Getting
Serious
February 15, 2003
By the Plaid Adder
I
never thought I would hear myself say this. But I think it
may be time for us to stop laughing at George W. Bush.
This is going to be a long piece, and I hope you all will
bear with me. But what I'm going to try to do is explain why
it is that the methods that have allowed all of us hardened
liberals and card-carrying progressives to survive Nixon's
perfidy, Reagan's America, and even George the First are not
going to help us cope with George II. Although most of us
have kept our brains safe from the doublethink that seems
to have become the normal mode of public discourse, we are,
to some extent engaging in our own kind of double consciousness.
We know, and we say, that this President was not elected,
that his virtual appointment by an interested group of right-wing
justices was a perversion of many crucial elements of our
democratic system, and that his presidency is, in so many
senses of the term, illegitimate. But at the same time, I
suggest, we have failed to really grasp exactly what that
means-and, as a result, we still largely act as if our democracy
were still functioning. If we really want to get these bastards
out of power, we must not only come to grips with the fact
that we are not, currently, living in a democracy, but also
adjust our tactics and strategies accordingly.
Totalitarian Laughter
I was walking to my car one afternoon and I saw a truck with
a bumpersticker reading "Drive It Like You Stole It!" I wasn't
sure at first exactly what that meant, but eventually figured
out that probably, driving something like you stole it would
mean taking it on a high-speed joyride until you either crashed
it or ran out of gas, then dumping it in a ditch and hightailing
it for Mexico before the cops found you. Then, bearing in
mind a sign I saw at a DC demonstration—"Drunken Fratboy
Crashes Car Into Ditch, Starts War To Cover It Up"—it
occurred to me that actually, that bumpersticker is a perfect
description of how Dubya governs. He didn't earn this presidency;
he stole it. And because he didn't have to work for this country,
he's just gonna drive it like a maniac until it either hits
a tree, causes a 50-car pileup, or runs out of fuel.
But of course understanding the fact that this presidency
was stolen goes a lot deeper than that. Any day you can go
to the DU forums and find 25 threads that are basically just
people marveling at some new idiocy that has just been committed
by Bush or his lackeys. Often this new policy/speech/malapropism/lie/display
of unholy arrogance and ignorance is so breathtakingly outrageous
that it actually comes across to us as insane. I keep imagining
that exchange between Kurtz and Willard at the end of Apocalypse
Now: "Do you think my methods are unsound?" "I don't see any
method at all, sir." Well, to say that there is a method to
Dubya's madness may well be giving him too much credit. It
would be more accurate to say that, like Hamlet, Dubya is
only mad north-northwest; that he appears to be mad to us
because we can't see the world from his position.
What it comes down to, really, is something very simple.
We are used to living in a democracy, where politicians' livelihoods
depend on their retaining popularity with their constituents.
For this reason, we all assume that any sane politician cares
a great deal about popular opinion. We have all, at various
times, bemoaned the demeaning and short-sighted things politicians
are willing to do to pander to popular opinion. Many of us,
even, have come to realize that what the right has long been
successful at doing is not so much changing their agenda to
suit popular opinion as refashioning popular opinion so that
it supports their agenda. But a politician who actually just
does not give a good God damn about what anyone else—not
just in this country, but in the entire world—thinks
of him? We've never run across that before, because no such
politician could survive the democratic process long enough
to become a public figure. But that's exactly what we have
in George W. Bush.
That's why, to us, he looks like a raving lunatic. Almost
everything he's done since 9/11 has demonstrated a truly staggering
disregard for American public opinion. Initially we assumed
that this was because in the wake of the tragedies, his approval
ratings were so high that everyone knew that he could go on
Oprah and yodel naked while writing passages from the Communist
Manifesto across his bare chest in lipstick, and he'd still
be polling at 95% the next morning. Now, however, his polls
are dropping, the international goodwill generated by the
tragedies has festered into hostility, the economy is so far
into the toilet that it may never be retrievable, the terror
alert is at orange, and even our spineless Congressional representatives
are starting to wake up and go, "I voted to authorize the
use of force in Iraq? Jesus Christ, what was I drinking?"—and
he still doesn't care. So what in the name of Zogby can explain
that?
Actual mental illness is, of course, always a possibility.
But I ran across another possibility while going through a
(very dense and not recommended as a casual read) book called
The Sublime Object of Ideology by a Slovenian philosopher
named Slavoj Zizek. In one chapter there's a section on "Totalitarian
Laughter" in which Zizek disputes the idea that irony and
mockery of an authoritarian regime are effective subversive
tools. His idea is that "In contemporary societies, democratic
or totalitarian…cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so
to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant
to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger
for totalitarianism is people who take its ideologically literally."
Basically, the application here is that when a totalitarian
regime is already revealing itself as cynical—if,
as Zizek puts it, the regime "takes into account the particular
interest behind the ideological universality, the distance
between the ideological mask and the reality, but still finds
reasons to retain the mask"—it doesn't do much good to
mock it by pointing out its many, many contradictions, inconsistencies,
and sheer flabbergasting looniness. The regime has already
neutralized that tactic by mocking itself—a pre-emptive
strike, as it were.
Nothing is more frequently remarked upon, over in the DU
forum, than the fact that this administration parodies itself
so fast and furiously that actual satirists are having a hard
time keeping up with it. Zizek seems to be saying that this
particular kind of defensive cynicism is particularly characteristic
of totalitarian regimes, which have dispensed with the "pretension"
that the ideologies sustaining them are coherent, rational,
and based on a transcendent universal good: "[Totalitarian
ideology] is no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken
seriously—its status is just that of a means of manipulation,
purely external and instrumental; its rule is secured not
by its truth-value but by simple extra-ideological violence
and promise of gain."
So, in other words, it's precisely because Bush, Rumsfeld,
Ari, et al. are a totalitarian regime that they don't have
to bother making sense. In fact, they can and do go out of
their way not to make sense, as this merely confirms
the fact that whether or not they make sense, they all have
us by the balls. This would account, I suppose, for the sense
I have that Rummy, Ari, et al are just positively reveling
in the spectacle of their own moral, intellectual, and spiritual
bankruptcy. They are so secure in their own power that they
can do without public opinion. That's what seems insane to
us; but it makes perfect sense to them. From their point of
view, it doesn't matter whether the stream of self-subverting
falsehoods spinning out from Ari Fleischer's lips is convincing
or not. Coherence is for the weak. If you're strong enough,
you should be able to control your subjects whether or not
they love, respect, believe, or even understand you.
We're used to the idea that our elected officials care about
whether we are going to vote for them next time or not. Well,
as we all point out daily, Dubya is not an elected official;
neither are any of his appointed lackeys. It is time that
we start not only saying that, but getting that. Dubya did
not win a fair and free election in 2000. And he is certainly
not acting like someone who expects to compete in a fair and
free election in 2004. This rush to war, at all costs and
despite overwhelming public disapproval, is merely the most
extreme and terrifying manifestation of what is really the
most frightening thing about Dubya: the fact that he acts,
talks, raves, and governs exactly like a dictator.
The 1984 Fallacy
One of the things that prevents us from really understanding
how things have changed over the past two years is what I
have come to think of as the "1984 Fallacy." For most
of us, Orwell's 1984 was the most poweful representation
of totalitarianism that we encountered growing up. In 1984,
the state controls its people through that "extra-ideological
violence" Zizek mentioned; but the major form of control that
we actually see operating in the novel is brainwashing—through
surveillance, propaganda, constant cultlike activities, the
2 Minute Hate, and so on. Now, it's not that those things
are not all part of the totalitarian project, or that this
administration is not trying to mobilize them all at the present
moment. Where I think 1984 misleads us is by giving
us the idea that if we can only maintain ownership of our
own brains, and keep ourselves from loving Big Brother, then
we've won the battle.
Zizek's point in "Totalitarian Laughter" is that being able
to laugh about Big Brother instead of loving him is not necessarily
going to help us bring Big Brother down. To do that, we've
got to be willing to rise up and dismantle the material structures
that keep him in place. And to do that, we have to change
not only how we think, but how we act. To use an example that
online political columnist Will Pitt brought up months ago:
In an old "Next Generation" episode called "Chain
of Command," Picard is tortured by a Cardassian who tries
to break him by forcing Picard to tell him there are five
lights behind his desk when in fact there are only four. Pitt's
point in bringing this up was that we have to keep reminding
each other that there are only four lights, no matter how
often they try to tell us there are five. This is absolutely
necessary if we are going to come through this; but it is
not sufficient. We're only going halfway if we know there
are four lights, but we still act like there are five.
Even if we joke with our friends and family about how there
are really four lights, that doesn't matter if as soon as
we get out in the public sphere we're basking in the glow
of that imaginary fifth light—even if we do it with a
wink.
Which brings me (finally!) to my main point. I depend on
humor to get me through life as much as the next woman, and
nobody is going to take my irony and mockery away from me.
However, this kind of mockery only has any value as a political
tool if you back it up by being dead serious. And that is
what we have to learn to do. Cynicism is a perfectly natural
response to the world as we've known it. But if we want to
get out of this mess, we are going to have to find our way
through cynicism, out the other side, and back to sincerity.
We are going to have to start taking Dubya seriously.
I've been thinking lately of a monologue from a play by a
Northern Irish playwright named Brian Friel called Freedom
of the City, which was written after Bloody Sunday. In
a monologue delivered from beyond the grave, the one character
who has come the closest to understanding the reality of their
situation as Catholics in Derry talks about looking out at
the machine guns that are about to cut him down and thinking
"how serious the British were, and how unpardonably casual
we were about them," and realizing that to take them on would
require becoming as serious as they were.
I don't know. How serious can I get? What's it going to come
to? Will I have to risk my job? My home? My life? What am
I willing to put on the line? Like most Americans, I've never
really had to ask myself these questions. I don't know what
the answers are going to be. What was that ancient curse supposed
to be: "May you live in interesting times?"
We are still doing them
"Cynical distance is just one way—one of many
ways—to blind ourselves to the structuring power of
ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously,
even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing
them."
—Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Much as we rant and rave, in a lot of ways, we are all still
acting as if the Bush administration is just another bunch
of people administering the democracy we all know and love.
As we know, this government can be administered well and it
can be administered badly, but for most of our lives we have
at least been able to believe that that which was being administered—the
democracy itself—was never permanently harmed or even
that fundamentally changed by the people running it. But since
September 2001, one thing has become increasingly clear: as
far as Bush and his team are concerned, they are not administering
a democracy. They are running a dictatorship. And because
they are, there are a few things we need to get over:
1) Expecting team Bush to care about dropping polls, public
embarrassment, PR disasters, or anything else that makes the
administration "look bad." Everything they've done lately
goes to show that in fact, they have decided that public opinion/approval
doesn't matter. They are doing without that. This is what
we all find so hard to grasp: yes, we are the American people,
but no, this group does not care what we think of them. This
is an important practical point because the traditional methods
of political activism all revolve around affecting public
opinion—and therefore, many of them will not be effective
against this administration.
2) Getting too wrapped up in pointing out the insanity at
the heart of what Bush II is doing. There is an important
therapeutic value in doing some of this for yourself and for
others, just so we all stay aware of the fact that we're the
ones who are really sane. However, by itself this is not sufficient,
and it feeds the strong temptation to just spend your entire
day ranting about these offenses against compassion, decency,
sanity, and even logic. I know, I fall prey to it every day.
But again, this is the main point: revealing that insanity
does not matter until we can use that knowledge to
produce real, material roadblocks.
We will never get Bush to moderate himself by proving that
what he's doing is unpopular, insane, and, from the perspective
of traditional democratic politics, suicidal. He and his cronies
are not operating in that universe any more. What we have
to do is get to the people who still are operating
in that universe—whichever members of Congress have not
been bought and paid for yet, organizations like the ACLU,
even media outlets if they can be brought back to the light—and
try to create material conditions that make it impossible
for Bush to screw us.
How do we do that? Well, the most obvious method would be
by impeaching his ass, and then impeaching Cheney's ass the
moment he takes office. If that's not within the realm of
possibility, then we have to try to set up as many obstacles
in the other branches of government as possible. Congress
has been an unbelievable disappointment in this regard; but
it is just possible that some of them are finally starting
to understand that Bush's ultimate plan involves rendering
them totally irrelevant. We must go to them using that line
of Vizzini's: "Did I make it clear to you that your JOB is
at stake?" Not because you're not going to get re-elected...but
because if things go on as they are, your job will eventually
simply no longer exist?
If Congress fails us, then we have to hope that the people
can get this done without them. That's why, while we work
on our elected representatives, we also have to work on each
other. There is this huge misunderanding in the media and
elsewhere about the ultimate goal of the anti-war movement—Koppel
et al. keep asking the question, "Will this be enough to change
Bush's mind?" No, of course not; nothing can change that bastard's
mind. The point of the movement is to change the minds of
the American people—not because that will terrify Bush
into changing his ways, but because it will finally teach
us that we don't need to put up with his crap just because
he sleazed himself into the oval office. We have to rediscover
our own power, and the fact that this power does not necessarily
have to be mediated through our elected representatives, if
they become incapable of doing that.
We can also hope for some help from the international community,
it now appears: France, Germany, et al., who are no more excited
about having this lunatic run the free world than we are.
Even in England, where Blair's toadying to Bush is extreme
and inexplicable, public opinion runs so strongly against
the war that it may become impossible for Blair to deliver
on his promises. In the end America may find that in fact
it can't take on the entire rest of the world, no matter
what the usual conclusion of "Ice Wars" may suggest.
So, again: right now, we are not living in a democracy. We
need to stop acting like we are. In fact, we need to start
trying to reproduce the democracy we have lost. Demonstrations
can help do that; we saw that with Milosevic. If nothing
else, they may galvanize some of the folks in the US Congress
who still believe they are living in a democracy, or would
like to live in one again. But even if that doesn't happen,
they will at least start training us to figure out how to
take power back from the people who have taken it from us.
I read what I just wrote and I can't believe I'm writing
it. But this is the thing that's making us all feel so insane
these days. We talk about Bush being a fascist, a dictator,
etc.; but it is very, very hard for us to actually believe
that. But I am afraid there will come a point at which it
is impossible—for most of us—to keep that from ourselves
any longer.
We can survive this. We've had unelected presidents before,
we've had internment camps before, we've had witch hunts and
doublethink and surveillance before. We can come through this
too—but it won't just happen. We have to make it happen,
just like the people who got us through the 1930s and the
1950s and the 1970s did. We can't make that happen without
getting serious. We have to get as serious as they are about
retaining their own power.
I heard the Native American singer Annie Humphreys open for
the Indigo Girls once, and she said that one of her role models
had said that the most important thing you could do would
be to find a fight that you can make a difference to, and
join it. The anti-war movement seems, so far, to be my fight.
For the rest of you maybe it will be civil liberties, choice,
campaign finance, plagiarism even, whatever, as long as you
fight. OK, this administration can throw shit in 100 different
directions on any given day. So what. This is a big country.
There are a lot of us. We can fight on more fronts than he's
got armies. And if we do it fast enough, maybe we can get
him the hell out of that office before things have to get
REALLY ugly.
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The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting an
equally demented online audience since 1996. More of the same
can be found at The
Adder's Lair.
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