FALLEN ANGELS

 SPECTACULAR GRIEF; 

Can there be any doubt that terrorists -- celebrants -- must engage periodically in A Black Mass of/and for state power? 

They lead the celebrations that people no longer have the heart for. 

 

THE TRAUMA SHOW

That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed.  Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future.  She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful.  She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model.  She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations.  I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. 

– President Obama, January 12^th, 2011.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The little child, in this case, being a useful symbol for the repressed trauma of 9/11.

The idea of 9/11 as some kind of vague, karmic punishment for cracked, varnished sins has a beautiful mirror-like symmetry in the popular culture of the Gringos.  According to the “Religious Right”, the punishment comes from God for tolerating sodomy, Viagra, abortion, Dr. Phil, etc.  For the equally puritannical Hairshirt Left, the gringos are being punished for years of nasty imperial adventures that have forever tainted the supposed “purity of their democratic ideals™”.  Amusingly, the gringos’ master psychologist, Osama Bin Laden, synthesizes both POV’s in the critiques of America found in his post-colonial communiques.  America is being punished for being an arrogant infidel state that has displeased and enraged Allah (the compassionate, the merciful, PBUH, etc.), and for being the humiliating replacement for the colonial powers whose sadomasochistic whips and kisses figure so prominently in the deeply wounded and narcissistic Pan-Arab mindset. 

Conveniently for the gringos, both ideas are also narcissistic defenses against a spiritual wound, and magically restore America’s place (despite much justified anxiety to the contrary) as the center of the newly globalized cosmos. And The War on Terror™ echoes yet inverts FDR’s famous motto: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If one must declare war on fear, then one can also guess that the battle is already lost. Ten years into it – exhausted by endless media exposure to propaganda -- people are more under the thumb of “terror” than ever, and Al-Qaeda is an old-time bogeyman who people have effectively forgotten. They have no choice.

Ellul, Propaganda: “We must also bear in mind that the individual is at the mercy of events. Hardly has an event taken place before it is outdated; even if its significance is still considerable, it is no longer of interest and if man experiences the feeling of having escaped it, he is no longer concerned. In addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion.  And as man's memory is short, the event that has been supplanted by another is forgotten; it no longer exists; nobody is interested in it any more….[ ] Actually, the public is prodigiously sensitive to current news. Its attention is focused immediately on any spectacular event that fits in with its myths.  At the same time, the public will fix its interest and its passion on one point, to the exclusion of all the rest. Besides, people have already become accustomed to, and have accommodated themselves to "the rest" (yesterday's news or that of the day before yesterday). We are dealing here not just with forgetfulness, but also with plain loss of interest…[ ] Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.” 

The beautiful challenge here (for the State, for culture workers at large) is to constantly relive the useful trauma of 9/11 without actually addressing it. So it’s the return of the repressed for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. More heaping helpings of irony: Both the gringos and Al-Qaeda are suffering from profound anxiety about Globalization. This globalization psychosis – the fear/reality of subcultures being dissolved into homogeneous and global mass techno-culture, drives on the War on Terror™.

And perhaps more interesting still is the power of the mythic idea that the wound is, in reality -- in truth, self inflicted:  things have gone so far astray from democratic ideals, that the State, in its’ neo-fascist arrogance and corporate lust for power, itself has orchestrated (or merely allowed to happen) these televised calamities. This is nothing less than a projection of fantasy power – the powerless explaining away their powerlessness and passivity before the screen (ultimately their lack of faith in democracy and the shirking of their democratic responsibility) through a fantasy of a sinisterly powerful yet secret cabal practicing secret violence (private, civil, economic, military) without limitation. A violence that can always be observed and mediated, glimpsed through the shadow, or in the "gap" of narrative. The perpetual representation of this mythic violence is more effective than its actual practice would be.

Living in the grip of remembered trauma is the necessary condition to certain aspects of tribal life. Because our memories are located in the technological, in the visible edge of the spectacle, like a patient with Alzheimer’s, we must always be reminded of what we would forget. We therefore live, gratefully, in the twilit space of myth.

The more simple and sinister truth: Nobody is riding the dragon of globalization…it is world-historical epochal chaos. Every man for herself. And Salafist Islam, so effectively characterized as an alien excrescence, is quite useful to calm globalization anxiety and thus to unite the world under the common banner of pluralistic progress and the sweet balm of techno-civilization – ideas which are the REAL SCARY stuff.

NOT ALL THE FACTS ARE IN, BUT...

(How dull. Another one on spectacular grief:)

Attractive Representative of the People's Regime is shot.

Mass Grief Event ensues, naturally, spontaneously! Like is customary and usual with any state martyrdom.

Miracle Bullet -- the very one that missed us all, enshrined in bed of velvet.

Kronos Quartet commissioned to perform The Gabby Giffords Requiem for strings and auto-tune, despite the poor woman being inconveniently alive. And in a long distance relationship with an Astronaut.

Chastened Media Demagogues Of All Stripes Recognize Themselves Mirrored in Angry, Low Status Schizophrenic Language Obsessive. 

Try hard to stutter moral tales out from the bowels of the unhappy event, with little success. Invent new grammars of ever-muted outrage.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

THE RETURN OF DICKENS

The anxiety that comes out of the post-freudian schizo-identity (as opposed to the traditional mutual confusion of tribe and self; mutual potentialities) naturally benefits the consumerist (ideology of "Choice") constructions of the self.

But this may be transitional phase...

People are becoming stereotypes, but not in a simple way -- that is, they possess an "optical", surrealist dimensionality, but psychology, which is the realm of the weak/wounded and private, the position of resistance, is giving way to the intriguing "flatness" of socio-tribal functionality.

Away from authenticity and back to social stylization of self.

Virginia Woolf: "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens (with his) characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

Zach Campbell: ....the context of emotion is usually left wholly unexamined in mainstream film & TV.  Only a false sense of "contained" emotion is to be respected. Emotions do not build upon each other; they do not have texture - the audiovisual, gestural archive of emotional cues is large enough at this moment to be drawn upon without elaboration, without narrative. We already see what a pouting lip means, what a raised eyebrow might mean, what a threatening posture entails ...the biggest aesthetic threat to competent film & TV acting is that people often hit these cues thoughtlessly and yet treat them as a register of "knowing" performance.

Woolf's "remarks" or strokes are somewhat like the Kata and Mie in Kabuki. They are devices to invite public participation in the spectacle, where the audience too has a role to play in the dynamic exchange. Kata and Mie have the power of artifice because we recognize that we often don't behave as idiosyncratic, withholding Brandos, but as clearly telegraphing types. We may not need for people to applaud the formal perfection of the performative move, but we at the very least want to be recognized. There is a not-that obscure virtue in the sophistication of fulfilling typage in an aristeia with regard to one's culture or audience.

Mahmood refuses the ideals of liberal philosophers who insist that individual choice is the prime value. She describes these Egyptian Muslim women's strong desires to follow socially-prescribed religious conventions "as the potentialities, the 'scaffolding' through which the self is realized", not the signs of their subordination as individuals. She argues that their desire to take the ideals and tools of self-reference from outside the self (in Islamic religious practice, texts, and law) challenges the usual separation of individual and society upon which liberal political thinking rests. She tells us we need to question the (modern American) distinction that underlies most liberal theory between "the subject's real desires and obligatory social conventions".

PALACE COUP

The people have spoken.

& MSNBC goes ever more meta, replaces self described "Angry Weatherman" with cute, loveable puppy, Bong Cha, who also holds the rank of Colonel in the North Korean Air Force. Puppy to be voiced by gringo humorist, Roberto Smigel.

American leftists overwhelmingly feel the move better reflects their need for a televised political mascot & champion.

MEA CULPA, MEDIA MAXIMA CULPA

...our most important spy.
Wounded in the line of duty,
parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties,
urging Fidel Castro to abandon fields and castles.
Leave it all and like a man,
come back to nothing special,
such as waiting rooms and ticket lines,
silver bullet suicides,
and messianic ocean tides,
and racial roller-coaster rides
and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.
I know you need your sleep now,
I know your life's been hard.
But many men are falling,
where you promised to stand guard.

Let me see if I have this right:

Two very entertaining gringo television "demagogues" make a very unpostmodern plea for sincerity and civility on the eve of a depressing election, and lead the crowd in a rather threadbare Woodstock of Mortification, and this whole program is branded as a sanity restoration...?

They don't call it Comedy Central for nothing.

GRAPHIC GOES GLYPHIC

We quit the Official Thingified World of Things with its rational lexicon long ago. Away from objecthood into....a un-place where it has become improper to speak even of reification anymore.

This was what Antonioni was so relentlessly after in that fierce middle period from Red Desert to The Passenger:

Antonioni: What interests me now is to put the characters IN CONTACT with things, because what counts today are things, objects, matter.

Giuliana panics not at what the world of objects MEANS, (what you would find in the ordinary expressionist world of Stendhal or Flaubert, -- & of course, Hollywood's) but rather at its' cryptic, occulted non-messages. Because things now have a sort of animal spirit and they chatter incomprehensibly -- rather like Princess Raccoon, if you would encounter her in real life. Communication frighteningly without expression. Grandiloquent Blankness. Strange OMENS of Further Abstraction and Separation.

Marxist unease (Panic!) with the fetishism of the commodity lies with the suspicion that the idea hijacks the scientific and inevitable character of revolution and leads ideology into what is, frankly, animism. The superstitious world of magic, the occult, and the primitive.

Two basic polarities in language that also apply to cinema and to reality:
explicitness and ellipsis. And the spirit-substance halfway in between is The Glyphic, which splits the difference.

BANZAI!!

To use a John Milius metaphor:

The public's attention is one of Nimitz's strike forces, a phantom, position unknown, and a blockbuster is a kamikaze attack -- in other words, a move of beautiful desperation.

Between them is the whole ocean.

Asked about the soul of Hollywood,
I would say
That it is
Like wild cherry blossoms
glowing in the morning sun.

DEMAGAGARY

How many times do I have to tell you, joto, it's never Fascism if you AGREE with the idea...

SOFT POWER

Software is an interesting word, isn't it?

In briefest summary, I was writing programs on the SWAC in 1953 at UCLA.  At the time, the SWAC was one of about a dozen computers in the whole U.S.  When I first hoked up the word -- to distinguish programs from hardware, of course -- people said, "Huh?"  I explained that 'soft' meant changeable.   People then and for years later kind of sneered "Software...[pause]...I see..."

Digital turns all cultural durity into software.  I suppose that's what people mean by the New Age.

STATE TRAUMAS

(one of a continuing series on spectacular grief)

Did you hear the one about the aircraft full of famous Polish marytrs that crashed on the border between commemoration and oblivion...? No? Well...

Here's how Rod Serling would write it...

The dignitaries are on the plane, flying to commemorate the tragic and fatal event. The plane lands safely. But it's 1940, and they are rounded up by the NKVD to join the rest of the Polish officer corps. The dignitaries, mostly wheezing old men, try to warn the others about what's coming, about the history of soviet treachery, 1980, etc...They are accused of senility, naturally. One young officer believes them, and leads an escape of the oldsters, back to the guarded presidential plane. They seize the plane, but the engine is riddled with 1940 vintage bullets, and the plane crashes, back in the present. Investigators find the body of the young officer, whose name is on the death lists in the official accounts of Katyn, along with the mystery of his pre-war uniform. The anomaly is hushed up. Koniec.

Back in "real" Poland, mad grieving crowds, surround the memorial cross in front of the presidential palace.

"First they finished Kaczynski off and now they want to hide the truth about it," said Katarzyna Zaluska, a 35-year old office worker, giving vent to a suspicion among some supporters of the late president that the Polish government shares responsibility for the crash.

Terror is best experienced in crowds, of course. It's best that the crowd sees its terror, humiliation and grief amplified by the screens.

Demurred one illustrious & sober public intellectual:

"In any case, when tragedy struck, the human attitude prevailed. Everyone is terrified to see human bodies torn to pieces. Everyone travels by air. Everyone is terrified."

By accident, he's hit on another beautiful hegemonic linkage. This is how systems become mental environments -- and then, scaling down, set the dimensions of mild inner gulags.

Someone tried to ride the dragon of the nation's grief, but the thing was too wild. A heightened, exalted state.

The production of Grief in perpetuity. Direct "access" to trauma-events. At odds with the usual way of transforming trauma into myth.

Nothing can be settled. The meaning can always be dragged back into the court of mediation. And it will be. The aircraft perpetually flying in the limbo airspace between 1940-2010.

Nightmares fed by the restless, paranoid feeling of a secret life beyond the merely visible.

THIS IS A PROBLEM...MAYBE

There is no religious sense of sacrifice in the destruction of digital data.

no dark joy.

There is no will to destroy zeros and ones.