AlterNet: Election 2004: Grand Old Attacks on Michael Moore

Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)

Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.

My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.

I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.

Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)

But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.

This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.

Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.

But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."

Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.

So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:

Let us admit, however, that the sudden popularity of global imperial ambition in
the United States is not due entirely to arrogance and lust for power, evident
as these are. It is also a response, however perverse, to requirements of the
time that even the antagonists of empire will acknowledge are inescapable. The
earth is fragile, and the earth is becoming one--economically, ecologically and
digitally. A global politics to deal with both conditions is required, and the
idea of empire, especially of global empire, offers the most familiar answer,
historically speaking, to this need. That it is a desperately wrong answer is
shown by the sweeping failure of the Bush policies. But defeating the Bush
Administration will not be enough. The need for a truly global politics--a need
that, in part, called forth America's misbegotten empire--must be met.

The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.

This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.

Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.

And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.

So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.

To sum up...

1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.

2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.

3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.

4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.

5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )

I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)

I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.

AlterNet: Election 2004: The Banner Seen 'Round the World

Again, more on this later...but something on my mind...

Nothing really unique here but thinking about the "end of the Protestant Ethic." Might be good to consider the variety of cultural forms and ojects, way they play to different classes and ethnicities. Stereotype of the rich business person who doesn't have time to "live" vs. the noble impoverished who have learned how to enjoy life. What this does is, in addition to the structural social problems and the way it is transferred through the family, is to keep people doing what they are doing. Allowing for the letter never arriving at its destination and the variety of media available in the culture...

on bus today...

more on this when I am less busy, but went on bus today, late again, feeling a bit angry and entitled. it was late yesterday as well and I was at the stop for an hour, at school an hour later than I needed to be, etc.

As I sat on bus, reading PEOPLE's History, realized what was going on. It was her first day driving this route.
doing it to make more $$ driving the long routes
people came forward to help
one after the other to gude her through
this was in her interest, and they were advocating for themselves.
Not about Americans but about people--but it is about making a country where people can help themselves, each other and the institutions in which they relate.
As I thought about it, compared it to a few weeks ago, getting off the bus when driver was wrong about the route, doing myself, the others on the bus, the driver and ultimately Metro itself a disservice because of my deference and interest in helping only myself in getting off the bus.

Lippmann--model of communication and of reading the news is the atomized, individual reader, trying to take it all in. But we don't experience the news that way, do we?

Still, more and more, even on the internet, I find that our communcation is strained

Mystic River

(On the off chance that anyone ever comes across this and hasn't seen the film and wants to see the film, it's probably going to spoil it for you. Then again, Jill says that everytime I talk about a movie I spoil it. ho hum.)

The film begins with a familiar plot device that seems to plod along throughout the film and is almost a distraction to the story. Robbins' character, Dave, is obviously troubled, having flashbacks of when he was abducted and abused as a child. The film wants us to understand this it is just unclear why. The only thing we know is that we can't trust him, that we should suspect him of something and, most likely, we should suspect him of killing his old friend Jimmy's daughter. We don't really understand why he would do it, but, hey, he's a fucked up guy: why not him?

The rest of the film is a well scripted drama with characters all dealing with their own kind of sadness, a dance where we can see the way they unfold in new ways through their interactions. A sign of a good scriptwriter who knows the most important thing is to have more depth to a character than the script will ever use. It wasn't nearly as depressing to watch as I thought it would be simply because, despite the deep anguish you see Sean Penn's character in, the methodical way in which he goes about finding is daughter's murderer gives it an edge. To some viewers, this edge may be very familiar--and even comforting: it is the edge we are told it is good to have when a loved one is wronged. It is the edge that comes naturally to the vigilante, the man who takes matters into his own hands when the police can't be trusted, well respected in his community because he is a man of action. He is, in a word, the prototypical Clint Eastwood hero: the cowboy, the rebel cop, the ubermensche who does what needs to be done: when he tells the corpse of his daughter that he will kill the person who did this, you still aren't completely sure how to read it, but you ultimately accept at least the sentiment and don't think it would be all that bad if he did do the dirty work.

And then there is the police officer, in this case, Kevin Bacon, who seems also to be the prototypical Example of the Establishment. He has left the old neighborhood, forgotten the rules, and seems to drag his feet when it means his old friend might be the one to end up guilty. His partner says as much and his response each time seems so defensive that you have to wonder if he is overcompensating for being secretly soft on crime. Though you see him doing the work to find this killer--much more so than the goons that Penn has running around--you are meant to wonder if he is really up to the task.

In the middle of this, of course, are the women, supporting characters at best for most of the film (though I think it could be argued they provide the starkest poles of the ambiguity the film ends with). Linney, as Penn's wife, has very few scenes where she says more than two words: in the first, she seems naggy, not all that deep, another prototypical character: she's that kind of wife. Gay Hardin is much more complex. She has a moral and ethical quandry that is central to the film and, for the most part, you think you know what she should do: she should do the right thing and tell someone that she believes her husband killed Penn's daughter. I had my doubts about whether she should have told Penn, but at the moment, you're sure she should tell someone. And it seems like the film wants you to understand, at that moment, that Penn is better equipped to handle the problem than Bacon. Bacon has the problem of red tape, of getting the right evidence to nail Robbins even if he did believe it: Penn has no such limits on his ability to dispense justice. It is, again, a theme that runs through many other Eastwood films.

But then there is the problem of the gun. The gun belongs to the father of Penn's daughter's boyfriend. Katie and (whatever his name is) planned on running away together and getting married. And, from the one scene we have with them, there is little doubt that is the case. The gun doesn't really make sense and I found myself trying to figure out how Tim Robbins ended up with the this other guy's gun.

And, of course, this is where the Eastwood legacy gets overturned a bit. First off, the goons have come up with little of their own information. They have basically followed in the footsteps of the cops who "for once are doing their job" and have pieced together the case against Robbins. At this moment we have little doubt ourselves that he did it and though there is a bit of bourgeois discomfort with these thugs taking care of business, it must be done for the movie to close. But this time, the thugs are wrong. They have found some information--information they didn't like, but believed anyway (he's a fucked up guy: why not him?) and began to take action. The Establishment, could have been trusted, in this case, and one less person would have been dead.

All of this seems to revolt against the Eastwood doctrine which says that institutional, social order can't be trusted to do what men alone can do better. Penn has killed the wrong man and as he did so, justice was being peacefully meted out across town, his daughter's killers safe behind bars. If the film had ended here, I would begin to wonder what to make of this seeming transformation. Are we really to believe that there are time when men can be too blinded by what they want to see that it helps to have some sort of objective process, with proper channels, checks and balances, by which we should work?

When Penn kills Robbins, he isn't doing it because he thinks Robbins has killed his daughter. On a certain level he knows that there is room for doubt. It is a forced forced confession. Penn has put into motion the wheels of vigilante justice and can't stop them. The thugs who are also convinced that Robbins did it will not easily let the evening end with him alive. Penn forces a confession: Robbins complys, but can't tell him the thing he really wants to know. Robbins can't tell Penn why he killed his daughter because he didn't do it, so instead he tells him about what he was thinking when he saw Katie in the bar. He probably truthfully did have a feeling of envy about the youthfulness she and her friends were enjoying. By this time we know he didn't do it; we know that Penn and his street justice are "wrong," that they've got the wrong guy. But we also remember why we tought he did it in the first place so when he begins talking to Penn about the way things might be different if he hadn't been the one in the car--something we know Penn has thought about because he mentions it earlier in the film. When Penn kills him he does it because, hey, he's fucked up: why not him? but, more importantly, because Robbins represents a source of guilt Penn would be better off without. So Robbins is dead, unjustly.

Robbins, for his part, is also being punished for taking the law into his own hands. He has a much better excuse, but certainly not one that would hold up in court. This desparation which makes it impossible for him to confess is not a small part of the plot--and is, perhaps an underlying reinstatement of the Eastwood ethos: Robbins as an unlikely Dirty Harry, taking care of a child molester that had been out of jail three time before. yet he doesn't believe either system, the street or the establishment, would be willing to understand this predicament. Granted he's a fucked up guy, but still he's right, right?

The last scenes of the film increase this ambiguity even more and the characters are shown in their true colors in the end. Bacon, though he seems to be a decent cop through most of the movie, operates with the sort of realpolitik we've come to expect of law enforcement: yeah he knows that Penn murdered Robbins but neither the street nor the establishment would help him prove it. He is happy that his wife has returned and, perhaps, also relieved that the guilt of Robbins is gone. The system is broken, but it isn't just the one in the Police Station. Power, restrictions, assumptions all come into play whenever people begin handing down judgements and punishments, whether in a courtroom or on a riverbank behind the local bar. Penn is just another part of this system. Though Bacon and his partner (Fishburne) did solve the case, the success is sullied by his actions after the case is closed. He makes no move to even attempt to hold Penn accountable and shows no remorse when Gay Hardin walks down the street, looking for some justice of her own.

This interpretation, ambigous as it is, certainly seems to redeem all the fascist, cowboy tendencies of earlier epics. The subtleties and the simple fact that it was difficult to have any idea who actually committed the crime, that the viewer was shaken by their inability to have shown the true culprit, make the riding off into the sunset of the cowboy an untenable ending. So instead there is a stalemate, a face off between Bacon and Penn where both of them concede that nothing will be done about Robbins death. If it was only up to the men, the film seems to end with this realpolitik as its final chord. But Laura Linney and Marsha gay Hardin simultaneously destabilize these positions and, in an even more subtle way, reinstate the Eastwood doctrine in a new, feminized way.

Linney's last scene is the only place that we get to see who she is and her reading of events is ultimately the last of the film. She basically tells Penn that it doesn't matter if he was right or wrong, it was the thought behind the action, the fact that he would be willing to kill on behalf of his family, that was important. This, in itself, is enough to wrap things neatly into a new package. True, it could be said to challenge some assumptions about women being the keepers of the moral flame. When Penn tells her he's killed, we expect her to act like Gay Hardin does earlier: with supportive, sympathetic horror. But instead, she simply brushes it aside, saying that he killed for a noble cause even if it ended up being a bit overzealous. this is, of course, that same eastwood fascism, repackaged for the era of the "fuck for freedom" movement and the drawing of the statue of liberty, draped in a flag, holding a baby and a gun saying "nothing should get in the way of a mother and her children." It is a new kind of law that says we all must join together to combat evil wherever it may be--and even if we sometimes kill the wrong guy at the time, he was fucked up: why not him? and, more importantly, you have proven yourself to be a dependable defener of your family, and that, Linney says, is all that matters.

This would be enough to make the final moments of the film seem more like a traditional Eastwood ending. But there is more. Within this little speech, Linney firmly places the blame for Penn's misunderstanding on the person who gave him this "intellegence:" "why would someone say that about her husband?" With disdain and disbelief, Linney makes us all feel better about having believed that Robbins was a murderer because, deep down, Gay Hardin wasn't loyal, she didn't stand by her man, and she made all of us doubt his innocence. She was the weakest person in the story and, though she may have told us what we wanted to hear at the time, it's ultimately her own fault for not having faith in her man. All of this goes a long way to making the final moments, when she tearfully wanders through the crowd of the parade, looking for a consoling glance from the people who loved her days ago, almost justified. Even her own son won't look at her and, as the camera pans around and lands on her from time to time, it asks us if we really feel sorry for her. Had she been loyal and never questioned the authority of her husband, she wouldn't be in this mess. In that regard, for all its hearfelt questioning and seemingly deep moral inquiry, and, most importantly, its ambiguity about the best way to get justice, it seems to be quite conservative in its final notes.

http://www.aejmc.org/

sounds like an interesting org--and had a conference on Blogging earlier this summer

Two sites to look at for the viz cult class

http://www.silentscream.org/

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/abortion/silentscream.HTM

The New York Times %3E Washington %3E Campaign 2004 %3E F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers

The New York Times New York Region Just Keep It Peaceful Protesters New York Is Offering Discounts

The Mayor of NY seems wise to the tactics--though still missing the point. Nevertheless, it is a bit humorous to see his "welcome, peaceful political activists" campaign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17tue1.html

It is interesting the way that the ghosts of the 60s protest movement are coming back to haunt us. This editorial of the NYT today is trying to keep the FBI from continuing down the same old path they went down in the 1960s--in which the tactics they used to infilitrate protest movements were so illegal that few of the cases against actual criminal activities could be prosecuted and little of the information that they gathered was useful.

On the other hand, Todd Gitlin (SDS pres in 1963-64) and John Passacantando have warned the protesters themselves to keep it clean: "Protesters who spell "Bush" with a swastika, who smash windows, fight the police or try to block Manhattan commuters might as well stay home and send their contributions to the Republicans."

The extremism of both of these sides is the best evidence around that Bush is bad for the health of the country. And it makes me appreciate Kerry's moderation all the more. For a while I was bothered because it didn't seem like there would be any drastic change in the system itself with the election of Kerry. Now I feel that, after watching Bush for the past four years, revolutionary extremist agendas are difficult to get consensus for without lying about what you are doing to most of the people most of the time. That is no way to run a country.

For the FBIs part, I am sure they are caught up in the neo-cold-war logic of us vs. them and are therefore more interested in quelling dissent of any kind, regardless of what totalitarian practices they have to use to do so. At the same time, I am sure that these protesters--or those who may be planning some of the more "violent" protests--feel that they also have an enemy to protect themselves from and that the "legal" means (which, as of late, are becoming confined to a thinner and thinner area of practice) are no longer effective. On both counts, however, it seems that people in the US don't like to see violence and they don't like to hear about the Feds infringing on civil liberties; no one is really worried about these activities as being "terrorist" thus the battle is really over hearts and minds (especially for those of us who may be protesting). As much as I cringe at Gitlin (aka Uncle Todd) I do think he is probably right that violent protest will only help Bush--and I wouldn't put it past the GOP to have people out there trying to make things violent so that it will look worse.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6678-2004Aug16.html

Another former Bush fan--at least in so far as he was carrying out the Liberal version of the New American Century--decides to ditch. Though I don't know how much I agree with his assessment that there were only two options about how to deal with Baghdad, but he is right, like Andrew Sullivan a few weeks ago, that even if you believed in the ends of the US war on Iraq, the means left much to be desired.

Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there's a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.

A bit over the top here, but there is obviously racism from top to bottom in this war--the basic premise of it in even Zakaria's understanding, is that the people of Iraq wanted and needed liberation, but were afraid of being liberated AND that Saddam is so very different than all the responible, reasonable white folks in the world that he couldn't be allowed to have any more of the big scary guns we'd been selling him. As for nation building, I would like for him to give some concrete examples of when that has worked and in what context.

Here is where he seems right in essance, though his use of corporate philosophy as opposed to political science is telling.

"Strategy is execution," Louis Gerstner, former chief executive of IBM, American Express and RJR Nabisco, has often remarked. In fact, it's widely understood in the business world that having a good objective means nothing if you implement it badly. "Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they're pointless," writes Larry Bossidy, former chief executive of Honeywell.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Own Goal

Krugman here on the prisoners of the american dream and the way Bush capitalizes on this in his skewed tax plan and his neo-liberal phantasy of an "ownership society:"

"The political problem with a policy favoring investment returns over wages is that a vast majority of Americans derive their income primarily from wages, and that the bulk of investment income goes to a small elite. How, then, can such a policy be sold? By promising that everyone can join the elite. "

Certainly this is obviously the tactic being used by the Bush, borrowed wholesale by the neoliberals that populate his silly little circle of performative economists. There is a local connection here at GMU, at least to the theory behind his seemingly beautiful "ownership soctiety" wherein, as Bush says, "I understand if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America." The Institute for Humane Studies here at GMU has its own version of this oversimplified illumination of the neo-classical economists, involving cute fuzzy bunnies--which, of course, is something no one should be afraid of, right? The idea, as with Bush's logic, is that people will only keep from squandering natural resources if they are allowed to own them. In the game, you are invited (along with two computerized rival poachers) to play two versions, the first where the bunnies are held in common by the public, the second when they are privately owned.

In the first version, the round only ends when all of the bunnies are gone, thus it is over very quickly and it is in your interest to kill as many as you can b/c if you don't someone else will. And, of course, there are no other social or political factors involved that might restrain you from taking as many as you can.

In the second version, you own a certain number of bunnies. There is not an explanation of how you came to own them or who you might have dispossessed of bunnies in order to do so. You just own them and are invited to see how much better the game goes when you have the incentive to not kill all the bunnies you own because then they will reproduce and you will have an unbelievable bounty of bunnies since each year the remaining bunnies you have will all reproduce (b/c they're bunnies).

In classic classical logic, there is no discussion of how this will play out if you are competing in the sale of your bunnies with a massive corporation who has bought out all of the other bunny owners, has bought up much of the land and is colluding with the mortgage company you have paid for your high-tech bunny raising equipment (which must be used in order to raise the bunnies they want on our modern market). The giant bunny corporation has the power to flood the market or otherwise control the bunny market so that you are pretty much forced to either sell all your bunnies to them or to work for them in some capacity, ending rather quickly, the little utopia of the "ownership society" since, in fact, only a handful of major bunny production corporations control the entry into the market. There is no way for consumers to effectively control this via the elegant and useless mechanism of supply and demand b/c if they want bunnies, there are very few choices and, besides, they only want name brand bunnies anyway because that's what they see on TV. It is, indeed, a fantastic society for the people who are owners; it would just be nice if there were a few more of them. Unfortunately, in such an ownership society, the only role for government is to make sure that the owners qua owners are never threatened. If you used to be an owner, that's your problem and it is your own fault that you sold out and now have to work for Bugs Inc. or whatever the name of that corporation is. And if you had tried, at any point, to join together with the other bunny raisers and keep your culture and lifestyle from being destroyed, you probably would have been branded socialists and, ironically, as enemies of the "ownership society" despite the fact that you were the original owners.

But at least the neo-classical dimwits have a simple way of telling you what you should believe. Along these lines, here is a final "money" quote from Krugmann about the still not dead plan of privatizing social security:

Social Security is, basically, a system in which each generation pays for the previous generation's retirement. If the payroll taxes of younger workers are diverted into private accounts, there will be a gaping financial hole: who will pay benefits to older Americans, who have spent their working lives paying into the current system? Unless you have a way to fill that multitrillion-dollar hole, privatization is an empty slogan, not a real proposal.

In 2001, Mr. Bush's handpicked commission on Social Security was unable to agree on a plan to create private accounts because there was no way to make the arithmetic work. Undaunted, this year the Bush campaign once again insists that privatization will lead to a "permanently strengthened Social Security system, without changing benefits for those now in or near retirement, and without raising payroll taxes on workers." In other words, 2 - 1 = 4.

My favorite part, of course, is the Orwellian reference "2-1=4." The problem is really that these people would like to be able to sum up everything with an equation. As teleological as my own little description is, they would really like to believe that all of economic life can be described in this way. Maybe someday we will be able to, but before that is possible, people should know the likely outcome of their choices over the long term and that is something about which, save the imperative that people save for the future, this economic theory doesn't bother itself.

'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation (washingtonpost.com)

a short summary/intro from near the beginning of the article on why a pesticide that has possibly caused hermaphrodite frogs is still able to be used:

"Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption."

It's a tricky thing to do, even if it is true. Who really knows how much genetic mutation is too much? It is a bit goofy, though, coming from a crowd who claims they don't want to go around playing God. Anyway, crazy how a few extra sentences in a regulation can make all the difference. Though I am sure there is more to this story, it is certainly something to be concerned about--and is just one more example of a drastic change slipped in under the post-9/11 radar by the Bush administration in the interest of combatting all those nasty scientists out there who, unfortunately, are more concerned with the possible genetic mutations in frogs (and maybe, even, someday, humans) than with the ever more important goal of making it possible for a pesticide company to make a buck. If only they could get their priorities straight. Why, they are almost as bad as the terrorists!

The New York Times > Opinion > About That Iraq Vote

A very good editorial in the NYT which takes Kerry to task not because he has changed his mind, but because he doesn't seem willing to give us the long version of that story, instead trying to justify earlier positions based on the logic and evidence of the present. My favorite point in the editorial though, which I made in an essay I have yet to type up, is that

"The Republicans have made much of this record; the Kerry campaign is haunted by replays of the theme song from the old TV show "Flipper." Mr. Bush, however, has a far more dangerous pattern of behavior. On issues from tax cuts to foreign policy, the president tends to stick stubbornly to his original course even when changing events cry out for adaptation. His explanations seem to evolve every day, but his thinking never does."

It would be nice to have a leader who was capable of complex thought. He wouldn't have to use it everyday, just in times of crisis or when the future of the country and/or the world relies upon it.

W Ketchup� | All Ketchup is not created equal

Here is the reason that democrats get clobbered: these OCD Republicans think of everything--even marketing a brand of ketchup so that the proceeds from Heinz (i.e. Kerry's wife's company) don't fund "Teresa Heinz and her liberal causes, such as Kerry for President."

My favorite part about this add is the implicit appeal to xenophobia (which is always charming in whatever context): "The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American."

It is also really amazing to look at the amount of press it has received.

McSweeney's: The Future Dictionary
of America

Last summer abouth this time, Eggers and Co. seemed to be determined to simply and somewhat quitely blaze their own path in the culture wars. They didn't seem to be consciously remaining nuetral; just attempting to change the entire terms of the debate.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/13/CM280047.DTL

They certainly have effected some changes at the cultural level and now it seems that these changes are being made at a more overtly political level as well. With the release of the "Future Soundtrack for America" and the "Future Soundtrack for America" they are consciously using their cultural capital to move change in a positive direction.

This is, I think, a very exciting development and if I had world enough and time (and more importantly enough money) I would certainly be buying and reading everything they produced. It is reassuring to see this happening. It is energizing to know that we are not alone. Things must change. And I am firmly convinced that if there isn't positive change in this country, whoever ends up sitting in that office on Penn, there will have to be some sort of popular revolt. The ISAs are getting flimsy, new ones are being constituted and unless the state figures out how to match the material reality to the cultural consciousness then it will only be able to retain its control via the fascist RSAs it has waiting in the wings. Or perhaps nothing at all will happen; we will all simply bow again to the powerful, let them go to war as they please.

It is absurd in a way that the problems of the country are so focused on the person in the oval office. Obviously the executive branch has power and that power is most obviously extended since it sprouts from one source. But there was no resistance in congress worth talking about, all the senators and reps approved this ridiculous excuse for a security/?/humanitarian mission. Why no outrage over those elections? Why no discussion of their responsibility and our own culpability in the fantastic re-election of a republican congress at Bush's mid-term? It's laughable and stupid how quickly we forget.

But I digress...the essential thing to stress is that the election, as important it is, is far from the only thing that we have to think about. We need a broad cultural change. And it isn't enough to restate the old diatribes of the past thirty years, to warm over the culture wars that the Republicans think they are fighting.

They want abortion illegal. I understand the principle of fighting this. Its fascist, patriarchal, and an infringement on women's civil liberties in the most fundamental and intimate of ways. But why not introduce and support a bill that makes abortion illegal--that plays to their moral base--but which expands welfare and employment programs, makes sex education programs based on science not ideology, offers day care subsidies and gives universal healthcare coverage to every American? If you're going to be patriarchal, after all, might as well go all the way. If they want to take care of women and tell them what to do with their bodies, they have to go all the way. How will they look when they reject this bill, the bill they have claimed to be fighting for all along, when they say, well, we care about women and we care about their children, but we aren't all that interested in helping them out once we've made them do what we tell them to about their children. Suddenly the wolf is no longer a sheep. HE (because he is a he in this case) is exposed. When they have to turn down the bill based on the complex part of their ideology that says everything else except women's bodies should be governed by the free market, their bleeding heart base will have no choice but to see they've been played.

They want to keep gay marriage from happening. Fine. Just introduce a bill that says the US government will no longer mingle in affairs of the heart or of the church: there will no longer be a category of citizens called "married." It will simply be some sort of cultural activity, sort of like joining a book club: membership migh have its benefits, but none of them will be sanctioned by the state. This certainly will make any benefits accruing to gay couples because there will simply be no way in which married people get any special benefits (this will be helped along by the whole universal health care bill passed above.) This bill will have the same effect as the GOP's pitiful attempt at amending the constitution: it is simply there to affect their base. Only this time, it isn't there to play to the base of the party presenting the bill, but to play to the opposing party's base, to show them that, not only are their representatives far from representing their interests, but that the opposite party isn't beyond compromise: they just aren't going to give something for nothing.

If they want the free market to be the only regulator of prices and the health of corporate entities, that, in the case of national parks, etc., communities should be able to decide what is done with their land and resources, then let them de-regulate every industry in the country, but increase mandatory sentances for any form of corporate fraud to ten year, make any form of tax subsidies or government bailouts illegal (free market, right) and pass anti-lobbying measures whereby anytime a lobbyist is in contact with a politician, an elected representative of a popularly recognized citizen oversight group must be present. They say we should give people in Alaska the right to decide what is done with the wildlife refuge there: fine, lets let them decide. And if the people of Alaska decide to make a withdrawal from their supply of the public wealth of the nation, well lets just make sure that the rest of us are given some sort of reimbursement: any citizen from Alaska that wants to visit any other national park in the country will have to pay a higher price to make up for their deduction. Fair enough, right.

All of that could backfire if it is done wrong, but if you could get enough people behind it and you made, for instance, the restrictions on abortion contingent on the receipt of benefits, i.e. women who might have had an abortion would only be prevented from doing so if they got their health care coverage, then it might be a good tactic for a large strategy of creating revolutionary change and a widespread re-consideration of what the role of the state is. In short, there needs to be a discussion about fundamentals not just culture wars. I feel like, on some level, McSweeney's and Eggers are working towards this goal, even if it is unstated. I also think that all of us would do well to be less polarized about these debates. The truth of the matter is that even if Kerry wins in the fall, we will all have to work very hard--together with the people who didn't vote for him--to carve out a viable future for America. I hope we are all up to the task.

Department of Art & Technology

Homeland Insecurity Advisory System

iraq

possible site for Vis cult class--though I am not quite sure what the nature of it is...

JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com

What to say about this.

Much more to be said about this:

http://www.fthevote.com/process.php

but I'm not going to be the one to say it, at least not today.
What is more interesting to me is the Carbon Defense League, the group that has started FTV, which sounds like some sort of oil company lobby, but is actually a sort of anarchist art ensemble btu with very practical projects. Though it does seem like the feds are still not too happy with the kinds of work they are doing, already arresting a few of the artists under terrorism charges. Yippee! nothing ever changes!

Weather Underground--Main Page

Watched The Weather Underground last night. After the first viewing, my first thought was that it would be a good film to show in class to talk about a variety of issues. It first and foremost provides a less sanitized understanding of both the social situation and the popular(?) response of the 1960s. Normally this era is spoken about with simple platitudes and commonplaces--or not spoken about at all: I am reminded of the student in Unit III last year who, when writing a history research paper on events in the 1960s, claimed that there simply wasn't much written about that time period because "everyone was so drugged out they don't remember anything."

For that, this film at least gives a bit of a greater understanding of what was going on (though I don't actually know what was going on, just trying to piece it together myself 40 years after the fact.) Either way, it seems like a fairly important bit of history, however one feels about it. There are certainly parallels today with other "revolutionaries" like Tim McViegh and his Turner Diary reading National Alliance pals who want to overthrow the overly "colored" government of America, redistribute wealth "back" to the white population. In fact it is sometimes striking to see the way that some of their rhetoric seems to gel fairly well, depite the fact that the latter are overtly racist--even praise racism as a positive attribute--and see Leninism (or Bolshevisim) as another part of a Jewish led conspiracy to take over the world from "white civilization," both of which are tenets exaclty the opposite of those espoused by both the SDS and the "Weatherpeople" (as Todd Gitlin refers to them, in his politically correct way).

But here is where I think the film fails to be anything more than a simple propaganda film for the Weathermen. While it certainly introduces some compelling arguments about a different kind of society and problems with this one, there is this elephant in the room that no one is really talking about. P. Smith always tells me that Americans will readily believe many Marxist ideas as long as you don't call them that. This is almost surely true with most Liberal Americans, and even some of the Neo-liberals, so long as one doesn't see the state as a vehicle for those changes. It is also probably true that you could read many of the tenets of traditional conservatism without callnig it as such and get as many people in agreement. In both cases, however, it seems to do little good to provide the ideologies as if you just came up with them. The film makes only passing references to what the FBI called the Weathermen's "Marxist-Leninist conception of armed struggle." If the goal of the film was to inform people about the movement, to clarify its place in history and not just provide a somewhat redeeming explanation of its actions, this seems like an essential element to include.

By obscuring the Leninist and Maoist background of this movement it really does a disservice to history in a variety of ways. First off, many of the national liberation movements that are discussed in the film as the revolutionary context in which this takes place were motivated by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movements. Of course, if we were all being honest, these ideas wouldn't be a challenge to Modernity and the enlightenment that produced the revolutions in the US, France and elsewhere--the US Revolution being the 0nly revolution in the history of the world that we can use as an example of the "right" kind of revolution. The irony of history is that in the place of these Marxist-Leninist-Maoist traditions which were actually strongly in the western tradition, we are now facing a decidedly anti-modern version of revolution in the Whabbist Islamists. (I'm sure that there is more to it than just being anti-modern, but that is the party line here in the USA.)

Nevertheless, by leaving out this detail, by almost wholly obscuring the communist background of these movements--not only in their theory, but also in the co-presence of many other similar movements--the film removes it from that tradition of struggle, which, for better or worse, seemed to be coming to fruition at that historical moment. It also makes it seem like all of these movements were solely motivated by the historical circumstances that existed at the time. Though this is true to an extent--and the film certainly begins to show the energy of the moment, if only from a certain perspective--it is surely the ideas espoused by "Professional revolutionaries" in almost every country struggling for independence that motivated the particular direction of that struggle.

I understand completely the reason for not highlighting this aspect. And I am ambivalent about the effect that it would have had overall. By not including a discussion of Marxism-Leninism, one therefore doesn't have to go to the trouble of explaining it as an ideology. This, of course, would surely be necessary if the discussion was to be of any value to a contemporary audience. The past century has produced a common sense--both through the ideological apparatuses of capitalism and the astounding repressiveness of much of the communist world-- about Marxism that is so aversive to even considering it as a theory or an idea in itself that to introduce it as something that seemed like a legitimate idea at the time would necessitate another 30 minutes of explanation. This explanation, in order to be effective, would have to include the historical successes and failures of both nominally communist and capitalist nations; it would have to make clear the stakes of the struggle; it would, in effect be an whole other movie. And, as much as the film seems to be giving the Weathermen too fair of a shake, it wouldn inevitably come off as a communist propaganda film to American audiences if it tried to mention Marxism as anything other than the greatest (or now second greatest) evil the world has ever known.

Of course this understanding was also present at the time and would explain much of the FBI's crazed and unlawful (gestapo? dictatorial?) actions in pursuing these dissidents. They somewhat correctly believed that these students had ties to the world communist struggle (though they might have had ideological ties, there don't seem to be any material ties) and, again, ironically, seemed ready to quell dissent in anything other than a "free speech zone" kind of way with surprising amounts of surveillance, suppression and even murder, maknig their difference from the communist police one of only degrees. But pointing out that this group was ostensibly communist and the FBI was operating with a Cold War mentality does much to illuminate why they felt it so necessary to go to these extreme measures. Not only does this help us to understand those actions, but it also serves as a warning to us today when there are already roundups of Muslims and still Daniel Pipes, a widely read columnist and a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, wrote just yesterday (quoting from an article of "late 2001:"

"Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers."
Militant Islam is the enemy; even its slickest adherents need to be viewed as such.

Daniel Pipes. "A Slick Islamist Heads to Jail." New York Sun August 3, 2004

This is the ideological climate that we live in today and it isn't all that different from that in which the weathermen and the black panthers were operating. And it seems that this repression on the part of the FBI had as little to do with the actual ideologies employed by these militants than it was a simple response to their militancy. And this militancy was only a problem in so far as it was gaining popular support. In that regard, it is as much a warning of things to come as it is a document of what was going on in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, I think that, with the proper background, this film could surely be included in one of the weeks of Unit III--perhaps the one on ideology.

Speech made by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, at the ceremony for the 51st anniversary of the attack on the Moncada: "June 21, at the Anti-imperialist Forum I read Epistle Number Two to the president of the United States, responding to an infamous State Department report on trafficking in human beings, one of those reports the government of that country usually issues, as if it were the supreme moral judge of the world. In that document Cuba is accused of being one of the countries that promotes sexual tourism and child pornography."

This is such a strange document. I've never read anything that castro has written or said, but it is so strange to hear a leader ramble on, quoting from texts and studies. This must be something that is only the privilege of a dictator: he can afford to be boring and underwhelm the television viewers. It is also strange to think of Cuba as anything more than a dictatorship--or to consider it from one polemical view or the other, i.e. as either a vicious dictatorship or a helpless pawn being bandied about by the US. Either way the speech is interesting.

The Democratic Dividend - The stock market prefers Democratic presidents to Republicans. Why? By Carol�Vinzant

I've been a bit absent, working (some) on fields, but mostly grading papers--a fairly instrumental process since it seems that both the students and I are hip to the fact that it's mostly a lot of busy work. But they get credit for it and I get paid so no one's talking.

YellowTimes.org - "America's pathetic liberals: the sequel"

Out of town for a while...the first thing I've read in a few weeks that has really turned my head. I have never felt so awed by being abused and criticized. The author makes some brillint points about the current situation but, of course, leaves no indication of what might be done about it. Typical.

though Jane mag isn't evidently interested in entering the digital age and thus I can't link to the story, the latest issue ("Summer"?) has an article on Dov Charney of American Apparel. The article is provocative and maybe even a bit disturbing from a certain perspective due to the way sex operates in the marketing of his product. In my understanding of the most dominant strain of feminist politics, his playful sexuality which seems to sort of blend sex and work (i.e. he has relationships at work with subordinates). He is also one of the chief photographers of these young girls. While the business is more ethical in terms of labor practices--and it is obvious that not *everyone* who works there is some sort of sleazy fodder for "the boss"--there is certainly a definite political issue with this.

On the other hand, much of the way I feel about this could be some lurking puritanical fantasy about the place for sex in society. It is interesting to consider the way Charney frames it in the article: "I think sex motivates everything [...] It motivates my work, too. You don't want something that's sexually driven, like panties, but then have them made in a horrible sweatshop. Like, I know my workers have a good time. They drink beer, they have relationships, they have girlfriends and boyfriends. [. . . .] It's fun to make money and pay people well."

First of, Charney is certainly not the only clothes manufacturer using sex to sell his wares, the only difference is that he is pointing to the fact that the places where these products are made--these products like the new Gap sundresses with those wildly sexual ads on TV--are made in very unsexy working conditions. Though there is certainly much to be unpacked in the way that sex is so wrapped up with consumerism, it is certainly an important appropriation (even if it is ultimately motivated by market concerns.) On the other hand, sex and consumption are certainly not all that foreign to one another and, according to Weber anyway, they would have been wrapped up with the protestant ethic in the early days of the most successful cultures of capitalism. That they have both become rampant (and interrelated) shouldn't come as a surprise, but it should make us ask how that pattern arose.

Second, the sort of appropriation that he is making--along with the various muses who work for him--seems to be picking up steam. Jane itself this month features a photo of Drew Barrymore with a t-shirt that says "politics is like sex: protect yourself...vote." Not sure how the metaphor (or is that a similie?) works, but this shirt is the subject of another article in the issue. Not very familair with the magazine itself, but it has its own thing going on which I don't really understand. In addition, sites such as http://www.beaverpower.com/ seem to be trying to tap into something like this. Their site features photos of young women wearing their t-shirts and proclaiming BEAVER POWER IS MAKING ENVIRONMENTALISM FUN AND SEXY! The site also features a quote by media and social critic Sut Jhally: "The imperative task for those who want to stress a different set of values is to make the struggle for social change fun and sexy."

To me this is a good idea--and one that is certainly not limited to the politics on the left. Last year when the Lysistrata movement was advocating an end to the war, a popular (in social location not in its mass appeal) right wing group of bloggers started a "f*ck for freedom" movement that was using the same appropriation of sex to sell the war on Iraq. Though I can't seem to find the original poster who created the graphics and started some of the movement, this particular blogger--who even got a couple of bones thrown by Sully at the time--was instrumental in spreading the word
http://www.asparagirl.com/blog/2003_03_02_archives.html
Likewise, aspiragirl launched another obscure artist into the public eye who used a similar sexualized image--this time also including a certain amount of matriachal imagery--to promote a sexy sort of violence that helped create a place for women who didn't identify with the "code pink" stance on the war--a movement which was certainly a bit old fashioned in its gender politics and was a bit overzealous in saying that all women have that peace and love stance. It, in fact, practically asked for this opposing movement.

So, to return to charney, it seems that, despite its blatent appeal to the market--and the fact that it seems the entire company runs in part on his charisma and thus would be hard to duplicate or expand too very far--american apparel is an important alternative to the much more exploitative practices of just about every other clothing manufacturer in the country. I would be interested hearing what a more feminist-minded person might say about this (which is not to say that I don't think about feminism, but that I don't think about it nearly enough to know what current trends of thought are--likewise with race studies, which would also have much to say about this particular case since most of his workforce is latino and many of the women (who also have key roles in running the company--even if they are also models for the ads) are non-white to one degree or another.) Finally, it will be interesting, now that the company is picking up steam, to see how they handle success and how they age: for instance, right now, many of these young women in charge of the company are models as well. As they get older and become both more embedded in the corporate structure and perhaps, less able to represent that young, carefree sexiness of their late 20s, will they simply hire more models giving them little stake in the company? I suppose it is something they will have to decide when they get there.

reading Lukacs "history and class consciousness"

One of the points he makes often in the 1967 preface is the problem that he had early on of having two contradictory strains of thought which he believed and of how to reconcile these--particularly with regard to the division between theory and praxis, that is, he believed something as a theorist, but in his praxis, he could see gaping holes or clear paradoxes that existed. While I sympathize with this--and have a first hand experience with it working in the SOC--I also find myself feeling this way about his theory itself.

Much of what he says about the totality and the method of marxist knowledge production is familiar to me and the way he elucidates it is striking in its clarity and logic. However, underlying all of this is a deep belief that he has in the coming revolution--no doubt inspired by the events of 1917 which were fresh on his mind in the early 20s when he wrote this. Much of what he says here sounds a bit ridiculous in its teleology. I will try to find a good example, but for now let me just present my own paradoxical position: I find the description he gives of a method important. it seems to be a clear predecessor to the position of cultural studies and I can see ways in which it also foretells althusser and the regulationist economists. On the other hand, it seems to be informed or underpinned by this firm belief in the coming upheaval and seems to largely overlook the ideological power of capitalism as a sort of elysian field that draws people to it even as it exploits and alienates them. The promise of capital has been far more powerful a force on people's consciousnesses than history--or any particular understanding of history--has been thus far. Perhaps he is saying more than this, but at this stage I feel like there is this contradiction I am trying to resolve: if this method is based on the assunption that the knowledge produced by the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" qua the totality is both linked to an a causal force in a form of social revolution that seems doomed to fail because it can't form a bulwark against a capitalist world without becoming ruthlessly capitalist itself. In other words, if this theory is rooted in this practice, can I consider one viable even as I think the other somewhat laughable in the form he presents it? This will be the question I seek to answer as I move onward in this text.

ABC news is using coverage commentary to assure americans that the rest of the world is feeling our patriotism with us because they are seeing our ceremony. There are some really money quotes here that are exceptional in their nationalism: that people around the world are watching our state funeral and experiencing our grief with us (qua 9/11) and therefore improving our tarnished image abroad is stunning in its ideological coherence. It is an absurd line of reasoning, but one that they parrot willingly--along with Terry Moran who claims that the affinity people have for the US in eastern europe is the result of reagan's policy. Within just a few minutes, all of the talking heads said just this, over and over. It may have a certain reasonableness in the context, but that doesn't make it any more laughable--especially because they seem to believe it. It is a strange way to reassure people to claim the continued love of America around the world is inspired by someone as controversial as Reagan. On the other hand, he was far less blunt an instrument than the current president. It is odd to think of reagan as nuanced, but I guess everything is relative.

Ambivalence in Former 'Evil Empire' (washingtonpost.com): "But Russia under President Vladimir Putin is hardly the free society that Reagan once envisioned. Instead, it is a country deeply ambivalent about democracy, where many "

Clearly a story that will get lost in all the hubbub. certainly there is more to the collapse of the USSR than the narrative of reagan's life can illuminate. It's kind of absurd to wrap up the disintegration of a country and a culture, a complete transformation of the world as something one guy did. It shows the fetishistic desire of people to have a clearly understandable, manichean vision of history. this is even more clearly illustrated by the fact that people seem to have no idea what is going on in Russia today--the only important point is that we ended it as a communist country. This certainly foretells the way we will think about Afghanistan and Iraq: it ultimately won't matter what happens in those countries after attention is shifted, but what "we" did to end the "evil" inside of them. Another interesting parallel is visible in this quote from the article:

Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy expert, said that for most Russians, Reagan's name is indelibly associated with his denunciation of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and "he was not loved for it."

Karaganov added, "At that time people were insulted, they thought it was unfair to them. It was not an empire already, it was an empty shell, so people believed he was insincere, an old-time Cold Warrior. Looking from the other side of the fence, knowing the emptiness of the system and seeing the leader of a powerful country lambasting the Soviet Union as a powerful threat seemed like a bad joke."

this last quote is utterly reminescent of the empty shell of a country we attacked last year--something that was done with some obvious awareness that it would be an easy fight.



watching the funeral...
bush's speech a ridiculous charicature of the story, myth about reagan. Yet it is obvious that he really believes this.

the battle hymn of the republic followed--arranged to sound like some sort of chorale.

then a speech from some minister in which he ties reagan to 9/11--or more says that reagan was already battling that force and saw clearly the threat even then. "a triumph of light," reagan was spreading the freedom qua a gift of god. In this case, Reagan is like jesus or something. Just the kind of thing the country needs to renew its nationalistic, jingoistic pride and its desire to carry on with world domination regardless of the consequences.

followed by "amazing grace"

more prayers, etc.

8 pallbearers each from a different branch of the military doing their thing to some sort of theme that is strangely reminescent of something from a jerry bruckhiemer movie

Here is something that is also interesting from Gorbechev

All of this is followed by a lot of footage with the bells in the background of the coffin going into the hearse, dignitaries trickling out of the national cathedral (such as nancy, the queen and prince of England, etc.) and a lot of really quiet, seamless footage of the cathedral. I can't figure out how they are positioned or where, but there are a lot of semi-aerial shots and many that move from a ground shot of these people leaving to a shot about ten or fifteen feet off the ground to this sort of wierd perspective shot of the cathedral towers (wish I could remember what those are called). There are also all kinds of soldiers and sailors carrying their rifles.

finally everyone if filing out of the cathedral, talking so that occasionally the mike picks up random snippets of conversation--just saw kucinich (is that possible?).

now moved to a silent shot of air force one--which is supposed to carry the coffin from DC back to CA for the interment. It's a rather strange, boring shot to move to, except that we can see the press corps and the Howitzers--both set to go off when the coffin arrives. My sense is that this is one of the only feeds allowed--the government camera or something.

Now a helicoptor arrives presumedly carrying the body which I suppose they transferred from the motorcade--something that only seems necessary if we're concerned with TV time rather than ceremonial time--it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes or so to drive to national but a helicoptor--even with the transfer time, would probably take a third of the time. This concern would probably only happen b/c of TV.

Now the helicoptor has landed and they've let the pleb out onto the tarmac to watch the transfer/create the massive crowd.

Upon second thought, this is probably not national airport but Andrews AFB--maybe making the helicoptor a bit more necessary.

honor guard is out; camera moves to follow them. low drum beat begins; band takes their positions--looks like a very big band--around the doors of the plane. Probably all musicians from Fort Meyer.

10 minutes after helicoptor landed with still no sign of the coffin. perhaps that's not where it was after all.

Now, for some reason, one of the air force one (or two?) 747s is in motion--the one that was closest to the helicoptor that landed. Now it takes off, I guess carrying the body. the cameras follow it into the overcast sky. Then focus in on the howitzers, the soldiers, the crowd, the Honor guard in front of the other plane...everything is quiet except for the sound of the plane engines...notably, it seems like all of the soldiers and musicians are men. Now they are standing almost perfectly still, at attention

more helicoptors seem to be arriving and they look more like the secret service crafts reserved for the president. But the television says that there is definitely a motorcade taking the body so I am not sure who or what took off in AF1 earlier.

TV also having an extensive conversation about Reagan...mostly about his "faith" his religion, etc.

Music For America (MfA)

nice site with some very entertaining MPGs.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: What I Actually Mean When I Say I Love You: Thirty Scenarios

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Teacher Salaries

The Cutting Edge - Why some doctors are moving away from performing surgery on babies of indeterminate gender. By Claudia�Kolker

Welcome to Landscapes of Capital

Comparative Urban Studies Project @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

An interesting book (it sounds like) by two world bank folks that presented at the program Karen is working at on Urban Development. The writers are using much of the terminology of cultural studies and sociology--especially of Bourdieu (though it could also be coined somewhere else)-- to talk about some of the problems of international development. Though I am not sure what the true thrust of the work is, this is a much more practical application of these ideas than I usually see. I appreciate this use of the language and ideas and I think it shows an inportant trajectory to follow--especially if it retains a critical edge and doesn't become instrumentalized (though the latter is all but inevitable.)

After a nigth out with Pablo-always a good time--talking about global finance, it occurs to me that another logical project that would have just as much of a connection between the two fields (maybe even more so) would be to talk about the debit card in the US and the way that it and the credit card have been framed in the terms of the millennial discourse of globalization ("it's everywhere you want to be...") they aren't necessarily unique in their use of this marketing, but the global reach of finance capital and the habitus created by these two instruments (both embodied in the ubiquitous "card") which helps to create both a dematerialized notion of money, reifying fictitous capital, and to instill a natural feeling to racking up tremendous debt. Viewing the change over time in advertisements for credit cards vs. the global finance regimes being implanted would be a fairly concrete project. It would also eliminate the need to discuss determination in any causal sense for both would be products of the same producers. There could be a chapter on the way that people use cards and it would be very interesting to see the generational differences between people who opened bank accounts for the first time in the 90s (and hence see debit cards and ATM cards as natural and normal) and those who were mostly writing checks for thirty or more years before that. A very good other option--which would have a much more doable research agenda within the time allowed.

Sean Andrews--Internship advisor, Summer 2004, New Century College

The blog for the internships.

The Village Voice: Features: The Jesus Landing Pad by Rick Perlstein

Here's a story. I am worknig on the adjective to describe it because it would be funny or kooky if these people didn't have so much power; since it is regarding a top Bush administration official (and sort of sleazy Iran Contra guy) it is between scary and disgusting. But I guess all of this is about religion even if it is also about ethnicity. Obviously these things will get worse before they get better.

Z Magazine Online, May 2004 Table of Contents

ashlee says she's reading z-mag. haven't been follownig the pub, but it is interesting enough to keep attention. Hopefully we can tweak that attention so that it is a little more academic of an enthusiasm, but at this point I'm just glad to know that someone in Texas has a conscience and a consciousness of how it should be used. She's also reading Chomsky, who is also a good starting point though often a sort of cartoon version of himself. I would like him more if he admitted the long line of people who have been doing what he is doing in an academic sense, but he is nonetheless useful in blowing the minds of young people who are hungry for that interaction and experience. It would be even more useful if he didn't make most of his arguments on the basis of flimsy moralisms and focused more on the way that, for instance, neo-liberalism undermines itself. However, it is incomparably important to instill a popular understanding of the moral compass of a system in which every socially positive aspect of economic development is basically an externality--i.e. the main goal of all exchange is simply between those two "individuals" (be they corporate or otherwise) and if it results in other more public consequences like quality education, a healthy environment, strong families, modern medical care, or their polar opposites, well then that is just "external" to the exchange. We shouldn't expect any of this from the exchange and neither does capitalism; all of this, if it happens, comprises a vast realm of externalities which the market is almost totally unconcerned with except in so far as they begin to affect the market itself by making more or less educated, healthy workers, etc. Even then, the market isn't concerned with making more or less of them--or with having a more or less clean environment: it is only concerned with the price of those resources as commodities (i.e. people, land, resources.) That these are, as Polanyi calls them, false commodities, is beside the point. Once capital has created the instruments to make them so, everything is for sale. Therefore, to compain about "Profits over people" is in some ways irrelevant and fanciful. However, it certainly flies in the face of all the rhetoric which claims that this system inherently functions to "raise all boats." And, perhaps this is the most useful thing about these popular leftist diatribes: they provide a striking dissonance to the accepted order which generates a critical distance from the status quo and an alternative subject position. If this position can then be developed more fully into a reflexivly nuanced understanding of the ideas being contested, seeing the problems and possibilities of both, understanding the "other side" is equally convinced of their morality and thus unable to be contested on those grounds except in all out ideological warfare (or direct action) in which the goal is basically to have "our side" win. This I see as equally dangerous for democratic participation in the long run, but as the hegemonic forces seem to gather all the cards for themselves, as Paul Smith quotes Baudrillard on 9/11: "It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules" (p.9). Or, in another context, a more popular voice once claimed:

Those who make peacful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - John F. Kennedy

Theories of communication--Mattelart and Mattelart

good intro that starts with Adam Smith and Quesnay and moves from there...good breakdown of the field into seven components that might be useful to my field and have a key organizing understanding of the field as being non-chronological, i.e. a circularity of these theories. Nevertheless, they still root all the theories of communication in the sociological theories (and the logic of the social) of the time. A good resource for a bibliography of Communication starting with "the social organism" and coming almost full circle to concepts of the network (perhaps fortelling Armand's later work "networking the world" which links this same sort of intellectual development (qua ideological development) to the technological development of communcation networks.


So far it has helped me to make a distinction between a pragmatist and a funcitonalist approach--which should be completely obvious but which I had not made before. I.e. the pragmatist approach has a certain set of goals it sees as necessary or desirable to accomplish--e.g. Dewey--while the functionalist approach claims to be non-partisan in its development of the facts of communication but, as Elias says at one point, had an implicit set of assumptions in the way that it defined things like a non-function or a disfunction (30).

Ambitious Vehicles: Cultural Studies and/of "The Hummer"

I have struggled a long time with how to frame this paper about the Hummer such that it is definitely a cultural studies project, that it lives up to the high standard that should prevail in a context such as this. The first thing I realize is that I cannot seem to make myself continue on one methodological path for any length of time before I come to the conclusion that there is more to the story. This is, or should be, a fundamental reflex of Cultural Studies. However, it should not only be this reflex, but also a dialectical committment to framing a rigorous method of inquiry whose conclusions can be validated by some sort of claims to the authoritative production of knowledge. The commitment to the former often overshadows the obvious constitution of the latter, which claims to anti-disciplinarity often cover over. In other words, we are always already forming a disciplinary practice even if we never pause long enough to consider the logic of that practice.

This claim is made in the terms of Bourdieu, but it could just as easily be framed in terms of Saussurian linguistics: we tend to deny the langue that structures our prole or the way that our collective prole has indirectly constituted a prole. As Volosinov and Bourdieu point out at various points but in different contexts, it is not possible to examine the langue except through the performance of the prole. The lingustic allusion is pertinent because Cultural Studies has so far been resistant to its constitution in anything more than a performative linguistic sense. I mean performative here in both the sense of performance theory or role analysis of people like Erving Goffman--wherein the self we perform is a reaction to the audience we are performing for and the rules it has set for that performance--and in the sense of J.L. Austin--who talks about performative speech in which words "do something"--such as, in cultural studies, make implicit forms to truth via a certain narrative performance. And when it comes down to it, that is what I am doing here: writing a narrative which is supposed to pretend to be knowledge which will explore the elaborate history and context of the gas guzzling bohemeth that is the Hummer.

The first impulse of the Cultural Studies scholar is often to name the theory that one is going to use and justify its use. Or, in this part of the story, the narrator may substitute a theory that s/he will prove wrong as it interacts with superior logic, alternative interpretations, or a more acceptable set of theories. In the case that the narrator appeals to the elusive foil of emperical evidence, said narrator will also have to provide a reason, theory or interpretation of how that evidence can be accepted as real: this will, of course be the downfall of the entire argument once the post-structuralists unravel it starting at that point.

In my case, I am trying to figure out how to use some combination of Marx, Raymond Williams, Bourdieu, Regulationist economics, with a healthy sprinkling of early Boudrillard, Semiotics a la Hall and basic rhetorical critique while simultaneously avoiding the passionate definistration of everything I have to say in the post-structuralist black hole that rests in the middle of the practice of CS--starting with my primary assumption: the Hummer exists and there is a system of relationships which have evolved over time in both an immediate and a global context which have helped to bring it into material existence. This material existence in our contemporary moment can be seen to have aspects which are cultural, but which we should consider as material nonetheless because of the way that cultural matter exists in our society. I think that the goal of cultural studies should be to first understand these relationships--or start building an understanding of them which can be evolved--and the social determinations and institutions which help to structure them.

I use the term determination here in the fashion of Raymond Williams to mean the limitation of options and the application of pressures. Though I am certain there has been--or maybe should be--an intense critical conversation about this definition of determination, I am accepting it as an analytical concept and have faith that it will be borne out as I move to the concrete object of the study.

(if you've been paying attention, you'll see that I just did most of the things I am supposed to do--including leaving that trace for the deconstructionists to play with. The next part of the paper is where I brilliantly move from abstract to concrete (or from my theory to my object) and show that I can tell a story about my object that proves or is aided by my theory. I think this is an important step to take and I notice most people doing it on one level or another, but I also notice that there is often a bit too close of a fit, such that the object was chosen to prove the theory and the object can do little more than do that. In my view, the reflex of cultural studies should not be to prove a theory or to prove one's knowledge of a theory. Cultural Studies should be its own theory which can illuminate its object (i.e. culture) in as many ways as possible. It should be striving to build an image of the context and the relationships that exist within it and their determinations and it should do so in order to help explain, among other things, how the objects are made to mean and how we are asked to value them. Meanings and values are both highly relative notions--as semiotics and economics like to remind us. That is why it is important that we understand the social and material relations from the very beginning and, as we complexify our image of the context, we add in layers of related meanings and values so that we can see how those relationships work as well. This process should not primarily work the other way around, assuming the subterrainian levels or reading them symptomatically from the object itself, but this is perhaps a way to open up the right questions to ask about those levels so a more rigorous understanding can be developed before returning to the object.

But here I've gotten off track and need to get back in my High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Hummer, or Humvee and move forward with my story. The controversial notion of determinism--clearly a problematic notion when we are talking about determining meanings or even values simply because we should all now realize the unfinished, non-linear and overdetermined relationship that those aspects have. But when I start with the material, political economic relationships which eventually produced the Hummer, I feel confident that determinism is the correct word to use.

This is because, from the beginning, the hummer, or more correctly the series of military and civilian vehicles made by the verious permutations of the corporate entity which eventually produced it, have always been determined AND had a determining effect on the funding and regulation of an entire class of vehicles.

In a much longer version of this discussion, I would go into all the facts of the case--assuming as I do that facts can be named. But in this limited time period I will have to give you the quick, dirty, impressionistic version of the events of the past sixty and more years that have made both the SUV and the HUMMER materially, legally and politically possible. In short, this narrative really begins to at the close of World War I, when the British and American military asked for contractors to come up with a new design for a lightweight, four-wheel drive vehicle that could carry men and a heavy machine gun (6). After some competition from Ford and another company, Willys-Overland came up with the design for the Jeep and won produced “the bulk of the Jeeps made for World War II”—making sure to trademark the name so they could sell the design on the civilian market afterwards.

Promptly after the war, the Jeep was converted to a family vehicle, producing the Jeep Station Wagon in 1946. While still not obviously a marketable property, in 1953 Willys-Overland was bought and renamed Willys Motors by Henry J. Kaiser, an industrialist who made his fortune building ships during World War II. The 1950s saw competition from the Land Rover, Toyota’s Land Cruiser, and the Harvester Scout, but Willys still retained a small consumer market in America in addition to its large military contracts.

Renamed Kaiser Jeep in 1963, it still relied on its military heritage, and had a close relationship with the US military and government, producing trucks, jeeps and delivery vans for the Armed Forces and the Postal service alongside its meager civilian offerings such as the new Jeep Wagoneer.

Thoughout this period, and into the 1970s, Kiaser Jeep enjoyed an ambivalent relationship wherein, its lack of a consumer market was used as an excuse to excuse it from a variety of new governmental regulations being applied to cars. I will address more of these in a moment. I have learned from a few years of experience that this is the best way to do what I am supposed to do, rhetorically, to make my point valid and intelligible within a CS context.

In 1970, Kaiser Jeep was bought by the American Motors Corporation. Under AMC, the civilian and military functions of the organization were partitioned. AMC continued to produce the various civilian versions of the Jeep while a separate division, AM General continued to build vehicles for the US Government along with adding new contracts for transit buses. This arrangement worked well for a few years and AM General was usually in good financial standing. However AMC, its parent company, was in and out of bankruptcy for several years.

In 1981, the Army declared it was retiring the Jeep and publicly asked for companies to compete for a contract which would design its antecedent. AM General had already been designing the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicle for two years, so it had a leg up on the other two corporations that officially competed for the bid. Thus it should come as no surprise that they beat Chrysler and Teldyne for the 5-year, $1.5 billion contract to deliver 55,000 Hummers to the Army. As AM General press releases of the time liked to taut. "It was the “largest multiyear contract for tactical wheeled vehicles ever awarded by the U.S. Army.”

The day after AM General won the contract from the Army, AMC announced that it would be selling the hot new property to LTV—an Aerospace and Defense company from Dallas. AMC used the spoils from that sale to design and market the Jeep Cherokee. This has further cultural implications in terms of the marketing of this vehicle and its success. Again, something I will have to touch on again later. I can't overly interrupt this historical narrative.

Throughout the 1980s, AM General and its parent corporation were almost continuously in Chapter 11 proceedings, but this didn’t hinder their ability to win lucrative government contracts for more Hummers, mail trucks, and personnel and cargo trucks for the US Government. Unfortunately, it did hinder AM General’s ability to keep its plants open and its workers happy. It laid off thousands of workers at various points, rehiring other workers to fill new contracts and renegotiate labor agreements. A more sincerely Marxist perspective would investigate these movements more carefully. I am obviously not sincerely Marxist enough at this moment.

By the end of the decade AM General had stopped building anything other than the Hummer and a few mail trucks. The next big milestone in the life of the company was January 16, 1991, the day the US started its last war on Iraq. While the war coverage itself was its own commercial, solidifying CNN as a news organization as well as making the 24 hour news channel a viable alternative to the networks, the star of that commercial was the Humvee. Although it had already been deployed in Panama and throughout the world in US Military operations and sold—with government permission of course—to other military contractors as well as “friendly foreign nations” for almost a decade, the saturation coverage given to the 20,000 or so Hummers deployed during Desert Shield and Storm raised their profile significantly. Along with Schwarzenegger’s pressure on the company to sell a civilian version (the company custom made one for him before the civilian version was available), AM General officials said that the war raised demand for a civilian version of the Hummer by a factor of 300.

The popularity and status of the Hummer—now, in practice, the name for the civilian version which was opposed to the, in practice, military version, The Humvee—continued to increase throughout the 1990s, but the sales of the vehicle were rarely more than 1000 a year (much like the Jeep of the early 1960s). Nevertheless, the brand had a lot of unexploited cultural capital that General Motors felt it could capitalize on—hence its purchase of the brand name in July 1999.

Here, we have come just about full circle in reviewing the corporate history of the Hummer. I feel that this is an important place to start with an examination of the object, but it doesn’t nearly begin to explore the wider context—or contexts if we are being correctly analytical. For as a commodity the Hummer has an ambivalent history in its relationship to other similar commodities.

A recent Public Affairs book by Keith Bradsher looks at these overlapping histories and pays particularly close attention to the political, economic and cultural background of these large military crossover vehicles. In between the more polemical moments of High and Mighty: SUVs—the World’s Most dangerous Vehicles and How Thy Got That Way, Bradsher reveals some of the seemingly mundane moments in the history of US regulations of the auto industry to point to the determining effect they have had on the development of the SUV as the popular commodity it is today.

He also inadvertently exposes what we might call the shifting vector of the Hummer stretching all the way back to the government contracts awarded to Willys-Overland and its post-war move to the civilian market. Though the commodity is not the same and the name on the corporation is different, the relationship exists—and is proudly displayed on the Corporate History of AM general’s homepage.

In a nutshell, Bradsher’s key point is that the allowances the various government regulatory commissions made on behalf of the manufacturer of the Jeep—from trade agreements and safety standards, to emissions and bumper height—have been exploited in the 1990s to create the vast market for SUVs that the Hummer has entered as the once and future king. Ironically, Bradsher sees this as the government protecting a company with a small, vulnerable market. In a typical passage he says:

American Motors was the smallest and weakest of the Detroit automakers. While it had bright sales staff and an extensive network of dealers, it lacked the financial and engineering resources of its rivals. American Motors struggled even during the 1960s, a golden age for the American automobile industry. When gasoline prices soared, the United States economy stumbled and auto regulations became more stringent in the 1970s. American Motors would barely survive. It would look to Washington for relief again and again. Too often, that relief would take the form of exempting Jeeps from rules aimed at making highways safer, making the air cleaner and making the American economy les dependent on foreign oil.(17)

Bradsher seems correct when he attributes most of the regulatory loopholes to the Hummer vector, but seems to overlook the fairly obvious other connection; the government wasn’t just being interventionist with regard to the market, overlooking the unsightly externalities its policies created in favor of protecting a small company and the small business owners it claimed to serve: it was also giving itself a break. Though American Motors might have been the weakest civilian manufacturer in Detroit, it was, and is, one of the largest contractors of government vehicles. By its own estimate, AM General (in its various permutations) has produced 90% of all Army tactical trucks. Thus, a regulatory loophole would not only save money in terms of designing civilian vehicles, but would also cut down on R&D for government contracts.

Of course there are certainly more issues at play than just economics in keeping standards where they are: as Bradsher contends, “the real secret of the auto industry’s political power lies […] in its vast and well-organized workforce” residing mostly in regions of unusual political influence—especially Michigan and Ohio which have been key “battleground in every presidential election for the last four decades” (60). But regardless of these various social relations or the speculation of what motivated the dearth of regulation on the category of “light truck,” the fact remains that the organization, positioned between the government and the market, which has produced the Hummer or its equivalent has been a unique beneficiary of this process and an important vector which made possible its eventual emergence as a high profile commodity in the early twentieth century in material cultural ways.

These regulatory loopholes, left open for an ostensibly minor player in the auto industry, were exploited to their full potential throughout the 1980s and early nineties, leading to the ubiquitous presence of the Jeep Cherokee and the Dodge Caravan throughout the latter part of that decade. In addition, the government support of AM General through lucrative military contracts was a boon to the development of this industry in that it was the sale of AM General--made possible by the value added to it through the Hummer contract--made possible the design and successful design and marketing of the Jeep Cherokee, which resulted in a revived notion of the Bourgeois frontierism already being proffered by the Militaristic, neo-liberal culture and economics of the early years of Reagan's presidency.

It is here where I am supposed to rationalize my approach and show the way I have proven my evidence has confirmed my theory. However, I have no choice to admit that the problem is ultimately that we have only this rhetorical kind of methodology to underpin our endeavor. For my colleagues more interested in the aesthetic, the argument is or will be made that the current marketing of the Hummer denies even this military industrial history.

What I find interesting is that even the Corporation AM General itself proudly displays this history--though without mention of the various regulatory snafus that have become enshrined as reasonable and rational. Yet without any ability to claim knowledge outside of our own narrow context, that is without a methodology that can claim some sort of truth, without a hegemonic version of CS--which, though it exists, we are unwilling to admit--we can have little effect on the larger culture except by pronouncing already digested truths about the outstanding militarism or monumental excess of the Hummer, truths which are easily dismissed by the dominant culture of neo-liberal, market oriented truth, exemplified by a GM lobbyist who shares the disdain of the SUV, saying, "It just annoys the hell out of me when I get behind one, I can't see anything, but I'd still, like they say about free speech, fight like hell for the right of people to buy one." This is not an outstanding example of free market ideology, but a sincerely hegemonic version of truth which we will be hard pressed to argue with outside of the terms of externalities and the social contract--niether of which are immune from a similar reappropriation.

In other words, though there is obviously a way that Cultural Studies makes a claim to truth as a social science, though we have a wealth of methods which would allow for a clear enunciation of authoritative integrity, we remain unreflexively committed to a pseudo-reflexivity which either refuses to dismiss certain uses of theory as truly banal or is committed to using whatever theory necessary to prove an already digested, pragmatic goal based on a tenuous and ideologically liberal understanding of the world which, as Bourdieu says of any autonomous field of productiondoesn't see any reason to prove itself to anyone other than itself. The fields he discusses most often as autonomous are those of science and art--which, coincidentally are the two fields which most resemble the practice of cultural studies. In niether case is there an absence of claims to truth or beauty but, like in our own field, the claims to truth or beauty promoted are simply ideologically inscribed by the performative authority of the people with the most symbolic capital. Normally, we have obsessed about the latter, stressing always the heretical intervention within our autonomous field--or any field for that matter. But, at the same time, we have come a long way and it is time that we started acting like it and figure out what it is that we are supposed to be doing.

This is, of course, the final necessity of any Cultural Studies project worth its name: one is supposed to attempt to make some sort of intervention in the field. A successful intervention, a way of defining it authoritatively, after all, has become a much more lucrative possibility. As I witness the continued commodification of the field I wonder when we will begin to truly police its borders rather than, as Lawrence Grossberg recently suggested to me, abandoning it altogether and starting all over with the original intervention but with a different name. This seems to be because most people have forgotton where we came from muchless where we were going. To this end, I make a provocation: any cultural study, no matter how fashionably theorized, of the Hummer which doesn't contain an understanding of its cultural, political and economic history, which doesn't consider it in terms of, as Raymond Williams called "Cultural Materialism" in more than an opportunistic way, is not Cultural Studies but something else.