Imperial Violence On a Blockbuster Budget

Several months after the fact, but more scorn can always be heaped upon apologias for military-industrial oppression, am I right?

Unlike the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, I didn't like The Hurt Locker - not that it's utter shit. The script suffers from a post-24 lack of narrative focus, but the film's strengths are plain to see: the actors acquit themselves admirably, and the cinematography is gritty & gripping. But like Quentin Tarantino's magnum o' post-modernism Inglorious Basterds, Kathryn Bigelow's film is a smug tribute to American hegemony. While Tarantino reiterates the United States' claim as the sovereign of narrative (fictional and, it's presumed, otherwise), Bigelow cheerleads the great American pastime of the last half-century: state-sanctioned violence.

As many a writer has been hasty to point out, The Hurt Locker is ostensibly a film expressing America's disillusionment with military endeavour. Instead of the square-jawed stoicism & heroics of WWII epics, we witness the tears, dread, incessant stress, and boderline breakdowns of the modern American soldier. But this doesn't encourage the United States to holster its weapon and retire to the quiet discomfort of being a former imperial power. Quite the opposite: by emphasizing moral ambiguity & displaying its scars (psychic & physical, societal & personal), The Hurt Locker shows that we are intimately aware of the chronic difficulty of military engagement - and yet we accept these hardships because such are the costs of the imperial adventure. We accept these hardships because of our nobility, our conviction, our strength of will. The locals are an anonymous throng of shape-shifty brown folks whose true intentions are foggy & dubious, but we are not so cowardly to deny our mission. Though our methods are flawed, our intentions are good. Though we doubt & struggle, we will not betray our commitment.

This is the same self-assurance of moral superiority that Žižek saw in the "darkening down" of such modern bastions of justice-in-action as James Bond and Batman. The "Boy Scout in blue" certitude of old-school superheroes doesn't reflect the endless complexity of contemporary society. As our iconic lone wolves suffer from all-too-familiar faults (e.g. doubt, vengefulness, lapses in reason) they reassure us that they understand the full scope & equivocality of the situation, while enacting their mission precisely as though there were no obscurity or ambiguity. Before, we enjoyed our violence because it had the full weight of Good & Truth behind it. Now, we enjoy our violence because it is difficult, invigorating, sadomasochism as proof of our dedication & macroscopic understanding. And make no doubt that we enjoy it, as attested by the the absurd slo-mo pimp stroll army recruitment ad of The Hurt Locker's final minute.

Bigelow's next project is slated to be "an adrenaline-filled exposé of life in the notorious triple border region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay." I'm curious to see how bare she'll strip the scenario of social, economic, and military entanglements so dense it makes Traffic look like a Jim Jarmusch short. No doubt the film will prove that, asymmetric enforcement be damned, America has the intestinal & technological fortitude to make the difficult decisions in the War On Drugs, and the darkly-pigmented locals will be dealt with all the depth & feeling of a first-person shooter.

Is This Not Ideology At Its Purest?

I gotta stop doing this: taking the bait on someone else's blog by responding to someone far over my political horizon, hijacking the comments thread and generally being a bloviating bore. But man, did I blow it this time - I raised the hackles of a 9/11 Truth evangelist. Yeah, one of these guys. And now my keyboard is paying for it in exponential wear 'n' tear.

I've never thought the narrative offered by the US government was entirely satisfactory; I'll even hazard there was actionable intelligence about the terrorist plot that was deliberately neglected by the Machiavellian vampires in PNAC. (Condi could probably back up such a claim.) But every alternate telling of the event - including though not limited to controlled demolition, squibs, stand-down orders, missiles, remote-controlled drones, and, of course, the Jews did it - is equally pockmarked by inconsistency, pseudoscience, and circumstantial evidence. Not that this dulls the fervor of the 9/11 Truth crowd, no sir! The great irony of the "Truthers" is that, as much cross-examination to which they subject the official account, they never betray the slightest doubt about their own conclusions. The last time I saw someone so brassbound of his own convictions, it was, uh... that retarded cowboy fellow who's been running the country for the past eight years.

I can't discuss the 9/11 Truth movement without hearing Slavoj Žižek's de facto motto ringing in my ears: Is that not ideology at its purest? The 9/11 Truth weltanschaaung is a meticulously fantastic, all-encompassing construction to which exceptions or contradictions only prove the rule, which in turn denies the exceptions or contradictions as being such. It's as impregnable and self-affirming as any other ideology, from Adorno's miserablist Marxism to Catholicism to Scientology. In short, it's fucking impossible to entrust with even a modicum of self-skepticism.

So why am I giving more airtime to this armchair-CSI lunacy? Well, I originally intended to use this space to continue the demagogic ping-pong match without co-opting any more of Jodi Dean's comment thread. But I'll save my breath and instead refer you to the article that kicked off this whole melee: the Biblically-long debate between Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin hosted by Alternet. Grab a cup of coffee, 'cuz it's over thirty pages long (though the fur doesn't really start flying until Part II). Almost any argument that was made at Dean's blog (or could be made here) is covered somewhere within the article, so give at least a little of your time.

I'll admit my bias out of the gate: Taibbi is one of the most thorough and viciously funny journalists on the beat, though his increasingly frenzied, nouveau-gonzo style reveals (as Tim Krieder noted) "a man whom coverage of national politics has driven to the brink of utter and irredeemable loathing of mankind." But I also have to give Griffin his due: he presented himself as diplomatic, patient, and attentive, ditching histrionics for investigative scrutiny. This is in stark contrast to the usual spittle-hail and witch-hunt hysterics through which Truthers deliver their arguments. Perhaps the 9/11 Truth community might make more headway if their massaged their PR a bit. The hectoring tone, juvenile monitions to "wake the fuck up!", and smug sighing over having to thanklessly point out "the blindingly obvious" aren't exactly endearing.

The mistake Truthers make is like confusing Bush with Batman: the forensic microscopy and fanciful dot-connecting ignores the complete picture. The day the WTC was destroyed, that very afternoon, I was already more terrified about what Bush's response would be. I'll borrow some words from Žižek to avoid sounding monstrously callous:

The U.S. just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York snipers and gang rapes, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

The attacks were like punching a gorilla in the nose: an irrationally bold gesture of defiance that would temporarily stun the beast, but then set its blood to boil. Run to the hills, motherfuckers.

Bringing this back to my initial point on Jodi Dean's blog, it's not as though any of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories need be proven true to indict the Bush (and Blair) administrations for their heinous offenses. The whole of the American & British cabinets could be dragged into the Hague right now and receive the same charge dispensed at the Nuremberg Trials: planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace. This is without considering the plethora of other disgusting transgressions that are sufficiently well-documented that I needn't recount them all here.

The question might become one of priorities: do we want BushCo. punished for being the amoral, imperialist hegemons they are, or do we want to bicker endlessly over incomplete and corrupt evidence? From a legal standpoint, a 9/11 Truth prosecution of the Bush Administration is unfeasible: in the Taibbi/Griffin article, Griffin's courtroom analogy posits himself as a defense attorney, who needs only establish the shadow of a doubt, which the official 9/11 narrative is certainly not beyond. But then neither is the 9/11 Truth version of the event.

Dismayingly, I suspect the real question at the root of this interminably dull argument is: what do we care about more, 2751 dead in New York City, or (as of today) 4180 Americans, 314 other coalition members, and an estimated 1,273,378 Iraqis? Do we care more about our fellow middle-class Starbucks customers, or a bunch of gun-toting pseudo-barbarians fighting over a beige wasteland? Are we more disturbed by a traumatic schism in our quotidian Western comfort, which we must fill with whatever fragmented fantasy we can possibly cobble together from material scraps, or by an ongoing, slow-burning slaughter of colossal scale that nonetheless is out of our empathic view?

I don't particularly want the answer to those questions - but then, that's probably exactly what a 9/11 Truther would've said about me anyway.

Exit Only

I recently made use of my insomnia to take in this debate from last year between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza. As hard as it is to forgive Hitchens his last seven years of White Man's Burden-esque bullying, he's still got the sharpest knives in the antitheist butcher's block. (Unlike Richard Dawkins, whose utopian faith that humans are perfectable mirrors that of his targets; or Sam Harris, who - unlike Hitchens - makes time in his book to advocate the nuclear extermination of Islam.)

Meanwhile, D'Souza appears to have taken the same mail-order public speaking course as my elementary school principal: his head mechanically ping-ponging like a lawn sprinkler, D'Souza over-enunciates in a torpid lilt as though the audience hasn't yet learned to tie their own shoes. That this mental mosquito armed with cherry-picked evidence is not only a Stanford prof, but a leading intellectual among the American chattering class makes me want to award Russell Brand the MSNBC anchor's chair and promptly hang myself.

Given that almost every word D'Souza utters is easily rebuttable, I'm not typing the X-hundred pages of blogspace required for a complete evisceration of his idiotic demagoguery. I'll leave it to you to decide if (a) watching a fundie and an antitheist catfight on C-Span is worth 90 minutes of your life, and (b) it would be better painstakingly to refute every straw man and tautology D'Souza burps out or just sock him in the throat. Here are the highlights for those not quite curious enough to be arsed watching:

• Hitchens has achieved a Howard Stern-circa-'85 anti-fame, judging by the number of people who attend his talks just to cheer on whatever faith-enthusiast he's facing off against.
• Jump ahead to part 7, around the 7:00 mark, and dig on the more-books-than-brains pseud (in a trucker shirt!) who couldn't find a way of asking, "Ex nihilo, nihil fit - yes or no?", that took under a minute.
• Immediately following, the next question inadvertantly revealed a great deal about the fickleness of the "faithful," as Hitchens was asked by a Tongan gentleman, "What do you have to offer us as an atheist?" Put another way: I'm willing to trade up, so what's in it for me?

That last point hung neatly on a thread that ran throughout the debate. If what people tell the Pew Research Center can be trusted, athiests are the most disliked constituency in America. If you compiled a one-sheet of the false accusations & hysterical indictments made against atheists and replaced the proper noun with "Jew," you'd Godwin yourself faster than you could say "shemozzle." The faithful constantly prod athiests to prove their core contention - that is, to prove a negative, despite the fact that (as Hitchens said) if atheists are right, "the world looks how it would look without god."

The crux of the theist/atheist battle is faith: those with see it as their greatest virtue, while those without see it as the worst kind of wish-thinking. The problem of faith, of course, is that it's as unprovable as god's inexistence. Consequently, the defensiveness often exhibited by the faithful in debate can be read as the nagging ache of the phantasmic/fantastic doubt: "What if we ARE wrong?"

This question of being wrong - of acting irrationally, of inherent inconsistency - is far from some faith-specific quirk: it's the very keystone of ideology. As Žižek would say, it's one of "these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to." Another possibility is that someone would know damn well they're wrong, but continues unabashed - in which case, we're dealing not with an ideologue but a fetishist. But in either case (aware that they're wrong, or unaware that they're wrong), people live as if they were right. Which is bloody infuriating.

I've recently been engaged in some old-school correspondence with my grandfather, next to whom it's very easy to feel stupid. But I was thrilled to recognise this sentiment in his last letter:

[Deconstructionists] remind me of when I was studying political philosophy away back at Cape Town University after WW2, and there was one guy who was a Marxist and had the answer for everything. I'd be sitting trying to worry out my understanding of some writer - Hobbes, Marx, Hegel, or whoever - while this guy always had the answer - THE answer, from his comfortable Marxist standpoint. In fact I had, and have, a lot of time for Marx' analysis, but also some doubts. I used to envy that guy in a way, for his certainty, his lack of doubt.

This is precisely why I'm such a fan of Žižek, "an improvising philosopher, rather than a composer of philosophy," as it was put over at Endschwindet und Verghet. Hokey though his billing as "the Elvis of cultural theory" is, it's perfectly apt: a populist, ad-hoc repackaging of ideas derived as much from junk culture as from "authentic" sources. Being the toe-dipping philosophical hobbyist that I am, I'm considerably more comfortable with this frothing goofball than amongst the button-down self-seriousness of "authoritative" intellectuals. There's an ease in an enthusiastic sloppiness that can readily result in error that can't be found in obscurantist efforts at some abstract infallibility.

My growing distaste for any ideological orthodoxy stems not a little from the now-deafening furor about carbon footprints, eco-friendly food, renewable energy, etc. Suffocating under so many mixed messages about how best not to be a wasteful bastard, there festers a guilt so bottomless that, were it a combustible semi-solid, our energy needs could be filled forever. Of course, this guilt is precisely the consumer impetus that capital breathes, eats, and shits. That our problems can be solved by consuming less, consuming ethically, but consuming nonetheless is a dangerously brilliant bit of three-card-monte. As K-Punk put it recently, "the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief;" all they do depend on is "a subject who is open to all kinds of fluctuating identities and who is therefore ready to be plugged into every commodity." (That's Dany-Robert Dufour via Jodi Dean.) And once again, the most confounding aspect of this ethical hedonism is its certainty, the smug self-assuredness that drops the curtain on the conclusive truth that All Your Carbon Are Belong To Capital.

Like my grandfather, while I do somewhat envy the womb-like warmth of self-delusion, I've always kept Orwell's caution against all True Believers close to my heart. Even in the instances where I agree with the essence of someone's stance, I find it slightly sociopathic if they're not even dimly aware of contradiction or insufficiency - in which case, I see fit to invoke the eternal words of the Dude:

I'm not saying you're wrong, Walter... you're just an asshole.