On Jared Loughner’s Politics
Why is Jared Loughner a Right-Winger?
Watching Jared Loughner’s youtube videos just a few hours after he’d pulled the trigger, keeping a window open on my computer screen in order to keep tabs on the Congressperson’s condition, reading the updates on deathtoll and wounded (six were killed, including a nine year old girl, while 13 were injured) it was difficult to judge the significance of the mediation. Forty-seven years earlier the US public had been able to witness the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on television as it happened–but they couldn’t control the replay button or click on a link to John Wilkes Booth or Leon Czolgosz.
I, on the other hand, was following the Gifford massacre on twitter. A virtual friend retweeted a link to one of the Loughner’s highschool friends and I clicked. The spectacular nature of the shooting became even more difficult to fathom. Was I getting farther away or closer to the truth?
On my feed a consensus quickly formed. The story shifted from Giffords and her martyrdom and onto a more famous female leader, namely Sarah Palin. Palin had used rifle scopes in some campaign ads, and people were pointing to her violent rhetoric and Jared’s supposed right-wing tendencies and making the connection. But in the youtube window the alleged shooter creeped onto my screen wearing an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask and a black hoodie sweatshirt. He stood next to an American flag planted in the Arizona brush, and the heavy metal music of Drowning Pool blared from my computer’s speakers as Jared set the flag on fire.
“Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies hit the floor.”
In order to understand the politics behind the Giffords shooting it isn’t enough to point to images of the Tea Party and Sara Palin, it isn’t enough to shed tears over the loss of civility. Understanding requires examining Jared Loughner himself, and how he fits perfectly in an America that’s been underwater for over thirty years.
Controlling the Grammar
Jared Loughner is a reactionary, a right-winger, but by this I only means that he fits neatly into the politics of an American generation born in mid-air. His youtube videos refer to theories put forward by far right figures such as David Icke and David Wynn Miller, to conspiracies involving lucid dreaming and the grammar of mind control, but this too only puts him more firmly inside the mainstream. Ours is a country that has been mired in a paranoid politics, at sea in an unreality, for at least forty years.
Consider the 1998 film “the Truman Show.” You may remember that, in the film Jim Carey realizes that his life is a fraud. His wife is an actress who is paid to sleep with him, his best friend is a pitchman for the beer they consume together as they pal around, and Truman himself is the star of a reality television show that has replaced actuality. Truman lives on a set, and his ambitions, his desires, and even his imagination are directed and suppressed by a script that he’s had no hand in writing. As the movie progresses Truman slowly wakes up to the fraud—he rushes out of the pattern that is his scripted reality and finds the gaps. He enters a building that is only an empty shell and finds groups of extras waiting to go on; he watches traffic and discovers, that the same vehicles and pedestrians traverse the same few blocks repeatedly—he finds the loops and facades and he begins to suspect.
“How can I be expected to go on with the performance under such conditions? It’s unprofessional,” his wife complains during what is supposed to be a marital spat. She holds up a brand name coffee and smiles a phony smile, and offers to make him a cup.
By the end of the Truman show the controllers on the moon have been driven to desperate acts. The director is forced to cue the sun early. The extras and actors have stepped out of their roles and are working together to sweep the set. Walking arm in arm they expose themselves in order to track down Truman. It turns out that Truman’s cooperation has always been vital, but this cooperation has, by the final reel, finally evaporated. The moon becomes a search light before the director is forced to cue the sun, the water parts, and Truman is found sailing away from the lie of his life as television and into the eye of a storm.
This is the world of Jared Loughner. The last decade has been nothing other than the turning on of the searchlight on the moon. It has been nothing if not the revelation of the method.
But, as any good conspiracy theorist will tell you, the revelation of the method is the final trick that keeps the conspiracy going, and it seems significant to consider what Jean Baudrillard said about the Matrix.
“The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment … The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.” -Jean Baudrillard
While some might argue that the same could be said of Baudrillard himself, we should pause here.
Loughner’s grammar obsession, his striving after conscious dreaming, the video of his walking tour of Pima Community College that he entitled “My Genocide School,” this can all be understood as examples of the confusion brought on by hyperreality. If the moon is a search light and reality itself a computer program, then the radical, the free man, must become a code breaker or an electrician. If solid, material reality has been abolished, then the real must be the signs used to describe this world that no longer exists.
The same holds for Loughner’s obsession for a return to the gold standard, his desire to create a new currency. In a world where the real economy has been usurped and then wounded by a financial sector stands exposed as bankrupt, Loughner turns to the ultimate financial instrument, to currency itself, as his new real.
In its entry on Hyperreality the free encyclopedia Wikipedia describes our situation in the following way:
“When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal.”
In Slavoj Zizek’s film the Reality of the Virtual he points out that difference between the right and the left can be boiled down to a difference of the perception of the world. A lefist perceives the world as fundamentally conflicted. For him society has conflicts and contradictions built into it from the start. Whereas the rightist sees the world as an organic whole that is only put into conflict due to outside interference. For the right-winger there is a real world, an organic whole, that one can hope to return to.
Certainly all of the immediate liberal explanations of the shooting were reactionary if we take this definition seriously. The social field wherein the Giffords shooting took place was depicted as an integrated whole and it was only due to the invasion of bad actors, of a lunatic, that everything went wrong. Calls to change the climate or tone of rhetoric aren’t speaking to the fundamental antagonisms in society but presuppose a neutral space wherein, if people just played by the rules, the political conversation could be worked out to everyone’s benefit.
The way people arrived at a decision about Jared’s politics is another case in point. Rather than ask whether Jared recognized the ways our society sets up divisions, even relies on divisions and inequities in order to function, or asking the more pertinent question of how those internal divisions and contradictions might influenced and or determined Jared’s actions most people went through a check list of political positions searching out where Jared stood on the “the issues.” And when this wasn’t easy to decipher they sought to break the code of his schizophrenic writing in order to determine who his allies or influences were.
In fact, Jared’s politics are contradictory and confused. He was aware of the class divisions and inequalities in the system, but thought that he could fix them by fixing the currency, by cracking the code, or by pulling a trigger.
At the end of the movie the Truman Show Jim Carrey finds an exit out of the dome and steps into the real world. We don’t have that option, and neither did Jared Loughner.
#Mooreandme and the Purple Rose of Cairo
The Split In the Capitalist Left
There is a split in the Capitalist left over the rape acccusations aimed at wikileaks founder Julian Assange. On the one side liberal icons like Michael Moore and John Pilger spoke up to defend Assange and posted bail for him–Assange was being held for possible extradition from the UK to Sweden where he would undergo another round of questioning about rape accusations from two different women– while in reaction to this support the feminist blogger and commentator Sady Doyle created a twitter campaign under the hashtag of mooreandme in order to demand an apology from Moore and television personality Keith Olberman. The campaign focused on a single comment made on Olbermann’s program Countdown and a retweet of a link to an online essay that identified Assange’s accusers by name. While the names of the accusers have been available online and in the media since August, linking to their names violated the principle that women making accusations of rape should be protected from retribution and remain anonymous.
What is at stake ideologically in this split in the American left is not only an answer about where people ought to focus their sympathies and energies, but more broadly the question being asked is this: What struggle is definitive? The struggle for information and against state censorship or the struggle for gender equity and against the rape culture?
Let me state my position openly and baldly here at the start: I don’t believe that either struggle is definitive or central.
At spike-online Brendan O’Neill explained the stituation in his essay “Why Wikileaks is Now Splitting the Liberal Elite”:
“…we’re witnessing a clash of miserabilist, conspiratorial outlooks, with one side insisting that all women are at potential risk from ‘rape culture’ and the other side arguing that Assange is at risk from the military-industrial complex’s ‘power culture’.”
O’Neil named the ideological divide, but he was too quick to dismiss the realities underpinning both ideologies. In the end he flippantly suggested that both factions seek a reality check, as if a neutral real world was available to us.
The late historian Howard Zinn was well known for taking a position against neutrality. The author of A People’s History of the United States, took a position against objectivity and for engaged scholarship. His memoir was entitled simply: “You Can’t Be Neutral (On a Moving Train) and when he was called upon to defend his abandonment of objectivity he would explain it this way:
“From the start of my teaching and writing I had no illusions about objectivity, if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a journalist (or any one telling a story) was forced to choose, from an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And the decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.” -Howard Zinn
It is not only history or scholarship that can never appear in a neutral void, but reality itself that always presents itself within an ideological Matrix. “The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek explicates this unnerving situation in his critique of the famous red pill vs. blue pill scene from the film the Matrix:
“But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions; but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill, which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive… not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.” -Slavoj Zizek in the Perverts Guide to Cinema
The Realities in these Illusory Miserabilist Outlooks
So what are the realities involved in Sady Doyle’s ideological stance against Moore’s dismissal of the charges against Assange as Hooey? And just what fiction was motivating Moore?
Let’s start with Doyle. The real kernel at the center of the #mooreandme campaign is this: We live in a rape culture, and in this culture rape is normalized and minimalized. The most extreme description and indictment of the the rape culture was put forward by Andrea Dworkin who argued that the rape culture, based as it is on gross inequality between men and women, “eroticized women’s sexual subordination to men.” According to Dworkin all hetrosexual sex involves a level of coercion, humiliation, and disintegration. In fact, in a society based on domination and inequality all sex involves coercion and objectification. This is why, even in homosexual relationships, there are usually masculine and feminine roles at work, tops and bottoms, femmes and butch types, masters and slaves.
This rape culture is not a natural fact intrinsic to gender, but a social fact stemming from the symbolic structure that supports sexual relationships. The symbolic order is not immutable, it is a construct that is socially produced and reproduced. The problem, the paradox, is that efforts to modify this rape culture always take place from within it, and almost universally fail to recognize the larger symbolic structures that are at work. This culture of rape, of gender inequality, doesn’t arise on its own within a system that is otherwise equitable and balanced, but is just another manifestation of the fundamental inequities at play in the current phallic order.
Turning to the defenders of Assange; they too approach the problem of these rape allegations from an ideological position. From Moore’s perspective the reality of State Power and its oppression of individual expression is the undigested kernel in his expansive gut.
All systems of collective power and organization are intrinsically coercive and violent. The State is the very center of violence–the right to violence is its primary right and implementing this violence its function. Again, efforts to reform or modify the State always take place from within a Statist system. Moore presupposes that if only the correct laws were enacted, if only the correct restraints were put into place, then we could return to a happy America wherein Mom’s Apple Pie wouldn’t be tainted with pesticides, heroes like Assange would have free reign, and 9-11 would have never have happened. Both Moore’s and Mooreandme’s politics are partial, even fictional, but there is no red pill. Our task is not to evaluate these positions against a set of natural facts or unmediated perceptions, but to interpret or judge the symbolic value of each framework from a position within the current system.
A Sophie’s Choice?
I tend to see the current political struggle as a battle along class lines rather than as a contest between free individuals and the state, or as a struggle to perfect the current legal system in order to provide a shield for women against a rape culture. But while these other perspectives both may commit the same error from my perspective, the error of a faith in the rightness of the current system, it seems that the mistake has a different political consequence in each case. And so, once again and unsurprisingly, the question today appears to be a choice between reformist positions.
What’s more important, empowering women to step forward and press charges when they are raped, or protecting free speech and the free exchange of information by journalists? Stated so baldly the choice may seem absurd. And both sides want to have their cake and eat it too. But, if you listen closely you’ll hear each side’s true priorities. As any proper Freudian will tell you, you can always tell what a person’s real ideological position is–all you have to do is wait for them to disavow it.
Moore’s disavowal happened on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, “Now to his guilt or innocence to this…I don’t know..but what they say he did–the accusation is that his condom broke during consensual sex…”
Moore tried to claim not to know if Assange is guilty of rape, but before he could even complete the sentence he characterized the accusations as merely involving a broken condom. To his credit, or in his defense, Moore was only echoing media reports at a point in time before the full extent of the accusations had been made public. More significant than his misstatement about the charges is the fact that Moore claims not to know what he truly believes, which is that Assanges is innocent. The whole allegation is a set up.
The Twitter campaign against Moore had its own set of assumptions. While they claim not to know whether Assange is innocent or guilty, and even though they admitted that the zeal with which Assange was being pursued was politically motivated, they referred to his accusers as victims of rape, and were quick to label anyone who suspected the accusers of being dishonest as victim blaming apologists for rapists. Ultimately the charge was that Moore was a perhaps unconscious enabler of the rape culture.
The choice is between a politically motivated acceptance of the accusations as true, or a politically motivated acceptance of Assange’s innocence.
How to Choose Your Fiction
In the Woody Allen film “the Purple Rose of Cairo” the protagonist, an ordinary waitress who is trying to free herself from a physically abusive husband and survive during the great depression, falls in love with a RKO movie about an Egyptian vacation, a “Madcap Manhattan Weekend,” and a heroic archeologist. The waitress is enchanted both with the movie and this archeologist, and finds herself returning to the theater to escape into the Purple Rose of Cairo as her life falls apart. Her husband is exposed to be a philanderer as well as an abuser. She is fired from her job waitressing, and she comes to feel more and more helpless and more and more in need of the sustaining fantasy provided on the silver screen.
In fact, after losing her job she heads to the cinema and stays there, watching the movie over and over again and again until, finally, the archeologist on the screen can’t help but notice her.
“You must really love this movie,” he says. And then in an act of movie magic, he comes down from the screen.
One of the slogans spraypainted on barricade walls during the student strikes of May 1968 read:
“Take your desire for reality.” Around this same time the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that the most profound ethical stance that one can take is to remain true to his or her desire. Specifically Lacan argued that while desire itself is problematic, that one does not arrive at his desire authentically, but rather one is told what to desire by the voice of the prevailing ideological system, nonetheless remaining true to one’s desire is the only possible ethical stance. If we apply this injunction to remain true to our desire, to take it for reality, to the Purple Rose of Cairo we can see that Mia Farrow’s character should dare to invest in her fantasy lover when he becomes actual. In this instance the impossible perfection of a cinema fantasy that can never be realized is Farrow’s true want, and according to Lacan and the students of 68 she should remain true to this want even as she realizes its fictional status.
And for a time she does realize it. However, in the end she is presented with a choice: stay with her fictional desire or live with a real lie. The actor who performed the role of Tom the archaeologist gives her an out from her desire, a way to properly sublimate her desire within the confines of reality. And rather than continue on with her true desire, she accepts this reality of the actor’s lie.
“”Try to understand. You see I’m a real person, no matter how tempted I am I have to choose the real world.” -Mia Farrow, Purple Rose of Cairo
Mia Farrow’s mistake was accepting the artificial constraints of what passed itself off as ‘real.’ Even after witnessing magic, after seeing her desire materialize, she is unethical and unimaginative.
What does this have to do with Sady Doyle and Michael Moore? My point is that the plot of the Purple Rose of Cairo illustrates precisely why we should side with Moore against Doyle. After all, Moore’s fictional struggle against State Power is closer to what we really want than Doyle’s more realistic lies.
Looking at the Fantasies Again
According to the Marxist film critic Louis Proyect, “For Moore, the 1950s were a kind of Paradise Lost for the American working class.” That is, Moore looks back to the New Deal, and the War on Poverty as times when the State could be set against the ruling financial and corporate elites. A return to this time of a more responsible and equitable Capitalism is what he desires. In this he’s not alone. Many radicals look back to FDR and after, to what Takis Fotopoulos calls the Statist period in Capitalist development, and wish for a return. Fotopoulos would argue that such a return is not possible, however even if we grant that such a return is only a fantasy, it is a fantasy about living differently. It is a fantasy of a different kind of system, about a system worth participating in, and while the nostalgic outlook is a trap, overall Moore’s fantasy is a positive one. If we can’t go home again, we can at least struggle after the ideals and characteristics that make home a goal worth having.
On the other hand Sady Doyle’s attack on Moore is essentially apolitical. Doyle’s goal was to enforce the etiquette around rape accusations. The first of these rules is that one must always believe a woman when she makes a rape accusation, and the second rule is that the identity of women who make accusations of rape should always be protected.
The first rule makes perfect sense in the context from which I believe it arises. That is, those institutions and individuals who work directly with victims of abuse– women’s shelters, crisis lines, emergency workers, and the rest–should always believe women when they make such accusations. If one is hoping to provide aid and assistance to victims of rape or other forms of abuse a critical approach is a hindrance and not a help. The second rule that was violated, the rule that those who make accusations of rape should remain anonymous, applies more broadly. However, when the names of the accusers are widely known the significance of violating the rule, especially through a medium like twitter where information can be shared instantaneously and thoughtlessly, is vanishingly small.
More significantly, Moore’s challenge to the prevailing power structure through his support of Assange was a step against the current system, perhaps not a radical step, but a real step. Doyle, on the other hand, ended up servicing and legitimizing the current order. Ultimately her campaign amounted to support for the Swedish prosecutor’s politically opportunistic interpretation of an expansive definition of rape. The commitment to ending rape culture led to a call to criminalize all but “enthusiastic” and unproblematic sex acts.
Again, Moore broke a rule that fits in the context of giving aid to women in crisis, but which would have terrible consequences if applied universally. His offense was diminishing the significance of accusations that everyone agrees were politically motivated. A social worker is right to ignore this larger context, a political columnist is not. Worse, the #Mooreandme campaign’s narrow focus on misapplied rules had political consequences.
The real impact was to deflate the dream on offer and provide left cover for reactions against it.
