difficult to determine the best course of action. Will taking “entitlements” away from the poor encourage growth and promote prosperity, or would it be better to simply lower taxes on the rich? The worst part is that no matter which path is chosen there will be doubters. It is much easier to find consensus in foreign adventures: nothing removes doubt and silences dissent better than the discovery of a “good” war.

America has fought more good wars than any nation in the world. If we cannot figure out what to do about health care or the environment, our virtue is preeminent when it comes to wars. A week after hundreds of marines were killed in the Beirut Barracks bombing, and America turned tail, Reagan sent other marines to bring the sonorous ring of freedom to Granada’s reddening sands. The first George Bush did well for himself in driving Manuel Noriega from Panama and Iraq from Kuwait. Bill Clinton, for his part, fought ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and enforced the no-fly zone over Iraq with weekly or monthly attacks. Surpassing all these in the justness of his vision was the second George Bush who was able to discover and prosecute two just wars on a scale much greater than anybody since Lyndon Johnson avenged the cowardly Gulf of Tonkin attack. Read the rest of this entry »

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Formlessness Meets Functionlessness: Stefan Ulrich’s Real Doll For The Creative Class

November 19, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The creative class are alienated not at the political, the economic or the social but at the most basic human level because they have chosen to be so in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success. German designer Stefan Ulrich aims to remedy this alienation with Funktionide.

According to the ancient poets there was once a King of Cyprus who commissioned a statue so beautiful that he managed to fall in love with it. Embracing the silent marble and lavishing kisses upon it, the king was able to imagine that it, in turn, loved him. When Shaw revisited the story of Pygmalion, marble was replaced with a far rawer material, an unrefined cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In Shaw’s play, Henry Higgins manages to fashion her into a woman of beauty and refinement.

For the Greeks it was a story about projection and the power that our creations come to have over us, but Shaw made it into a story about class and human relations. In the present day, when the objects that we possess seem to possess us, it seems that the earlier version of the myth has a greater resonance. No matter how much effort we put into molding our Eliza Doolittles, at some point, they will always be able to say “no.” Far better, then, to turn our attentions, and our affections, toward objects. Read the rest of this entry »

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Funny Games: Flash Mobs, Lynch Mobs and the “Human Flesh Search” Engine

November 5, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The social-networking technologies that promise to create connection and community are equally suited to the production of violence, coercion and repression. The flash mob, a seemingly benign social experiment, can easily become a lynch mob.

Conan: The riddle … of steel.

Thulsa Doom: Yes! You know what it is, don’t you boy? Shall I tell you? It’s the least I can do. Steel isn’t strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks; a beautiful girl. Come to me, my child [coaxes the girl to jump to her death]. That is strength, boy! That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart, I gave you this! Such a waste. Contemplate this on the tree of woe. Crucify him!

– Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Its day now past, steel no longer holds many mysteries. Updated for our times, Conan’s riddle would find steel replaced with silicon. But the answer is unchanging: flesh is stronger than silicon. Still, we to our eternal folly fail to learn the lesson and, like the barbarian / future governor of California, find ourselves in a Tree-of-Woe time-out.

The technological and digital revolution ballyhooed by Boing Boing, Wired and an ever growing throng of “futurists” has come to seem as though it were the result of technology’s actions upon us. The prose is always breathless: the computer in all its forms, and the ongoing liberation of information are changing us rapidly and irrevocably. The new possibilities are unlimited, freedom is on the march, and the new world will allow degrees of individual liberty never before imagined. Technology promises to do what politics, religion, labor and colonial armies could not. History will end, bringing with it peace and the end of all our toils.

Technology, which is the product of human labor and social relations, assumes a phantom objectivity that conceals the fundamental nature of technology so that technology seems to be acting upon humans rather than the reverse. The manifold wonders that seem to come out of the ether to change the structures of our thought and the patterns of social order are actually the products of human hands and brains. Through reification, these products take on a mysterious existance of their own and relations between people become relations between software and gadgetry. The result is that technology begins to seem an essential and indispensable aspect of human life, and we view our own lives and human relationships as dependent upon technology. As this process advances, technology becomes the natural order of things, and technologies that should be optional become required for the bare maintenance of social life. We begin to think that our gadgets “make” us, rather than the reverse. In short, our various technologies, which are contingent upon human work, make the human seem contingent. Read the rest of this entry »

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Two Cheers for Technocracy: Social Media and Information Liberation

November 2, 2009 — Henry Brulard

If for G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx the end of History is humanity’s emancipation, for economist Tyler Cowen, it’s information’s — even if it means enthralling human culture to realize it.

Everybody and Nobody

Susan: I wish we could afford a place in the Hamptons. Everybody who’s anybody has one.
Hobie: Yeah, but if you’re somebody who’s nobody, it’s no fun to be around anybody who’s everybody.

– Melinda and Melinda

I hear the word “everybody” a lot, even if it is only implied. Whenever there is discussion of what technologies “we” will be using five years from now, or what effects technology has on “us,” we are talking about everybody. I consider myself fortunate to be an everybody. If everybody is on MySpace, so am I. If they move to Facebook, I follow. Technology replaces technology, the new becomes old and the old recedes in the face of the new. This is the world now. We blog and we twitter, and when Google unleashes the “Wave,” we will probably be swept away by that too, unless and until something else comes along. We will all, also, do whatever comes after that, and after that.

If we occasionally argue or resist, it is only in marginal ways. We look for shortcomings in the new technologies or ways to improve the “app,” to make it more killer. It would meet our needs better if it did this or did that. We ponder whether twitter is here to stay, or how long a certain program can possibly remain state of the art.

Sometimes, turning inwards just so much, we discuss what all this is doing, or might be doing to us. Perhaps we think of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and wonder if it is possible that certain things — thoughts, feelings, ideas — are incapable of being communicated or expressed through these new media. And where will such things go? Is it possible for thoughts, feelings, or emotions to just disappear, to cease to exist? Whatever our qualms or reservations, and no matter how principled we may be in them, we never stop. Read the rest of this entry »

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An Ever-Living Fire: All Things Change Until Nothing Remains

October 27, 2009 — Henry Brulard

It is always vindicating to hear the flush and to watch the old, the moribund, the bloated, sink and spin away forever into the dark, distant sewer of history. But sometimes it is worthwhile to look up and notice just who or what is holding down the handle. Or at least that used to be the case. At one time historical events seemed to have causes, whether in the form of great men like Napoleon, Stalin, or Reagan, or as well-defined forces such as class conflict, imperialistic urges, or unfettered greed.

But now it often seems as if the handle is simply flushing itself, over and over again.

If American banks, universities and newspapers are failing, it is merely the result of an ill defined “progress,” a force out of our, or anybody’s, control. For now, at least, we seem to require the continued existence of the banks and universities, but the newspaper, a nuisance that once left our fingers smeared with disgusting black ink, is a different story altogether. Though the failures of particular large-circulation newspapers have often been the avoidable result of poor management decisions, the institution as a whole seems to be doomed.

Earlier this year Clay Shirky, NYU Professor and Futurist (though not F. T. Marinetti’s sort) explained why (more recently, Shirky has reaffirmed his views of the newspaper’s inevitable fate) that was so: complacent in its monopolistic excess, the newspapers find themselves unable to mount any defense to the drastic deleveraging of information made possible by humming hordes of air-cooled server banks. And so, the general, large circulation newspaper, formerly a civic institution, has been doomed by an outdated economic model and become a modern impossibility. As Shirky has it, not only is the newspaper’s fate foretold, but we should not even try to save it:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

So this is what real revolutions are like. Of course, unlike the protestant reformation or other past revolutions, the never-ending information revolution does not involve an ideological or social struggle, but the important project of liberating information from its chains. Change comes, and it will continue to come. Shirky seems to have forgotten the omelet from Lenin’s old adage: it is enough now to simply break some eggs.

Just poo-poo it: technophobes foul fair future prospects.

For Shirky, the only possible response to change is a certain amount of damage control. We should round up the innocent and shepherd them out of the building, so that we may better enjoy our view of the inferno. Never mind who started the fire, or whether it can or should be stopped. Those who question change are motivated either by fear, naivete, or, even worse, self-interest. They are the real villains.

Nicholas Carr, perplexed by Shirky’s bizarre history lesson, and his refusal to predict what would succeed the newspaper presented a thoughtful analysis of what he termed Shirky’s “accidentalism” earlier this month:

Accidentalism is a theory of convenience. It is, it seems to me, a fantasy version of history conjured up to support a popular and largely faith-based ideology, an ideology built on the belief that our new digital media landscape represents a great human advance over all that’s come before. Accidentalism provides an easy way to denigrate and dismiss the past: Oh, our poor, benighted forebears: they never even realized that all they held dear was merely accidental. “Accident,” I hardly need point out, is a word with negative connotations. Those to whom accidents happen are victims. Every time we pick up a printed book or newspaper, the Accidentalists imply, we turn ourselves into victims of technological accidents.

Accidentalism, in other words. provides the perfect backdrop for the liberation mythology promoted by many of the web’s most ardent proponents, which is built on the idea that old technology put us in chains and new technology is breaking those chains. In order to underscore (and place beyond debate) the societal and personal benefits of the web, they feel compelled to paint a weirdly dark caricature of the past, portraying those human beings who had the misfortune to live before, say, 1990 as passive and enervated, victims of an (accidental!) media complex that circumscribed and diminished their lives and thoughts. One need not be a fan of old-school mass media to see that this picture is a clumsily rendered fake.

Carr’s analysis seems to be on the money. Accidentalism as posited by Shirky seems to be little more than an alibi for a destructive deference to progress and technology. If all past technologies have been an accident, there is little or nothing that we can do to shape the future. The future itself begins to seem like a car accident that we will witness during tomorrow’s commute. Our job in such circumstances is not to attempt to understand it or try to change it, but to, as the saying goes, “deal.” Now that the former revolutions which held the promise of some greater good have given way to a state of permanent revolution for its own sake, we must “deal” with that too.

I would give Carr’s critique a broader scope. There is nothing new or revolutionary in Shirky’s view of history as calamity and accident. Indeed, George Orwell noted a similar strain of thought sixty years ago:

There is a theory which has not yet been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last. One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret police forces and so forth, because these are the price that has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even imperceptible. If you object to dictatorship you are a reactionary, but if you expect dictatorship to produce good results you are a sentimentalist.

In Orwell’s day, Progress came with the promise of liberation and revelation. Whether it was secular or divine, history seemed to have a purpose. The catastrophic gradualists of Orwell’s day — Orwell was critiquing an essay by Arthur Koestler — claimed that the hardship and disaster of Stalin’s purges and the atom bomb were merely unavoidable stops on the way to a better future.

We have since demystified history, carefully taking if from the hands of god or the proletariat to rest it safely in the bosom of religio-scientific “market forces.” But in the process history began to seem not more rational, but less so. The old teleological history that had as its perceived goal redemption or liberation, is replaced by a version of history that allows only for more of the same. The market is somehow larger and more mysterious than God, the Proletariat, or even progress. And what are we, or any individual, compared to the market? Subsumed into it universal and all-encompassing will, we are merely data points. Occasionally, through stock ownership or consumer purchases, we get to take part in its mysteries, but never too great a part.

The catastrophe that Shirky is defending is nothing so terrible or bloody as Stalinist purges or the growth of nuclear arsenals. But Shirky has also abandoned any prospect of good coming from this change. Though we never know quite why, we must struggle always forward. Shirky can no more look over the wings of the angel of history than you or I or the president can. And so the new form of prophecy can tell us nothing more than what Heraclitus already knew 2,500 years ago:

This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be — an ever living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. (Fragment 29)

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Trompe le Monde: Slavoj Žižek on Hipsters (a Translation)

October 21, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The following essay by Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of the French photographic journal Rhinocerotique as “L’etat d’hipster.” The original was accompanied by morgue photographs of the late Dash Snow, an American artist. Owing to copyright uncertainties and American libel laws, the photos could not be reproduced here. It was translated from the French by Henry Brulard. (Our thanks go to Jean Bricmont for calling this piece to our attention.)

A company of porcupines crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist. — Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, II. Teil, XXXI., “Gleichnisse und Parabeln” (As quoted in Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego)

The problematics of analyzing “hipster” were recently affirmed in an account of  n+1 Magazine’s symposium, “What was the Hipster?” related by Rob Horning. Though the facts of this bizarre event are, by now, well known to all, I must relate the essential details: When n+1 failed to deliver the symposium’s promises of either an exuberantly carnivalesque King Kong-like display of the hipster in chains (the hipster as un-Prometheus) or a phallogocentric explication of the hipster phenomenon, the gathered multitudes rioted, pointing accusatory fingers at n+1 and each other. The denunciations were as total as they were swift, and were larded with all the bombast and caricature of a show trial.

Indeed, the event was reminiscent of a tactic used by the American police apparatus to entrap those with outstanding warrants: the offender receives a card in the mail telling him that he has won a big-screen tv or similar “big-boy toy” and that he must pick it up at a certain location. When he arrives to redeem his prize at the appointed time and place, he his promptly handcuffed, placed in a paddy wagon, and delivered in carcerem (of course his actual incarceration, as we know from Foucault, was achieved by the inscription of his name upon the card). Perhaps the editors of n+1 had just such a thing in mind when they planned the event, but lost their nerve at the last moment.

In his analysis of the fiasco, Mr. Horning identified the true nature of the analytic dilemma presented by this word, “hipster,” and its cognates:

It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1‘s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth.

The nature of the beast, then, is that “hipster” is always presented as an objective phenomenon and never as a subjective stance. If there is no objective “distance” (physical or temporal) from which to analyze hipsterism, then we must look instead for a subjective one. That is, assuming the position of S over s in the Lacanian algebra, we must posit a critico-analytical stance that places itself squarely within the “taint” of hipster. This taint, as such, is felt not by the hipster—who has not yet revealed himself—but by the one capable of uttering “hipster,” as the ejective enunciation of the utterance “not me.” The analysis must therefore start from the perspective of this subject, the hipster, as the “not me” who is simultaneously embedded in the taint of hipsterism and capable of uttering the utterance “hipster.”

Before we proceed we must pause at the appearance of the “not me.” The not me is, of course, the inutterable utterance of the ungrammatical voice. As such, and this should be obvious to all, it is none other than the objet petit a, the ersatz phallus of the hipster’s mother. And this is why, through the object of the mirror, the mask of the hipster’s desire always figures hipster as the effiminate male upon whom a linguistic act of irrumatio must always already have been performed.

Read in this light, the hipster’s symbolic and pseudo-ejaculatory utterance of “hipster,” is nothing more than the original of the signal of the taint of hipster: conceived as a danger to the “scene” and the autonomous self. At this point the author’s ears, and perhaps the reader’s too, begin to burn. I am certain that you must feel the heat rising.

It should by now be obvious that the utterance “hipster” finds its analogue in the sobbing flight of the debutante who arrives at the dance only to discover that another girl is wearing an identical dress. The debutante’s double calls into question her own sense of self. In order to avoid Girardian annihilation and rejoin her self she must flee from the sight of her double. But what would it mean if the debutante had planned the entire social disaster, including the existence of her own double and her ridiculous exit, in advance? The utterance “hipster” presents us with just such a scenario.

The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body.

What the hipster, now as the S in the Lacanian algebra, finds in the taint of hipster is the terror of cooptation by the mainstream. And hipster, as the projected invention of the hipster’s own cooptation, exists as a sort of skinwalker who is able to transform individual autonomy and the authentic “scene” into lifestyles and bogus demographics. These threats to the scene and autonomy imperil and attempt to unravel the hipster’s unconscious, which is in the familiar form of the Borromean knot.

Photobucket

There's no place like sinthome: hipsters cut the Borromean Knot.

The Borromean knot, as you no doubt know, is a series of three rings that will be completely severed if any one ring is severed, resulting in psychosis. Hipster and its utterance exist as manifestations of the sinthome or “symptom,” the fourth order in Lacan’s model of the Borromean knot (see diagram). The symptom is that ring that must come into existence when the knot itself is threatened. Hipster, is that place where the real, the imaginary and the symbolic combine into one. The hipster, known only through the utterance “hipster,” is, then, the overcoming of an individual as well as a cultural psychosis, through an act of individual and group projection in the strictly Freudian sense.

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Hooked on Hedonics: Happiness as the Universal of Feeling

October 20, 2009 — Henry Brulard

There are things that money can’t buy. If this is a fact, it is one we are willing to cede only after our many strenuous — and ultimately vain — attempts to buy those very things have ended in failure, lending credence to poet Emily Dickinson’s line, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”

The diamond ring that measures out love in carat weights and “the three C’s,” is easily reduced to a monetary value. When that same diamond ring ends up in the pawnshop, however, the love that it contained has already dissipated into the ether, but its monetized value, diminished somewhat by love’s evaporation, remains to make a fool out of love. Similarly, the new car or other consumer fetish creates a happiness that can be measured by the precise diameter of our smile, only to depreciate in size and corresponding value almost as quickly as the car itself. Though we repeatedly try to monetize happiness and love, it seems that we are ill-equipped to do so.

Perhaps the point then, is to perform the project in reverse. Perhaps we can bring love and happiness into the universal genus of money if we start with the premise that happiness is a sort of universal genus of feeling. Recognizing that it belongs to a sphere that is, for now, outside of money’s scope, we can then attempt to quantify happiness until we find the true equation that will bring it within the scope of money. After all, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum holds that “every quality is merely a quantity”; the discovery that Happiness, once confused with a subjective and internal state of mind, is, then, actually an objective phenomenon subject to quantitative analysis has led to the economic sub-field of “Hedonics.”

In ”The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” scholars of happiness Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have identified a disparity in objective data that attempts to measuring men and women’s subjective happiness. It seems that despite increased equality and opportunity, women have actually become less happy over the last thirty years.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, recently took issue with Wolfers and Stevenson’s conclusions. Ehrenreich argues that the supposed happiness gap is no more real than was the missile gap which during the Cold War fueled so much anti-Soviet hysteria:

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eye. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called “ordered probit estimates” do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: “Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006, women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category.” Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Ehrenreich’s conclusion is that the study itself is a laughable affair that, whatever its authors’ intentions, now exists as an anti-feminist bludgeon. The history of feminism over the last thirty years is the unavoidable line that Wolfers and Stevenson draw between increased equality and opportunity, on the one hand, and declining happiness on the other. Wolfers and Stevenson have used the occult science of statistics as a manipulative discursive tool to tell us something that we think we already know: feminism makes women unhappy. The study is now on set to be flogged in Marcus Buckingham’s forthcoming Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. Which, as Ehrenreich points out, is designed to sell happiness to the growing hordes of dissatisfied women:

It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.

Designed to objectively measure and isolate happiness, the study will now be used to sow unhappiness and reap discord. The happiness gap may be the ultimate in capitalistic self-consumption. The state of unhappiness that is nurtured and encouraged, if not created, by consumer culture is then packaged as one more problem for the consumer culture to solve.

Adam and Eve

Mirth of a nation: hedonics seeks to measure our pleasure.

Wolfers has responded to Ehrenreich’s attack by defending his study as “simply about documenting a fact.” Wolfers then calls Ehrenreich a liar who either does not understand the study, or is purposely misrepresenting its “factual” conclusions. Wolfers has missed the larger point: Ehrenreich is not attacking his study so much as the entire field of happiness studies, especially as they regard the happiness of women:

For starters, happiness is a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend — so what am I really?

And the difficulty of understanding happiness at all seems to me to be the larger point. A cursory look at Wolfers and Stevenson’s metrics of happiness reveals that happiness can take everything into its scope. All the old emotions, anxiety, fear, melancholy, envy, anger, emptiness, are lumped, by an act of the statisticians pen, into the category of dissatisfaction. From that, satisfaction or happiness, the negative of the negative, must be posited, and its supposed appearances measured in various life “domains.” Happiness or satisfaction in each domain is then ranked on a scale of relative importance. Are the satisfactions of these different domains as fungible as hedonic studies suggests? The reporting of relative happiness seems to amount to a collection of data that records instances when the test subjects were, for lack of a better term, happier than themselves. What can this possibly tell anybody about their own life or that of another?

Questions on the order of, “are you happy?” or “are you satisfied?” seem already to include the inevitably negative response. It is always “no” or “yes, but….” And, if happiness is truly subjective, then it is as meaningless to say “I am happier than you” as it is to say “I am happier than myself.” Aggregating the answers to such meaningless questions simply cannot create meaning out of meaningless, no matter how rigorous the statistical method.

Isn’t unhappiness, if not the human condition reduced to words, the required condition of beings living within a consumer milieu where every commercial message is designed to foment dissatisfaction? And what of the fact that more consumer messages seem to be targeted at women than men? Could the cultural creation of woman as ur-consumer, and therefore perpetually dissatisfied, have anything to do with female unhappiness? How is it possible to factor the effects of advertising and culture, those places where we learn what happiness actually “is,” out of, or into, a quantitative study?

As Ehrenreich points out, if it is difficult to know if the happiness of two women can be compared, it seems even more difficult to be certain that men’s happiness and women’s happiness even the same things? From my own subjective impressions, I would guess not. As evidence for this I would simply present my own romantic life.

But the most overwhelming problem for Jeffers and Stevenson’s is the one initially pointed out by Ehrenreich: we do not know what happiness is. Like obscenity, perhaps, we think we know it when we see it. But if we actually understood and knew happiness, we probably would not spend so much time, money and effort pursuing the things that are supposed to bring happiness, and would instead simply pursue happiness. But happiness slips away as soon as we examine it. Always represented as freedom from worry, want, melancholy, and despair, happiness is known only through its opposites. We all want to be free of never-ending thirst for something more that successive and compulsive purchases can never quite quench, and so we posit happines. Happiness itself, though, seems to exist not so much as an experienced subjective state, but as the echo from a distant future or past of a life beyond what is currently possible.

If their methodology and all its premises are severely flawed, let me suggest that perhaps Wolfers, Stevenson and the rest of the hedononomists should begin by first finding and capturing the truly happy man and woman. These specimens could then be displayed and studied in a controlled laboratory environment. If they will not reveal their secrets, perhaps the surgeon’s knife can be employed to cut away the meddlesome flesh that presently obscures the true nature of happiness.

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Right-Wing Melancholy: The Graven Images of Glenn Beck’s Amerikan Kargo Kult

October 13, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. — Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough

Jon McNaughton’s One Nation Under God (“ONUG”) has secured a place for him as the Jacques Louis David of the Glenn Beck–Cleon Skousen divinely inspired constitution scene. McNaughton seems to have created this painting with the very urim and thummim (“spirit goggles” or “seer stones”) with which the prophets of old were able to divine the word and will of God, but McNaughton’s spirit goggles are tightly focused on the dominionist visions of Skousen and Beck. Billed as the most symbolic painting ever created, ONUG is a crowded landscape set somewhere on the Washington mall.

The overall impression created by the painting is that Norman Rockwell has painted a version of Bosch’s The Last Judgment, or that Joe Coleman has become a born again Christian. The scene is set beneath a darkening sky, and our only points of reference are the Capitol Dome in the left-hand background and the Supreme Court in the distance on the right.

Rising from the center of ONUG is the figure of an enormous Christ, triumphant and resurrected, a magnificent light bursting forth from his head. He is bedecked in a golden robe over a white undergarment that is “branded” with the tree of life (composed of dozens of swirling chinatown Nike swooshes). In his right hand, the Son of Man holds the constitution as he stares coldly and decisively at some distant point beyond the viewers’ right shoulder. Surrounding Christ on all sides are a motley multitude of well-known and anonymous figures, who stand as the “symbols” in this painting.

Here I should pause for a brief aside. On McNaughton’s webpage, ONUG is presented with a scrolling java interface that allows the viewer to roll over each figure in the painting and receive the symbolic “meaning” of that figure straight from the artist’s mind. In other words, McNaughton has preempted the work of both the viewer and the critic (for McNaughton’s complete listing of the symbols see here or for a more critical listing, see here). With an authoritarian voice consistent with his worldview, McNaughton has pronounced that a equals a, does not equal b, and that the excluded middle shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. This attempt to control the meanings of words and symbols, to say “yes” and “no,” is the juvenile aping of paternal authority and the degree zero of the authoritarian act.

To resume, the first of the figures we note is a small boy who has approached from Christ’s right to point at the constitution (perhaps he is pointing to the establishment clause?). Before this simultaneously cute and terrifying spectacle, a symbolic concatenation of the saved and the damned huddle in the painting’s foreground. To Christ’s left stoop the liberal elites whose damnation is assured. There is the smug “Mr. Hollywood,” who has laughingly turned his back on Christ. In the corner sits the money-counting Lawyer (the Jew?). Then there are the Activist Supreme Court Justice (portrayed as a sobbing Judas who, probably due to the artist’s own fear of libel suits, is unable to show his face), and the Professor, who clutches Darwin’s Origin of Species to his heart as he pompously ignores the Living God. Also pictured are the Pregnant Woman (who McNaughton tells us is considering an abortion), the Liberal News Reporter looking for a story, the Politician who is too busy talking on a cell phone (negotiating a last minute rewrite of the public option perhaps), and, hidden in shadows, old scratch himself, the Devil.

At Christ’s right hand sit the elect, in every way the sinners’ symbolic opposites. There is the simple Farmer, America’s backbone, who, by a wholesome sort of alchemy, converts government subsidies into life-sustaining food. Also among these living saints are The Mother,the Christian Minister, the School Teacher, the Immigrant (according to McNaughton, to represent freedom of religion!?!), the Family Doctor, the loving, life-renewing, U.S. Marine, and the student, who holds aloft Cleon Skousen’s 5,000 year leap. The ideological debt to Beck and Skousen is finally acknowledged.

This painting is not just McNaughton’s dominionist view of America, it is a channeling of Beck’s and Skousen’s views as well. Behind the painter’s Yankee piety lurks the avarice of the huckster who has finally found his dupe. The best salesman, as we are often reminded, is the one who believes in his own pitch.

Continuing, we find a litany of dead and, it would seem, resurrected historical figures, arrayed at a respectful distance, fanning out from behind Christ. Each one as out of place as the next. Included are a number of anonymous and representative soldiers from all our wars. In the background the careful viewer will also find Frederick Douglas and Ulysses Grant, both staring dumbly from behind Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap. Eisenhower is here too, and so is “space-teacher” Christa Macaulliffe. At Christ’s left shoulder George Washington swears not to tell a lie while Abraham Lincoln strikes an Al Jolson pose in front of a modern African American soldier identified by a name patch as “King” (as McNaughton explains it, in tribute to Martin Luther King). Dolly Madison, Patrick Henry, are here too, as well as many, many, so many more. Chief among this motley crowd looms Ronald Reagan, who, adjusted for perspective seems to be taller than anyone in the photo save the Living God.

The message of the painting is made clear if we simply remove the figure of Christ. The painting’s center becomes an empty field and the constitution flutters lifelessly to the ground. Without Christ we can imagine that this strange menagerie of the Great, the dead, the sinful and the bored, would suddenly come to life in a melee of bickering and strife. Not even Reagan or Harriet Tubman can save us from the mob, and from ourselves; only Christ can turn difference into unity.

Signs taken for wonders: the infant piety of McNaughton's ONUG.

The entire history of the United States, of competing interests, compromise, reform and reaction, greed and restraint, war and peace, is reduced to the will of God. America as God’s domain conquers the old notion that the American Experiment, at its best, stands for a faith that reason will, slowly but surely, triumph over chauvinism and self-interest. But this is not Skousen’s view, and that is not what these men represent. Reduced to celebrity status, this horde of known and anonymous great men are stripped of complexity and individuality, reduced to a comforting mob of gestures and facts. Stripped of their greatness, their sole commonality is that, no matter what they thought they were doing, they were conduits for divine purpose, the slaves of Christ. If we wish to be great, we should do as they did an become as they are: we must bow our heads in prayer, and then do nothing. How can base and worldly concerns like universal health care possibly improve the perfect?

It is easy take issue with almost everything in the painting. Why, for instance, is it called “One Nation Under God,” when a more logical title would seem to be “One God over a Nation?” And then there are the painting’s formal issues. Why are these symbolic figures, sinner and saint alike, looking in so many different directions? What are they looking at? And they are just piled on, with no real uniting structure at all. How can Lincoln and Washington stand there blithely unaware that the Word Made Flesh stands just to their right? And is that golden light emanating from Christ’s head, or the heavens, or both? The perspective is unclear. Why does the activist supreme court justice have six fingers? Why do so many of the resurrected appear bored and disinterested? Is that a symptom of the resurrection process?

Many have attacked the meaning and symbolic incoherence of ONUG, challenging both his choice of subjects and the meanings that he attaches to them. Why Teddy and not Franklin Roosevelt? Why Dolly Madison at all? Why is an immigrant numbered among those apparently saved? Aren’t many of the resurrected deists? And why no mention of slavery in explaining Lincoln’s importance?

Some of these questions can be answered by resorting to psychology, cynicism, or ideological motive, but none of them solve the larger problem, which is the strange weight of all these symbols. Every symbol is problematic, and the juxtaposition between each symbol and every other symbol in the painting only serves to multiply the problems. What is the meaning of all these symbols?

Normally, symbolic paintings are ordered to create an organic whole that transcends the symbolic. To achieve this, artists must use symbols sparingly. Look at Leonardo’s Last Supper or Durer’s Nemesis to see this principle at work. When there are too many symbols or the symbols do not have clear meanings, the result, as in Durer’s Melancolia, is fracture and confusion of meaning. At first glance, this seems to be the problem with ONUG. But ONUG is so heavily laden with such a wide variety of symbols that any attempt to find meaning in the juxtaposition of the symbols themselves or to find an internal cohesion fails before it has even begun.

The point of the painting seems not to be so much in the meaning of the symbols, but in their collection and display. The longer we look, the less McNaughton’s painting seems to belong to the modern tradition of painting, and the more it begins to resemble the sort of art found in the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon or Lascaux cave. These older forms of painting work not only on the symbolic and representational planes. They promote divine favor by representing abundance and increase: in short they employ sympathetic or imitative magic.

ONUG finds another parallel in the representational and symbolic practices of others who have been dazzled by American greatness:

When the war ended several years later, the Americans departed [Vanuatu] as suddenly as they had arrived. Military bases were abandoned, and the steady flow of cargo which had altered the islanders’ lives completely dried up. The men and women of Tanna Island had grown to enjoy the radios, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola, canned meat, and candy, so they set into motion a plan to bring back the cargo. They had surreptitiously learned the secrets of summoning the cargo by observing the practices of the American airmen, sailors and soldiers.

The islanders set to work clearing their own kind of landing strips, and they erected their own control towers strung with rope and bamboo aerials. They carved wooden radio headsets with bamboo antennae, and even the occasional wooden air-traffic controller. Day after day, men from the village sat in their towers wearing their replica headsets as others stood on the runways and waved the landing signals to attract cargo-bringing airplanes from the empty sky. More towers were constructed, these with tin cans strung on wires to imitate radio stations so John Frum could communicate with his people. Piers were also erected in an effort to attract ships laden with cargo, and the Red Cross emblem seen on wartime ambulances was taken as the symbol of the resurging religion. Today villages surrounding Yasur Volcano are dotted with little red crosses surrounded by picket fences, silently testifying to the islander’s faith.

So great was the American wealth that had appeared out of the sky, that it could only have come from the gods. Using the principles of sympathetic or imitative magic, the obvious notion that like begets like, the Vanuatuans attempted to conjure up cargo by aping the actions of American servicemen.

9-12, 24-7: Glenn Beck's doctrine of eternal recurrence.

And this too is what McNaughton, Beck and Skousen are up to. Overwhelmed by the strife and discord of the present, they have turned to aping the past. If the country seems fractured and discordant the answer lies in finding the secrets of the ancients. And through the kabbalistic power of 9 principles and 12 values we can do just that. The sacred language of the American past must be pilfered to find just the right men and just the right words. The words, chanted and repeated until devoid of meaning, and spoken by one whose heart is pure, can then be used called forth the New Jerusalem, which has always been our birthright.

McNaughton’s painting does with images what Beck and Skousen do with words. Blending apotropaic and imitative magic, McNaughton has not created a painting so much as a charm or a spell intended to restore the old America of goodness, virtue and abundance. His symbols, and the control he exercises over them is not an attempt to create meaning, but to strip it away. Once the excess meanings and connotations of these ghosts have been excised, the absent god-men can be properly conjured up, and America will be restored, One Nation Under God, with no King but Jesus.

John Frum will come.

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The Unobtrusive Dinosaur: A Review of Wallace Shawn’s Essays

October 6, 2009 — Henry Brulard

Essays
by Wallace Shawn
Haymarket Books, 186 pp. ISBN 978-1608460021

When one hasn’t noticed that it’s one’s own boot that’s standing on the suffering person’s neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them. — Wallace Shawn

The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. — T. W.  Adorno

Wallace Shawn’s Essays (also reviewed here, here, and here) is a collection of thirteen essays and two interviews. Though written over the course of 25 years on such diverse topics as personal morality, the politics of 9-11, the war in Iraq, theater, poetry and art, the book is unified in its concerns. Divided into two sections — “Reality” and “Dream-World” — Shawn’s Essays returns again and again to a question found in his plays, as well as in the film My Dinner With Andre (1981), written by Shawn in collaboration with Andre Gregory and directed by Louis Malle. The question, roughly stated, is a simple one and an old one: How can we live a good and moral life?

Updated somewhat for the readers of Generation Bubble the question becomes, how is it possible to live a good and moral life when that life is predicated on barbarity and death? The question has no satisfactory answer.  We want to be good and we want to be happy, but perhaps we cannot be both.

Essays stands as a sort of record of Shawn’s attempts to live such a life in spite of his own human failings. And to that extent, the book offers a sort of solution to the problem — though he does not present it as that. Rather, he represents his struggle to live through the conflict between reality and dreams that figures as the book’s structural conceit. We can enter reality through our dreams and enter dreams through reality. The disengagement with reality, the escape that is one of the pleasures of the dream life, can never be pursued for itself alone. Nor can we live completely in reality without complete despair. Reality and engagement must be tempered by dreams and disengagement. In this dialectical repetition, from reason to dreams and back, without ever staying with one for too long, Shawn finds a sort of accidental method to retain and maintain his own humanity.

Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.

In “Morality” he demonstrates, as he did in his play Aunt Dan and Lemon, that reason can and often does lead us violently and horribly astray. We like freedom and prosperity, we see that it is offered by free markets and politicians espousing such ideals, and so we vote for Bush, and the result is not only economic disaster, but death and neverending war. Or, we dislike Bush. We think his economic policies are poorly conceived and his adventures in Mesopotamia and Central asia are unlikely to achieve succes. We hear a politician who also dislikes these adventures, so we vote for him, but the economy only worsens and the murder continues. We calmly and happily accept one seemingly sane and reasonable proposition, and then another, and another, and find that the result, as in Adorno’s epigram, is murder and enslavement.

Likewise, morality, by itself, is no help. In an interview with Noam Chomsky, Shawn suggests that perhaps adherence to moral codes provides a solution. Chomsky’s reply is a resounding “No.” For morality, grounded either in rationality or the chauvinism of religion, is, as we have seen, no less likely to end in genocide and historical disaster. And what, in the face of that, can art accomplish? If we flee into art and dreams because reality is unbearable and unlivable this does nothing to change reality. Even worse, the comforts and security provided by art are questionable because complete escape is never quite possible. The result is that we are left, like Andre Gregory’s character in the film, weeping openly in the street because, to paraphrase, we are able to live only in our art, and never in our lives.  Art, which seems to be our salvation, can just as easily lead to voluptuousness and escapism that leads in turn to more casual inhumanity that inflicts violence upon reality.

At times Shawn reproaches himself with “memories” of his early, privileged life. Immersed in art and music as he was, he still failed to see others as fully human:

Perhaps it was my father, who taught me to love art, who also in some way nourished these perverse “memories.” I remember once, when I was ten or so, I was riding with him in a taxi and I drew his attention to an overweight, bizarre, rather miserable-looking boy whom we were passing in the street. I found the boy funny and was merrily laughing away at him when I turned around and was shocked to discover that my poor father had burst into tears. The sight of the boy hadn’t struck him as funny, apparently, and my response to the boy had also, apparently, not made him happy.

From all this a sort of answer, as much as one is possible, emerges. The trick is to reject art, morality, and reason as solutions in themselves, in order to embrace them as mutually complimentary techniques of living that must exist in a constant and questioning tension if life is to go on.

Photobucket

What dreams may come: Shawn's oneiric–material dialectic.

I am impressed by Shawn’s simple and familiar morality evident throughout the “Reality” section, and considered explicitly in “The Quest for Superiority,” “Morality,” and “Patriotism.” It is not groundbreaking. It is not fashionable. It is not exciting. That is its charm. This morality is grounded in cutting away all that obscures reality to find the objective condition of one’s own humanity and the effects our humanity has on others who share it in common. The objective fact that Wallace Shawn is only one person, just as I or you are one person, among billions refutes any claim to superiority or privilege that he might make. The humility provided by this objective view requires Mr. Shawn to confront the fact that his life, like mine and perhaps yours, requires the subjection and exploitation of millions of impoverished and oppressed others. That is, for the status quo that constitutes his comfortable and humane life to continue, others must live horribly uncomfortable and inhumane lives.

The knowledge of this fundamental and inescapable immorality — an immorality that he did not choose any more than you or I chose it — requires a moral choice. He must either retain his morality and his fundamental humanity, or follow many of the privileged people he grew up with in “throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation”:

Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, We live in beautiful homes, we’re surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food. And if there are people out there who are envious of us and who might even be tempted to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to protect us. And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission, and we only hope they’ll do what they do with diligence and skill.

On a larger scale, the comfort and security that we have come to expect as our due requires not guards of the manor, but guardians of the empire.  For each of us to continue to live as we do, soldiers will have to kill and die in far-flung outposts. This is the unavoidable truth hidden among the bumperstickers screaming, “Support the Troops”: Silently, and perhaps unwillingly, we all support the troops, and the death they sow. Our lives, as they are now lived, require it. To renounce the status quo means to embrace the humanity of others, and hopefully, discover our own, but it may come at the price of our happiness or our comfort. Those people who have made the choice to accept reality at the expense of morality are, according to Shawn, able to be comfortable and happy at the price, we who are only human think, of their own humanity. I do not know if this is true, and I do not know if happiness or comfort, offered at increasingly lower discounts by advertisers and politicians alike, is sufficient for a life.

In his writing, Shawn refuses to adopt the weighty tones of leaders or the shouting of entertainers and pundits. To do so would be an act of superiority and privilege, and Shawn’s voice is the negation of privilege and superiority. He writes with humility, calm and reflection. He cares and he wants to understand, just as he wants you to understand. Abstraction and reification, political or philosophical, can only be challenged in human and subjective terms. Likewise, inhumanity and barbarity can only be met with humanity and civility. So his voice must be soft and calm, his terms concrete. And perhaps that is the only route left. Amid the din of competing and ever more thoughtless shouts the alarm can only be raised by thinking and living carefully and speaking softly.

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The Cloud of Unknowing (cont’d): Admiral Yamamoto as the 20th Hijacker

October 1, 2009 — Henry Brulard

Since September 11, 2001, America has employed a single narrative to explain the historical significance of the attacks: September 11th was the new Pearl Harbor. We heard it from politicians, anchors and pundits. We read it in headlines, news tickers, and blogs. Perhaps we noticed the similarities ourselves. It is usually stated along these lines: The Deadliest Attack on American Soil Since Pearl Harbor. The fact that this association seemed to have come simultaneously from our leaders, the media, and our own heads — from everywhere and nowhere in particular — made it all the more powerful and all the more real. In our thoughts it passed from comparison to metaphor, and from metaphor to fact. The fact united us. 9-11 was Pearl Harbor.

It was obvious, even though it shouldn’t have been. Quietly, and long after the events themselves, we realized that Pearl Harbor did not have to become the dominant narrative for 9-11. Terrorists had attacked America in the past — the first World Trade Center Bombing, the African Embassy Bombings, the USS Cole, not to mention Oklahoma City. Even if it dwarfed them in scope, 9-11 was like those events. Terrorists, unaligned with any nation state and lacking any geographic presence, had once again attacked and killed Americans. 9-11, though more spectacular and more devastating, was, like previous terrorist attacks, a criminal act.

But the circumstances of 9-11 made the false analogy to Pearl Harbor too tempting to resist. For the second time in less than a century, the Asiatic races, angry over something or other, had mounted a cowardly surprise attack from the sky. The tactics they employed were Kamikaze attacks, just like the Japanese had employed in the later days of World War II. And just as the Pacific Fleet had been the symbol of American power in 1941, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were symbols of American economic and military hegemony. After this, the comparison breaks down, but so what?

And so, 9-11 entered our collective consciousness as Pearl Harbor, which was a very different event from Oklahoma City or the Embassy Bombings: Pearl Harbor meant war. Therefore, we thought, 9-11 had to mean war as well. But for 9-11 to mean war we had to avoid certain theoretical and definitional barriers that had prevented us from going to war in response to previous terrorist attacks. We had to ignore the fact that nations do not, generally speaking, go to war to capture or kill criminals. We had to excuse the fact that, since the terrorists had no army, no territory, and no territorial ambitions, we could not, strictly speaking, “attack” them. In short, we had to forget that the term “war” is generally reserved for conflicts between two or more nations. The fact that this was Pearl Harbor, rather than simply another in a string of terrorist attacks, allowed us to avoid all those conceptual barriers to war. So what if there were no opposing nations or armies? We would declare war on criminals and tactics. When that failed to make us feel whole, we would simply redefine the problem and invade countries that had nothing to do with the attacks.

The pundit class helped by discovering and naming certain previously unknown historical trends and social forces. As Samuel Huntington pointed out, 9-11 was actually just one more event in an ongoing Clash of Civilizations. It had been going on for a while, and we had spent so much time anticipating new Initial Public Offerings and building bulletproof tech-stock portfolios that we had overlooked it: the West (whatever that is) had to be saved from Islam. This was a threat equal to or worse than the combined threat of Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. Our way of life was imperiled not just by the terrorists, but by Turkish workers in Germany and Algerian girls wearing the Hijab in French schools. The demographics were terrifying: so many of them, so few of us. Nobody remembered how or why the old colonialism had failed, but it was generally agreed that a new colonialism would have to be invented or discovered to do the job right.

But even the thought of 1.6 billion Mahometans and their inscrutable devotion to a god that wasn’t the market wasn’t enough to unite us. The faces on the television screen seemed too real and too poor and too much like National Geographic pictorials to incite fear. Besides, the whole conflict of civilizations thing was a bit abstract. The crisis had to be put into terms that were simultaneously more concrete and more faceless. Here, the erstwhile leftist Christopher Hitchens abandoned his dialectics and came to our rescue. The threat wasn’t so much Islam as a particular sort of Islam: Islamofascism. It was a rhetorical masterstroke and it mattered little that the term was meaningless. Hitler and Tojo — the Arch-fiends — had returned, this time in turbans and vestbombs.

Tora! Tora! Tora! to Tora Bora: Pearl Harbor and 9-11 twin towering myths.

Tora! Tora! ... Bora?: Pearl Harbor and 9-11 twin towering myths.

It was what we needed when we needed it. Islamofascism transformed the incomprehensible face of worldwide Islam into mere incoherence: they hated freedom in general and our freedom in particular. Even better, Islamofascism tied in perfectly with our own growing belief that 9-11 was the new Pearl Harbor. Unable to accept that the events of 9-11 had been masterminded by a very tall Saudi billionaire criminal who now lived in a cave or by the disheveled and obese Khalid Sheikh Mohamed we knew that hidden eastern hordes lay in wait, ready to make the trains run on time and destroy our way of life. So what if nobody had actually seen Islamofascists goose-stepping to midday prayers, we had found our enemy and our war.

It certainly helped that we no longer had any idea what war was. We had long since ceased to call our wars wars, preferring since time out of mind such terms as “police action,” “crisis,” “emergency,” or “peace-keeping operation.” When we did use the term it was not to describe armed conflict, but, much like the term “fascism,” as a sort of metaphor to convey our extreme distaste for something. By 2001, though few Americans had served in armed combat, all Americans were proud veterans of, among others conflicts, the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the Cola wars, the culture wars, and the never-ending war on high prices. Here was a victory in which all could take pride: in the span of fifty years we had liberated war from its semantic chains.

So, we were a little bit goofy about war, but we knew what a real war was: it was World War II. The American consciousness, busy with tracking the mating habits of J-Lo and Britney and bored by the tedium of history, had cranial capacity and attention span to consider only two actual wars: World War II and Vietnam. World War II, narrated by Tom Brokaw and Ronald Reagan, stands as our greatest triumph, and Vietnam, brought to you by Oliver Stone and Robert MacNamara, as our greatest failure. This Manichean view, fostered by the wish-fulfillment industry and the demands of political expediency has gradually manifested itself in an atavistic duality whose effects are too broad and profound to catalog. Suffice it to say, we love to talk about World War II, while we bring up Vietnam only when we wish to excoriate hippies, attack Dick Cheney as a draft-dodger, or bemoan our betrayal by politicians who “wouldn’t let us win.”

By 9-10, World War II existed in our minds as a golden age inhabited by a heroic race known as the greatest generation. The veneration of the greatest generation had largely supplanted America’s founding as our central myth. Everything we had, we owed to them. In our neutered and denatured state, these men stood as the representation of everything that we were not. We worshiped their glory vicariously through books, movie screens, and television documentaries.

The more devout among us participated in yearly religious pageants or processions known as “reenactments” or “living history events” at places like Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania and Queen Creek, Arizona. There, dressed in painstakingly realistic battle dress, our priest caste commanded tanks, tossed grenades and launched bayonet charges to honor the ghosts. For several weekends every year, they separated themselves from the worldy weekend rites of yardwork and NFL triplecasts to propitiate the penates. Afterwards, having pleased the absent gods with their sacrifices, they drove home in SUVs to await and prepare for next year’s rites. Despite such heroic efforts, our separation from the heroes of Guadalcanal and Omaha beach grew more profound with each passing year.

The new Pearl Harbor promised to change all that. The new and terrible enemy revealed, 9-11 would, at long last, allow us to demonstrate our own honor and virtue as we ushered in a new age. With Pearl Harbor as a sort of protective totem, we commenced to herald the dawning Satya Yuga and celebrate our strange rites by “re-living” history on a much grander scale.

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