topic by
John Calvin
7/10/2002 (15:33) |
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Well, the Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom Campaign is going very badly both at home and abroad. Only a few countries are offering any kind of support and most of that support is purely formal- there are some very amusing articles around the net detailing the so-called 'contributions' of our purported allies. Latest reports even have Tony Blair making jokes about Bush ( Quaylizing him). At home, both Congress and the Press are jumping all over the President on practically every issue. Need-less- to say ,this 'dire' state of affairs has a profound impact on the discussion here at MER. The number of brainless dolts posting total rewarmed nonsense from Fox news has definately increased. The spectre that their hero George Bush is failing and falling into general disrupte is very discomforting to these characters and they feel an urgent need to come to his defense and to somehow boster the world view upon which the President's failing policies are predicated. Why? I have tried to explain why on a number of occasions in the past, with no obvious effect. Neve-the-less, I think a handful of people might getr something out of the following remarks by an anthropology professor as USC San Diego:
'The new patriotism arises from deeply felt contradictions in U.S. society. It arbitrates anxieties about changes in gender roles, jobs, communities, and collective identities brought on by deindustrialization and economic restructuring. Narratives of national honor take on increased importance as the practices of transnational corporations make the nation state increasingly powerless to advance the interests of its citizens. Private anxieties about isolation, loneliness and mortality fuel public spectacles of patriotic identification that promise purposeful and unselfisah connection to collective and enduring institutions. The new patriotism serves vital purposes for neoconservative economics and politics, providing psychic reparation for the damage done to individuals and groups by the operation of market principles, while at the same time promoting narcissistic desires for pleasure and power that set the stage for ever more majestic public spectacles and demonstrations of military might.
The dynamics of militaristic spectacles have a self-perpetuating character. Oedipal and preodeipal identities play upon one another: regression to primitive desires generates anxious longing for identification with powerful patriarchal authority; systematic submission to superior authority gives rise to anxious feelings of lonliness and isolation, which in turn fuels the desire for even more connection to powerful authorities. In 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', Hannah Arendt suggests that people in putatively democratic societies become ready for totalitarianism when lonliness becomes a routine feature of everyday existence. The combined effects of de-insustrialization, economic restructuring and the oppressive materialism of a market society where things have more value than people feed a sense of lonliness and isolation. Privitization prevents people from active engagement in civic society, from participation in processes that might lead to a healthy sense of self. Militarism becomes one of the few spaces in such a society where a shared sense of purpose, connection to others, and unselfish motivation have a legitimate place.
Yet while providing logical responses to the diminution of collective and individual power in an age of deindustrialization, the new patriotism encourages us to evade collective problems and responsibilities rather than to solve them. It interferes with serious public discussion of the world we have lost and the one we are building through deindustrialization and economic restructuring. It promotes male violence and female subordination, builds identification with outside authorities at the expense of personal integrity and inflames desires that can only be quenched by domination over others and a taste for gloating over the perils, pains, and slaughter of fellow-men whom one does not know, but whose destruction he desires in a blind and artificially stimulated passion of hatred and revenge.'
'The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; How White People Profit From Identity Politics' , Chapter 4, 'Whiteness and War' by George Lipsitz, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1998.
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