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From the NYT today:

The split on the gas tax is a relatively rare one for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, who agree on the broad outlines of policy in most areas. They have both called for the suspension of purchases for the national strategic petroleum stockpile, a supply of oil to protect the country against sudden supply disruptions; new taxes on oil companies; measures to curb global warming; and heavy federal spending on renewable energy sources. They have also called for a federal investigation of possible manipulation in oil markets.

Ha! You mean, like, this? 

Just to be clear, the wars and threats of future wars are not responsible for the entire run up in price, as there’s clearly an enormous increase in demand / plateauing of supply at foot that at the base of this. But the “war premium” ensured that the oilcos were receiving a nicely inflated price from 2002 on, despite the fact that the US economy was falling into recession. The “axis of evil” speech, which turned loose talk into an announcement of imminent action, was given on January 29, 2002. Look again at the graph… 

Nothing would have sucked more, for certain parties, than running the last stable years of oil supply down at $10 / barrel. 

One needn’t believe in direct conspiracy, only capitalist over-determination (that, on its side, looks like underdetermination…) Things happen because they can - fields of benefit fall into place, everyone’s happy and lobbying, and then you get this sort of thing. 

Beyond even Mr Centerpiece here, just the look at the shot. I remember, back when I was in college and we did the eurail-pass thing, we ponied up for a deluxer room in Roma once because we wanted the air conditioning. Deluxe came with a tv too. The shit on it though - Berlusconi’s channels, I suppose, or maybe RAI too. All guys in chicken-suits surrounded by bimbettinos, all chortling, and a dude in a bad suit serenading a pig with the spotlight on. Forty midgets in a phone booth, my secret secret talent, look at what my neighbors dog or daughter can do.

Felt like the end of everything, watching it. The final lurch back in to the marsh. 

And now that’s home and everywhere. Except, in the US, the president begs onto it rather than simply owning the network. Or I guess it depends what the definition of “own” is.  

I know that I pound on Adbusters all the time, and there are, I’m very well aware, better things to pound on, but what the fuck is this about? It’s from Kalle Lasn’s opener to a recent issue…

This is the magic moment in which capitalist cool can stumble and authentic cool can start bubbling back up again. And after decades of wandering around the wilderness, we on the Left are finally realizing what that magic moment is all about. Clive Hamilton – author of Growth Fetish and Affluenza – nails it in his 2006 article, “What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy,” when he writes, “The defining problem of modern industrial society is not injustice but alienation . . . the central task of progressive politics today is to achieve not equality, but liberation.”

Forget about treating the symptoms. Forget about the hedgemaze of identity politics. Break away from the glorious equality and social justice battles of the past. Instead, liberate yourself from the capitalist mindfuck. Learn to live without dead time. Start generating authentic cool from the bottom up again. The rest will follow.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I know. But it’s starting to look like something of a meme, perhaps the early smoulders of a new/old political formation that could become increasingly central as things fall apart one way or another in the next few years. Since I’ve been on vacation, I’ve been allowing myself time to read (for me) tons of brand new fiction, which is a pastime in some senses as depressing as it sounds. But one thing I read that was especially interesting - and probably more scary than depressing - was James Howard Kunstler’s new “peak oil” novel World Made By Hand. Now, Kunstler has a blog that I’ve commented on before…

I might actually try to put something into real paper print about this one, so I’d rather not give away everything here. But just for now: we often say that we live in a period without utopias, a period that somehow gives itself only to the construction of dystopian fictions and films and visions. (Remember this piece by Jameson from the NLR?) All sorts of good and easy and subtle and complex reasons why this is so of course. But whatever the reasons, it has seemed true for quite awhile.

Well, Kunstler’s new novel - like the wild-eyed catastophism of his blog and non-fiction writings - mark a turn in the genre, a turn towards a new (no, again, new/old) quiet, disturbing utopianism emerging out of the ashes of economic collapse and world war. Long story short, we’ve got here a sensible post-technocratic alliance with the fundies, the black population of america katrina-ed right off stage, and the last standing minority in opposition to the new order of later-day settler-patriots with blacksmith shops and Olde Style Dentists and lots of horses and cows are the White Trashers who live up the hill, Mad Maxing the future with live-action porn reenactments and monuments to the Harley.

Resentment+gemeinkitsch+handkraft+catastrophe. It’s not really hard to see where it goes. (I even think there are signs that Kunstler knows himself what horrific echoes the things he writes about have, and writes them anyway out of an “exception times require that we not be pansies about the inevitable emergence of fascism” sort of ethos. Again, all to familiar this stance, no?) But just like the Lasn bit at the start, it is “alienation,” in a sense, that Kunstler’s dystopian utopia is bent on resolving at the expense of just about everything else that we hold dear.

Long story short, it bears remembering that “alienation” may well best be considered a value-neutral term, at least in my book, useless without further qualification and explanation for the telegraphic establishment of the pro or con. Take up arms against this abstraction as an abstraction, and you may well have simply taken the next (il)logical step from the war on “terror”….

Relatively interesting stuff going around this weekend about an exchange between John Lennon and a guy named John Hoyland in 1968. All on the occasion of a documentary that just aired on ITV, and which at least had a nifty sequence on the paris posterers.

He was absolutely furious. “Dear John,” he began. “Your letter didn’t sound patronising - it was. Who do you think you are? What do you think you know?… I know what I’m up against - narrow minds - rich/poor… I don’t remember saying that Revolution was revolutionary - fuck Mrs Dale… You say: ‘In order to change the world we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then - destroy it. Ruthlessly.’ You’re obviously on a destruction kick I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the world - people - so do you want to destroy them?”

He also asked, pertinently: “What kind of system do you propose and who would run it?” and finished: “Look man, I was/am not against you. Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones - think a little bigger - look at the world we’re living in, John, and ask yourself: why? And then - come and join us. Love, John Lennon. PS - You smash it - and I’ll build round it.”

I had the last word in a reply that we printed below his letter. “What makes you so sure that a lot of us haven’t changed our heads in something like the way you recommend - and then found it wasn’t enough, because we simply cannot be turned on and happy when you know that kids are being roasted to death in Vietnam, when all around you, you see people’s individuality being stunted by the system.”

Orlando Patterson in the NY Times:

Not so this Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is “happening in the world” — although it never says what this is — and that Mrs. Clinton is better able to handle such danger because of her experience with foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every social linguist, knows that words are often the least important aspect of a message and are easily muted by powerful images.

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.

Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.

(You can see the ad in question here… It doesn’t seem to want to embed…)

From an article entitled “Celebrate huge salaries, minister tells Labour” in The Guardian:

In a speech to the Labour organisation Progress, [business and enterprise secretary John Hutton] will say: “Aspiration and ambition were natural human emotions - not the perverted side effect of primitive capitalism.”

How to parse this curious quotation, if it is in fact accurate? Aspiration and ambition were natural human emotions, that is to say, presumably, present from the start, but… aren’t now? On the other hand, the  scapegoated capitalism is [would be] scapegoated as “primitive,” and we should abandon this line of critique in favor of… the endorsement of the effects as even more primitive (natural) than primitive capitalism? So is he saying that, sure, capitalism is primitive, just not primitive enough for his taste? Or primitive things get perverted when they encounter primitive periods of…

…you know what, forget it.

Check this out:

Bushwick is big (it’s like saying “the Village”). It’s also notoriously
bad. Bushwick suffered the worst of the rioting that struck New York in
the summer of 1977. The area is home to a mostly poor Hispanic and
African-American population, though there are pockets of
gentrification. My corner of the neighborhood, a loft district that the
city is trying to re-brand as the “East Williamsburg Industrial Park,”
mostly warehouses kids just out of art school. It’s a bleak,
rubble-strewn landscape pocked by cement factories and hemmed in by
towering projects. When I moved to the neighborhood, some of my friends
were spooked by the blight, but I only saw the beauty. This is what
Soho in the early seventies or Tribeca in the early eighties must have
felt like, I thought. When I came to New York almost twenty years ago,
those places had been overrun. But when I got to Bushwick, I knew I had
finally found the New York I was searching for—a scrappy loft
neighborhood full of young bohemians camping in their studios. This was
the pre-gentrified New York I wanted to be a part of.

[...]

The real drama of the attack was its aftermath. Within 24 hours of my release from the hospital, I made it back to San Francisco, where I grew up; within 48 hours, I decided to quit my job and move back there; and by the end of the week, it was done: I had given notice to my landlord, quit my job, and asked my girlfriend to move in with me. It all made perfect sense to me, a row of falling dominoes. The only thing I couldn’t understand was why everyone kept acting like I had post-traumatic stress disorder. “Only a flesh wound!” I joked. Now I understand, because in retrospect, I realize that maybe I do have a touch of PTSD. I’m not quite the same person I was. Blight, graffiti, empty buildings—the signifiers of every artsy New York neighborhood for the last 40 years—have lost the romantic appeal they once held. I carry a knife now, a small utility blade that I picked up at the hardware store. And when friends of mine get nostalgic for the bad old days, when lofts were cheap and New York was edgy, I tell them that it’s all still there, if you know where to look.

Morality tales from the gentrifying fringe, ah. Boy goes in search of reality, and reality bites him on the ass. I mean, we shouldn’t laugh, but he’s the one who put the damn thing in the magazine, copped to something obvious and ridiculous at once.

The glorious thing about the end of history and the triumph of capitalism is the way that it relieves us of the obligation to know our history. There’s something exhilarating about students completely ignorant about their country twenty-years since - something that proves some point about something. And really, in the free market of ideas that is the high school classroom, communism exposes itself as really frigging boring compared to the vivid dramatics of liberalism and open markets, especially when they offer the possibility (unique to capitalism!) to spend twenty hours a weekend im-ing with friends in Thailand and suburban Chicago.

Thankfully, also, all of this is entirely representative of the mindset of Germany as a whole.

Nothing new, I suppose.

My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative
to global capitalism. Yes, it is true that ‘capitalism will not be
around for ever’ (it is the advocates of the new politics of resistance
who think that capitalism and the democratic state are here to stay);
it will not be able to cope with the antagonisms it produces. But there
is a gap between this negative insight and a basic positive vision. I
do not think that today’s candidates – the anti-globalisation movement
etc – do the job.

So what are we to do? Everything possible (and
impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising
self-satisfaction. I am aware that when the left builds a protest
movement, one should not measure its success by the degree to which its
specific demands are met: more important than achieving the immediate
target is the raising of critical awareness and finding new ways to
organise. However, I don’t think this holds for protests against the
war in Iraq, which fitted all too smoothly the space allotted to
‘democratic protests’ by the hegemonic state and ideological order.
Which is why they did not, even minimally, scare those in power.
Afterwards, both government and protesters felt smug, as if each side
had succeeded in making its point.

I agree, I guess. But maybe we need to enter into a pact to sit quietly and not speak or write until we’ve come up with even the tiniest “basic positive vision.” Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, at least at the moment, etc etc.

(I’ve been having trouble getting the videos to embed correctly in this one. They work for me if I push play. I wonder how they work for you. If you have trouble, leave a comment and I’ll keep working on it!)

I read a graduate student’s seminar paper today (finally - but hey, at least I read them!) where Freud’s definition of the uncanny was trotted out in just the way that I used to trot it out back in my graduate seminar papers. You remember the bit about the collapse of the heimlich and the unheimlich, the “something added” that makes the merely unfamiliar or familiar qualify for full uncanniness and the great stuff about fiction (”in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life”), and the disappointing “solution” presented at the end (”whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body”)

It’s a great essay, and it’s understandable why we love to rehearse the description - even though everyone is already familiar with it - in our student papers… But the ending is too pat to really serve as a good explanation of anything at all. It is easy to deploy it, like so many canonical theoretical moments, as a surrogate or placeholder for analysis. (Which might be what I am doing here - we’ll see.) And thus we’re left with a feeling of “uncanniness” and an excellent formulation of the question from Freud, but we’re at a bit of a loss to describe the answer.

So I’ve been preoccupied tonight with what makes uncanny things uncanny - the special whatness that triggers the deep shiver.

For instance, for me any way, I find ambient television noise in the background of video recordings (whether my own or those that I find on-line) at once deeply disturbing and totally alluring. Please don’t laugh at the video that I’ve found it in tonight.

I remember when I was a kid - back in the having-a-bedtime portion of my life - I would fall asleep almost every night to the dull murmur of whatever baseball or hockey game my father was watching downstairs. The audio portion of these two sports - and not any others - still mesmerizes me a bit, gives me a great sense of comfort. But advertisements are far more disturbing when they register only ambiently. This is especially true (as in the video above, from what I can tell) when it comes to sleazy-local ads for strange products. (I find these disturbing even when they’re not only half-heard, only ambient. One of the recurrent episodes when I find myself most disturbed by the fact that I no longer live in NYC is at dinnertime, when the TV streams ad after ad for the local shit jewelry shop, some disgusting looking suburban Italian restaurant, the law offices of Pinchcash and Chasebody and so forth…)

There are even few cultural artifacts that come to mind when I start probing this topic. The infamous video game series Grand Theft Audio brilliantly, to my mind, features a very realistic “radio” function that plays while you drive around in your boosted ride, and one that trades heavily in inane talk radio noise and ridiculous but mimetically accurate local ads. This feature is demonically well-attuned to the foreground work that you’re doing in the game: crunching over bystanders, trolling for drugs and prostitutes, scanning the roads for another driver to rage on etc…

More distantly, there is Orwell’s 1984 and in particular the movie version of the book. This clip not only starts with a scene in which we hear the murmuring background from the TV and the foregrounded interior monologue of Winston Smith, offers at the 2 minute point an uncanny turn on the uncanny, where the screen addresses Smith directly (imagine the talk radio ad that mentions you by name), and, at four minutes, has an extended section where that metallically strident female voice, so influential to later dystopian flicks, rattles on and on about victories military, industrial, and ideological….

The easiest answer - and like most easy answers for nebulous questions of culture and aesthetics, an insufficient answer - to the key to the effect that this ambient auditory fill has on me is one that would be true to Freud’s findings in his essay. In this reading, the ossified vitality of the ads, just now obsolete as they appeared yesterday, the day before, in which we can hear the pitch-punch of a previous right-now, is a marker of finitude and death. It capsulizes the presentness of the past - the bath of this-after-that that fills our rooms even when we are not paying attention - and in doing so exposes its transitory nature, the fact that the machine just keeps talking, talking, talking the slip of the now under the curtain of just now away from our attention. There is, perhaps, nothing so everyday - and no everyday so touched with the absurd violence of the rapid passage of time - as the ad chatter preserved in the amber of digital video. Time seems to pass so quickly now that “amber” doesn’t seem at first the wrong word to use to describe the preservation via digital video of a moment that likely occurred within the last few months.

But this answer, the Freudian answer, is insufficient in the way that most hardline Freudian answers tend to be. It structuralizes that which is undeniably historical. A characteristic effect of the times emerges as a symptom of life in general, a universal of representation and the feelings that representation provokes. The avatars of Freud’s uncanny - the double, for instance - have always been and will always be avatars of the same effect. But when it comes to something like the background noise of the television in user-produced video clips, we can be sure that we’re dealing with something a bit more specific to our particular moment in time, in history, in the sweep of technological development. Another example will perhaps make this clear. Think of the redoubled strangeness and fascination of certain media moments that we keep replaying - the allure of watching and rewatching the CNN footage just before the news broke on 9/11. Check out this clip, which renders the whole effect as vividly as is perhaps possible, as we break, without transition, from a ditech.com ad, so familiar yet so dated now, into The End of the World.

In the wake of 9/11 and all of the other terrorist attacks and sudden catastrophes of whatever sort that have occurred during the last few years, we have all become astute anticipators of “breaking news” - of what used to go by the phrase “We interrupt to bring you a special bulletin…” It is hard to pinpoint the extent to which our very faculties of perception and anticipation have changed. What is it that we are waiting for when we keep the television on in the background, and how will we react to it when it arrives? Is all programming, even the benignly banal stuff that comes in the form of advertisements that no one intentionally listens to, that everyone hears, even when staring the set dead in the face, indexed to its potential (or is it inevitable) interruption?

One last video clip, this time the final scene of the Sopranos.

Chase and his writers struggled throughout the portion of the series that appeared after 9/11 to somehow speak to the psychic (and televisual) significance of the attacks. Tony’s cash flow tightens as the nation slips into recession, the attention of the FBI agents who had been assigned to his case is drawn away into counter-terrorism, characters chatter nervously about what might be coming in through the ports, and there is even a subplot, never brought to a conclusion, about some Muslim guys who are in the market for a huge amount of guns. But nothing in the show so successfully incorporated the immense of effect of the event more vividly than the formal moves in the last scene. While much ink and html has been spilled in panicked interpretation the “message” hidden in the jarring fade to black - which had, one imagines, hundreds of thousands banging their set top boxes thinking that their cable had gone out at just the wrong time - fewer have discussed the relationship between this sudden fade to black and the progressively foregrounded volume of the background noise in the scene, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” played through a tabletop jukebox, which gradually comes to swallow almost the entirely of the audiospace of the program as it plunges towards its inconclusive end. The writers’ dramatic ploy here, which trades on the audience’s anticipation that when heavy ambient sound is encountered, it is almost inevitable that the sound will cancel itself out in a sudden interruption of violence, presents a tacit theory of our relation to recorded ambient sound today. The background song comes to foreground; someone, we are sure, is about to get whacked. It is no wonder that, in the comment boxes of Alan Sepinwall’s Soprano’s blog for the N.J. Star-Ledger, the second most often advanced reading of the final scene, after the basic “Tony was killed by the guy who went into the bathroom,” was that the gun-buying Muslims had set off a nuke that faded the entirely of Northern New Jersey, rather than simply the space of the show, to black.

The paranoid anxiety that suffuses the American everyday thus comes around to meet Freud’s uncanniness at the pass, as does indeed seem to be death that, at least in this case, is responsible for the strange effect of these deployments of ambient audio superfluities. We begin to detect a certain circularity to the arrangement, in which the form of something like the final scene of the Sopranos is intentionally touching a nerve exposed on September 11th, which in turn was exposed in the “unexpectedness” of the event against the backdrop of all the floating tech-bubble placidity and end of history-ness in the air the time, a sense in turn informed by a certain narrative sensibility, which in turn was informed by various historical events and so on right down the chain. But despite the fact that the effect - or our sensitivity to the effect - comes from somewhere, it nonetheless is clearly a symptom of our times and marks a subtle but important shift in our sensibilities. If Roland Barthes famously described the “reality effect” that makes the realist fiction of the nineteenth century realistic as the situation in which certain objects in a narrative hold no purpose other than to announce, via their very purposelessness in the story, “we are the real,” today, what feels uncannily real has come to say something else, something like “we are, being what we are, bound to come to an abrupt end.”

Imagine the scene. You are flipping through the channels and land on a movie that you have never before seen. It is a recent movie, from the look of the characters and the space they are inhabiting. It is a family - a mother and a father, and two kids of school age - and they are getting ready for their day, eating breakfast, and the like. A television is droning on in the background. It is tuned to a news channel, and alternates between silly reports on celebrities in prison, “health updates” on the latest treatments for anxiety, financial reports on market turbulence, and advertisements for the newest idiotic blockbuster and sexual performance enhancement pills. It is, perhaps, a scene from a life not altogether unlike your own. Gradually, the sound of the blathering television rises up to overtake the happy household noises, the voices of the children, the loving back and forth of the parents, until it is all you can hear. The camera focuses in on the television screen - the talking heads, ads with middle-aged people walking on the beach, live reports from the stock exchange. Everyone is happy, or trying their best to be - everyone is safe and secure in the sense that today will be a day like any other day. And then…

What happens next? What do you anticipate? Savy-viewers would always have anticipated that something was about to happen - it is a fundamental imperative of narrative development. But you, living when you do and living as you do, know down deep what genus of experience will come with the next frame, what it is that the television on your television will bring into everyone’s living room all at once.

We don’t grow beasts like Hitchens in the US. Filled to the brim with satanic figures we surely are, but they rarely have reams of poetry by heart. Ours slick and equivocate, but not with the likes of Yeats and Shakespeare on their forked tongues.

Here he is with his latest and perhaps worst piece to date:

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by
Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described thedeath, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his
words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth ofJuly, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there
was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens
on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … “

Did you notice that the moments of ethical adding up that happen in the piece, the places where Hitchens “solves” the problem of his own complicity with this horrible thing (the war, the death of this kid), involve the deployment of literature. Literature that serves here as a cloud of easy equivalence, as permission to say mistily what you couldn’t possibly say without the screen of metaphor and allusion.

For the piece relies upon the equation: Hitchens is to Iraq what Yeats is to the Easter Rising and Orwell is to Barcelona. But of course Iraq is not the Easter Rising, nor is it Barcelona, unless perhaps you’re seeing it from the other side of the lines.

If you’ve been reading this site for awhile, you already know how I feel about Alfonso Cuarón in light of his recent work. I’m very, very glad to see the direction that Naomi Klein is headed in. I had very little time for the No Logo stuff. Going after brand lust has always seemed me like lancing a butt pimple when the melanoma patch on your forehead has metastazed into full born brain rot. This seems much better. I’ll buy the book this weekend…

(Terrific the way this video - set in our here-and-now dystopia rather than the semi-imaginary one of Children of Men - so closely mirrors “The World Has Collapsed” public-service ad playing on the bus in the film… And it’s another example of extremely fruitful collaboration between Cuarón and Foreign Office…)

We wait for the image, the conjunction, that will blind us or make us at last see, that will reset the operating system and let us move under a power “not our own” but all our own, just differently, newly, once and for all.

But the right image, the effective conjunction, never comes. We have flags and mothers and cheerleaders, we have the soft core and the hard core, the lynchings, the bombings, and the children.

These clips lend us access to a world that has passed. Nothing does the trick anymore; we must find another aesthetic with which to break ourselves into compliance with our baser, animalian, that is to say human, enlightened, imperatives.

Just came across another candidate for my collection of incredibly strange American politico-cultural amalgamations, hybrids, and halfrights: Green Day’s recent cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.”

Did they actually listen to the song before they decided on this Darfur x-over thing? High-Period Lennon Political Ambivalence (see also: “When you talk about destruction, doncha know that you can count me out… in…) meets Teary Liberal Piety about those Poor, Poor People Elsewhere at the crossroads of unmetabolized reflexivity. How about this part, as the noble faces of the Darfurians bubble across the screen, and Billie Joe Armstrong sings:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.

Yeouch. Just to make it worse, here’s a bit from wikipedia that quotes the band’s press release about the song:

When asked why they chose the song, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said, “We wanted to do ‘Working Class Hero’ because its themes of alienation, class, and social status really resonated with us. It’s such a raw, aggressive song — just that line: ‘you’re still fucking
peasants as far as I can see’ — we felt we could really sink our teeth into it. I hope we’ve done him justice.”

You could write a dissertation, not an acceptable one, but whatever, on the topic: “Who does Billie Joe think the ‘you’ of that toothsome line refers to?”

Secondary mystification, or simply vapid distraction, “what the fuck, yeah, the Africans, cool…”? Benettonism gone libidinal? Inadvertent self-disclosure, a profoundly unconscious honesty that leaves Lennon’s navel-gazing in the dust?

(UPDATE: If you’re confused about what I’m saying here - my fault not yours - you can watch me circle back and explain myself over in the comments at Long Sunday, where I x-posted this…)

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Not really a big fan of the Onion, or really of any of the many permutations of fake news to emerge in the last few years. But this piece is very well done - close to perfect, actually.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners..

[...]

Iraqis have often been observed weeping and wailing in apparent
anguish, but the study offers evidence indicating this may not be
exclusively an outward expression of anger or a desire for revenge. It
also provocatively suggests that this grief can possess an
American-like personal quality, and is not simply a tribal lamentation
ritual.

I honestly do believe that many (most?) Americans do have a bit of trouble picturing people from other nations, especially non-English speaking nations, as human in the full sense of the word. Not trying to be silly or mean in saying this - I believe it’s a strange sort of cultural dysfunction. Partly it has to do with the isolation / insularity of the place. It’s hard to get anywhere from most of the country where another language is dominant (Mexico for some along the southern border, and Quebec for us in the northeast.) Only about 25% of Americans even have a passport - I’d love to find the number of us who die never having left the US. (When my wife’s grandfather was driving her to college, they stopped at Niagara Falls. He was in his 70s - and would die two years later - and had never visited another country. Faced with the very easy prospect of driving or walking across the Rainbow Bridge to the Canadian side of the Falls, he decided not to. A bit too scary and strange to leave - why bother now, at this point, etc…)

It’s no excuse, really, none at all, for condoning what has been condoned. But it is a factor…

(via Ghost in the Wire)

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