I will, eventually, be getting back to my series of posts about conspiracy theory and the paranoid style, so here's a short one courtesy of everyone's favourite immigration expert, CNN's Lou Dobbs.
Dobbs has finally gone to the zoo. He is embracing the cause of the "birthers," that small but determined group of conspiracists who believe that Barack Obama was not actually born in the United States and therefore is not actually president. This in spite of the fact that the authenticity of Obama's Hawaii birth certificate has been verfied again and again and again--but then of course, each new independent confirmation merely adds to the evidence of a massive conspiracy to cover up the truth.
With Lou Dobbs' tacit endorsement of the birthers' claims, they have gained what is in conspiracy-land the brass ring--official recognition from a prominent media source, who by merely mentioning their cause lends it legitimacy.
Many have expressed dismay and surprise at Dobbs' endorsement of this fringe group, but frankly I'm hardly shocked. Dobbs has been a vociferous opponent of anything resembling amnesty for illegal immigrants and has devoted large chunks of airtime to denouncing immigration of both the legal and illegal varieties. I think that the very idea that the president is effectively an illegal immigrant has tripped something deep in the primal sectors of his brain.
To sum up the absurdity of it all however, I leave it to the master:
Showing posts with label conspiracy theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conspiracy theory. Show all posts
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The triumphant return of the Paranoid Style: the case of 24
I must admit to being a fan of the television series 24, but also to being a bit ambivalent about that. I imagine I don’t need to elaborate too much on the reasons for that ambivalence: the show’s explicit endorsement of torture as a necessary interrogation tool and its antipathy to issues of civil rights, to say nothing of the way in which Jack Bauer has become something of a folk hero for the pro-Patriot Act right, all sit uneasily with me. In my mind I can reconcile the show’s unpalatable politics with the pleasure of watching a fast-paced, exciting action-based drama for the simple reason that the series’ plots are so ludicrous that they are effectively pure fantasy. And with each season, the show ratchets up the absurdity to the point where you wonder what they’ll do next season to top it. (In the words of Stephen Colbert, they “crank up the crazy and rip off the knob”).
The Ticking Time Bomb
That is however a rather big cop-out on my part. The particular fantasy being peddled by 24—the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and the correlating need on the part of federal agencies to be able to act as they see fit irrespective of law and individual rights—is essentially a fallacy, and has been debunked in a variety of forums. That has done nothing however to mitigate its power as both a narrative hook and a point of paranoid fascination. Series like 24 normalize a particular conception of threat and the strategies to counter that threat. The relationship to reality is more or less irrelevant.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario was first used, for all intents and purposes, in the 1963 novel Les Centurions by Jean Lartéguy. Set during the Algerian war, the novel follows its protagonist’s desperate attempt to find and disarm bombs laid all over the city by Algerian terrorists. The initial discovery of the plot, incidentally, comes when the hero beats the fact out of an Algerian woman.
Significantly, the novel is generally credited with salving French liberals’ discomfiture at the brutal treatment of Algerians—depicting them as brutes who only understood the language of violence. Sound familiar? I would hope so, considering that 24 has accomplished something remarkably similar, insofar as the show’s various life-and-death scenarios have been considered seriously as hypotheticals in a number of high-level debates over the validity and efficacy of torture. Antonin Scalia in particular is fond of invoking Jack Bauer. (More encouragingly, a group of army officers met with the producers of 24, asking them to please stop, because both academy graduates and new soldiers in the field were increasingly taking their leads from the show).
The ticking time bomb may have originated in France’s Algerian quagmire (there’s something to taunt Republicans with—Jack Bauer was invented by the French!), it finds fecund soil in the American imagination at least in part because of the obsession with speed and expedience that marked the Cold War. Most significantly, it is an outgrowth of a discourse of “fast-response” scenarios that Elaine Scarry critiques in her essay “Citizenship In Emergency.” Scarry observes that:
“Speed” has occupied the foreground not only of our descriptive statements about our national defense but also our normative statements. Our military arrangements for defending the country have often been criticized for moving increasingly outside the citizenry’s control.
This preoccupation with speedy response has led to a situation in which “The constitutional requirement for a Congressional declaration of war has not been used for any war since World War II”; speed, she continues, has continually been cited as a counter-argument to objections about weapons policy and war-making practices sliding increasingly beyond the scope of democratic and legislative oversight.
Scarry’s larger argument—that for all the military’s preoccupation with fast-response, the only effective defense mounted against the attacks on September 11th was the democratic consensus for action reached by the passengers of United 93—is at least partially beside the point I am trying to make here. It does however highlight a broader cultural discourse that has come, in spite of evidence to the contrary, to privilege the “whatever-it-takes” attitude embodied by Jack Bauer and 24.
Conspiracy’s Bait-and-Switch
My interest here today is not so much to debunk the ticking-time-bomb scenario as to highlight the way in which 24 employs it in relation to what we’re calling the paranoid style—and how the show has really come to be almost a parody of the classic conspiracy narrative.
This point occurred to me last night at the end of the most recent episode, which ended with one of the series’ patented cliffhangers (which in the real-time universe of 24 meant that it occurred at one minute to the hour—you’d think that after six and three quarters seasons, the Jack and company would be getting squirrelly as a matter of course at the top of the hour). The plot twist of last night’s episode (spoilers to follow in the course of this post, if you haven’t seen the episode yet) was typical of how 24 rolls. Which is to say, it brought to satisfying conclusion one storyline, only to raise the stakes and reveal that there’s another, probably larger and more malevolent, conspiracy at work.
This is how 24 has developed into the acme of the conspiracy narrative. Each season unfolds as a series of nested conspiracies, like Russian dolls, or ever-widening concentric circles. And that seeming contradiction of those analogies—one getting smaller and more central, the other broadening out in larger and larger and more all-encompassing—is one of the structural paradoxes of conspiracy. It is both a matter of getting to the “center” of the plot, finding the key players and the secret(s) at the heart of the matter; and of discovering the larger shape of the sprawling yet invisible network of power and control.
To use this season thus far to explain: we began with an conspiracy against the U.S. by agents of the fictional African country Sangala, who have acquired a device that lets them hack into, well, everything on a federal grid—power stations, air traffic control, etc.—in retaliation for the President’s plan to invade Sangala and intervene in an ongoing genocide. It turns out the Sangalans have all sorts of people in the U.S. government in their pockets, and what’s worse, the formerly-thought-to-be-dead Tony Almeida (a former associate of Bauer’s, for those who don’t watch the show) turns out to be alive and has gone over to the dark side, working for the Sangalans. But then, we discover, this is merely a front: though he has been since rumours of his death been doing some nasty stuff as a mercenary, Tony has in fact been working undercover with other former colleagues of Jack’s from the (now defunct) Counter-Terrorism unit (CTU). Of course, Jack now goes rogue (which is something he has to do about once a season) in order to assist Tony and company. Together, they recover the hacking device and foil the plot to hold the country for ransom.
So ends conspiracy the first. But even as that one comes to a conclusion, Tony warns Jack of something else about to go down. What it is, he doesn’t know, but we find out soon enough: a group of Sangalans in the U.S., led by their president Juma, infiltrate the White House with the assistance of their agents and take the President hostage. Thanks however to Jack’s derring-do and the sacrifice of one of the CTU people, the Sangalans are defeated, bringing to a close conspiracy the second.
Shift to a Blackwater-style military contractor called Starkwood, and its CEO Jonas Hodges (played by a wonderfully scenery-chewing Jon Voight). It turns out that the Sangalan conspiracy was facilitated by Starkwood in exchange for allowing them to test a biological WMD on President Juma’s enemies in Sangala. The bio-weapon is now in the U.S. and Hodges proceeds to threaten the U.S. President with an attack on America’s cities. His demand is a “seat at the table,” and a free hand in shaping American military policy. However, once again the conspiracy is thwarted—this time by Tony Almeida, who manages to destroy the missiles armed with the bioweapon.
So much for conspiracy the third. But when the President has Hodges arrested, he warns her that she ain’t seen nothing yet—he was just the tip of the iceberg. And sure enough, a Starkwood employee escapes with a tank of the bio-weapon. He is cornered by Almeida and an FBI agent but manages to wound the agent. At which point, Tony Almeida finishes off the G-man, and reveals that he is in league with Mr. Starkwood. Ladies and gentlemen: I give you conspiracy the fourth.
Now on one hand, this is exactly the kind of potboiler plot twist that animates 24, in conjunction with the relentless ticking of the clock. Unless I miss my guess however, we will see over the next few episodes that Tony Almeida has been playing everyone from the start, in the service of an all-encompassing conspiracy that effectively contains all the others. The bait-and-switch that 24 constantly engages in, the false resolutions followed by the ramping up of the action and the stakes, not only follows the standard conspiracy narrative format but cranks it up to eleven (and breaks off the knob). It is, indeed, akin to the way The X-Files worked: each season ended with the promise of revelation, of finally finding the “truth” that was out there … and inevitably the next season pulled the rug out, deferring endlessly the promise of discovery.
It is this last element of “deferral” that most specifically differentiates conspiracy narratives from mystery or detective fiction, for the latter—while often engaged in investigating conspiracies of various sorts—does so in a limited fashion that ends with the detective in the study with all of the suspects, reassembling for everyone the disparate and confusing welter of clues into a coherent narrative. Well, OK—it doesn’t always take place in the study, but you catch my meaning. The point is that everything is contained. The detective (or agent, operative, or cop) scores an epistemological victory.
Conspiracy narratives however articulate a deep suspicion of the possibilities for such a victory, while at the same time evoking the desire for it. It is for this reason (as I have argued elsewhere) that conspiracy has had such currency in the postmodern moment. On one hand, the persistent deferral of revelation, which expresses in part a deep-seated suspicion of the concept of capital-T Truth, parallels what Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized as postmodernism’s rejection of “grand narratives.” But while Lyotard more or less argued that this rejection is essentially an emancipatory one (freeing us from the despotism of monolithic discourse), postmodern narratives have also frequently expressed uneasiness with the dissolution of formerly certain truths and what George Steiner famously called “nostalgia for the absolute.”
Hence, conspiracy is at its core a necessarily paradoxical motif, offering the comfort of revelation but too shot through with fundamental suspicion of its truth-value (the two mantras of The X-Files exemplify this contradiction: “The truth is out there” on one hand, but we are also enjoined to “Trust no one”—which effectively negates the possibility of reaching a stable truth). In this regard, 24 is at once the acme of the conspiracy narrative, and its radical simplification. Whatever issues of abuse of power, of the psychological toll torturing takes on Jack, or any other mitigating elements, 24 ultimately lacks the kind of ambivalence that marks the balance of conspiracy narratives. This lack proceeds principally from the series’ profoundly conservative nature, with its moral absolutes, the starkness of its black-and-white choices, the villainy of the bad guys, its disdain for liberal waffling, and its celebration of the exercise of government power.
The Ticking Time Bomb
That is however a rather big cop-out on my part. The particular fantasy being peddled by 24—the “ticking time bomb” scenario, and the correlating need on the part of federal agencies to be able to act as they see fit irrespective of law and individual rights—is essentially a fallacy, and has been debunked in a variety of forums. That has done nothing however to mitigate its power as both a narrative hook and a point of paranoid fascination. Series like 24 normalize a particular conception of threat and the strategies to counter that threat. The relationship to reality is more or less irrelevant.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario was first used, for all intents and purposes, in the 1963 novel Les Centurions by Jean Lartéguy. Set during the Algerian war, the novel follows its protagonist’s desperate attempt to find and disarm bombs laid all over the city by Algerian terrorists. The initial discovery of the plot, incidentally, comes when the hero beats the fact out of an Algerian woman.
Significantly, the novel is generally credited with salving French liberals’ discomfiture at the brutal treatment of Algerians—depicting them as brutes who only understood the language of violence. Sound familiar? I would hope so, considering that 24 has accomplished something remarkably similar, insofar as the show’s various life-and-death scenarios have been considered seriously as hypotheticals in a number of high-level debates over the validity and efficacy of torture. Antonin Scalia in particular is fond of invoking Jack Bauer. (More encouragingly, a group of army officers met with the producers of 24, asking them to please stop, because both academy graduates and new soldiers in the field were increasingly taking their leads from the show).
The ticking time bomb may have originated in France’s Algerian quagmire (there’s something to taunt Republicans with—Jack Bauer was invented by the French!), it finds fecund soil in the American imagination at least in part because of the obsession with speed and expedience that marked the Cold War. Most significantly, it is an outgrowth of a discourse of “fast-response” scenarios that Elaine Scarry critiques in her essay “Citizenship In Emergency.” Scarry observes that:
“Speed” has occupied the foreground not only of our descriptive statements about our national defense but also our normative statements. Our military arrangements for defending the country have often been criticized for moving increasingly outside the citizenry’s control.
This preoccupation with speedy response has led to a situation in which “The constitutional requirement for a Congressional declaration of war has not been used for any war since World War II”; speed, she continues, has continually been cited as a counter-argument to objections about weapons policy and war-making practices sliding increasingly beyond the scope of democratic and legislative oversight.
Scarry’s larger argument—that for all the military’s preoccupation with fast-response, the only effective defense mounted against the attacks on September 11th was the democratic consensus for action reached by the passengers of United 93—is at least partially beside the point I am trying to make here. It does however highlight a broader cultural discourse that has come, in spite of evidence to the contrary, to privilege the “whatever-it-takes” attitude embodied by Jack Bauer and 24.
Conspiracy’s Bait-and-Switch
My interest here today is not so much to debunk the ticking-time-bomb scenario as to highlight the way in which 24 employs it in relation to what we’re calling the paranoid style—and how the show has really come to be almost a parody of the classic conspiracy narrative.
This point occurred to me last night at the end of the most recent episode, which ended with one of the series’ patented cliffhangers (which in the real-time universe of 24 meant that it occurred at one minute to the hour—you’d think that after six and three quarters seasons, the Jack and company would be getting squirrelly as a matter of course at the top of the hour). The plot twist of last night’s episode (spoilers to follow in the course of this post, if you haven’t seen the episode yet) was typical of how 24 rolls. Which is to say, it brought to satisfying conclusion one storyline, only to raise the stakes and reveal that there’s another, probably larger and more malevolent, conspiracy at work.
This is how 24 has developed into the acme of the conspiracy narrative. Each season unfolds as a series of nested conspiracies, like Russian dolls, or ever-widening concentric circles. And that seeming contradiction of those analogies—one getting smaller and more central, the other broadening out in larger and larger and more all-encompassing—is one of the structural paradoxes of conspiracy. It is both a matter of getting to the “center” of the plot, finding the key players and the secret(s) at the heart of the matter; and of discovering the larger shape of the sprawling yet invisible network of power and control.
To use this season thus far to explain: we began with an conspiracy against the U.S. by agents of the fictional African country Sangala, who have acquired a device that lets them hack into, well, everything on a federal grid—power stations, air traffic control, etc.—in retaliation for the President’s plan to invade Sangala and intervene in an ongoing genocide. It turns out the Sangalans have all sorts of people in the U.S. government in their pockets, and what’s worse, the formerly-thought-to-be-dead Tony Almeida (a former associate of Bauer’s, for those who don’t watch the show) turns out to be alive and has gone over to the dark side, working for the Sangalans. But then, we discover, this is merely a front: though he has been since rumours of his death been doing some nasty stuff as a mercenary, Tony has in fact been working undercover with other former colleagues of Jack’s from the (now defunct) Counter-Terrorism unit (CTU). Of course, Jack now goes rogue (which is something he has to do about once a season) in order to assist Tony and company. Together, they recover the hacking device and foil the plot to hold the country for ransom.
So ends conspiracy the first. But even as that one comes to a conclusion, Tony warns Jack of something else about to go down. What it is, he doesn’t know, but we find out soon enough: a group of Sangalans in the U.S., led by their president Juma, infiltrate the White House with the assistance of their agents and take the President hostage. Thanks however to Jack’s derring-do and the sacrifice of one of the CTU people, the Sangalans are defeated, bringing to a close conspiracy the second.
Shift to a Blackwater-style military contractor called Starkwood, and its CEO Jonas Hodges (played by a wonderfully scenery-chewing Jon Voight). It turns out that the Sangalan conspiracy was facilitated by Starkwood in exchange for allowing them to test a biological WMD on President Juma’s enemies in Sangala. The bio-weapon is now in the U.S. and Hodges proceeds to threaten the U.S. President with an attack on America’s cities. His demand is a “seat at the table,” and a free hand in shaping American military policy. However, once again the conspiracy is thwarted—this time by Tony Almeida, who manages to destroy the missiles armed with the bioweapon.
So much for conspiracy the third. But when the President has Hodges arrested, he warns her that she ain’t seen nothing yet—he was just the tip of the iceberg. And sure enough, a Starkwood employee escapes with a tank of the bio-weapon. He is cornered by Almeida and an FBI agent but manages to wound the agent. At which point, Tony Almeida finishes off the G-man, and reveals that he is in league with Mr. Starkwood. Ladies and gentlemen: I give you conspiracy the fourth.
Now on one hand, this is exactly the kind of potboiler plot twist that animates 24, in conjunction with the relentless ticking of the clock. Unless I miss my guess however, we will see over the next few episodes that Tony Almeida has been playing everyone from the start, in the service of an all-encompassing conspiracy that effectively contains all the others. The bait-and-switch that 24 constantly engages in, the false resolutions followed by the ramping up of the action and the stakes, not only follows the standard conspiracy narrative format but cranks it up to eleven (and breaks off the knob). It is, indeed, akin to the way The X-Files worked: each season ended with the promise of revelation, of finally finding the “truth” that was out there … and inevitably the next season pulled the rug out, deferring endlessly the promise of discovery.
It is this last element of “deferral” that most specifically differentiates conspiracy narratives from mystery or detective fiction, for the latter—while often engaged in investigating conspiracies of various sorts—does so in a limited fashion that ends with the detective in the study with all of the suspects, reassembling for everyone the disparate and confusing welter of clues into a coherent narrative. Well, OK—it doesn’t always take place in the study, but you catch my meaning. The point is that everything is contained. The detective (or agent, operative, or cop) scores an epistemological victory.
Conspiracy narratives however articulate a deep suspicion of the possibilities for such a victory, while at the same time evoking the desire for it. It is for this reason (as I have argued elsewhere) that conspiracy has had such currency in the postmodern moment. On one hand, the persistent deferral of revelation, which expresses in part a deep-seated suspicion of the concept of capital-T Truth, parallels what Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized as postmodernism’s rejection of “grand narratives.” But while Lyotard more or less argued that this rejection is essentially an emancipatory one (freeing us from the despotism of monolithic discourse), postmodern narratives have also frequently expressed uneasiness with the dissolution of formerly certain truths and what George Steiner famously called “nostalgia for the absolute.”
Hence, conspiracy is at its core a necessarily paradoxical motif, offering the comfort of revelation but too shot through with fundamental suspicion of its truth-value (the two mantras of The X-Files exemplify this contradiction: “The truth is out there” on one hand, but we are also enjoined to “Trust no one”—which effectively negates the possibility of reaching a stable truth). In this regard, 24 is at once the acme of the conspiracy narrative, and its radical simplification. Whatever issues of abuse of power, of the psychological toll torturing takes on Jack, or any other mitigating elements, 24 ultimately lacks the kind of ambivalence that marks the balance of conspiracy narratives. This lack proceeds principally from the series’ profoundly conservative nature, with its moral absolutes, the starkness of its black-and-white choices, the villainy of the bad guys, its disdain for liberal waffling, and its celebration of the exercise of government power.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
The triumphant return of the Paranoid Style
A favourite insult of mine is a Bart Simpson coinage: “Assbutt.” This beautifully economical and redundant epithet at once conveys, with its semantic doubling, utter contempt and a scornful dismissiveness—the person on the receiving end is not worth a fouler combination of oaths, but is nevertheless an ass to the power of two.
I rarely have occasion to employ this choice insult, but lately an exemplary candidate keeps stepping up to the plate. Ladies and gentlemen: Glenn Beck of Fox News. Assbutt extraordinaire.
Yes, yes, I have been harping on this sort of thing for the last few months. After the last post on El Rushbo, I promised myself I’d get back to more personal posts and try to distance myself a little from the insanity and inanity (and Hannity) of the Fox News Alternative Universe. But it seems I’m having a Pacino moment: every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.
Truth be told however, I’m a little grateful to Assbutt and his compatriots at Fox and on the right side of the aisle in Congress. Grateful because their bloviating has taken a decidedly conspiratorial and paranoid turn. Beck is in the vanguard, but is by no means the only voice in the chorus. All of the Obama Administration’s moves, from the stimulus package to the budget to the firing of GM’s Rick Wagoner to his actions at the G20 summit, are all being characterized as evidence that the United States is moving toward totalitarianism of some form—socialist, communist, fascist, it’s unclear. But certainly, the government will be coming for YOU very soon.
Why is this good for me? As it happens, this sort of behaviour—what historian Richard Hofstadter termed the “paranoid style”—is sort of my specialty. I wrote my dissertation on representations of conspiracy and paranoia in postwar American fiction, film, and popular culture. Since defending my thesis in September 2004, I have made a handful of half-hearted attempts to return to it and rewrite it for publication in book form. There’s a sort of window of opportunity to do this: the longer you take, the more cringe-inducing your own writing becomes to you, and the more like probing the nerve of a tooth it becomes. Also, I had the added strike of having written on a more or less contemporary topic, and with the passage of time I became increasingly concerned that the whole conspiracy theory thing was becoming passé.
Because honestly, when you think of it, there was not a great deal of conspiracy-mongering happening during the Bush years. Oh, there was the usual expected fulminations, most notably with regards to 9/11—an event that big and that shattering will attract conspiracy theorists like moths to a flame. There was however very little in the way of cultural production: not much in terms of film, almost nothing in fiction, and television series pretty much universally reversed the conspiratorial trajectory of The X-Files, shifting the locus of conspiracy from inside the government to external threat (mostly, anyway—the current season of 24 is bringing it back within U.S. shores in the form of a Blackwater-style private militia). In fact, as I tended to say wistfully, the Bush Administration sort of negated the conspiratorial frisson by being so bald-faced in its malfeasance. It made one nostalgic for carefully calculated cover-ups of Nixon or Reagan.
However, all that seems to have changed. Spearheaded by Beck, but supported by the other talking heads at Fox and by such political types as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) and Newt Gingrich, the Paranoid Style seems to be making a triumphant return. We saw the first grumblings of it during the presidential campaigns: Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Obama In League With Terrorists and the Plot To Put Bill Ayers In The Cabinet, and so forth.
All that however, which might well be dismissed as simply the kind of mud one sees slung in any election, was just the warmup; since Inauguration Day, the self-appointed Paranoid Spokesmen (and women) have really been hitting their stride. And they’re doing so in interesting, albeit a little scary, ways.
I’ve been culling examples for the last few days from the news, from blogs, and online sources with an eye to possibly writing something on this topic. Certainly, I will need a new introduction to the thesis to address the years intervening between my defense and finally picking up the threads again; I’m also considering an article for a media studies journal, but am not yet sure if what I’ve been seeing will have the substance for it. I do want to offer commentary in some forum, however, so I thought I might make use of my blog as something different: a space for working through some of the issues and ideas. I’ll throw stuff up against the wall here, in other words, and see what sticks. So for the next few posts: the paranoid style redux!
I rarely have occasion to employ this choice insult, but lately an exemplary candidate keeps stepping up to the plate. Ladies and gentlemen: Glenn Beck of Fox News. Assbutt extraordinaire.
Yes, yes, I have been harping on this sort of thing for the last few months. After the last post on El Rushbo, I promised myself I’d get back to more personal posts and try to distance myself a little from the insanity and inanity (and Hannity) of the Fox News Alternative Universe. But it seems I’m having a Pacino moment: every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.Truth be told however, I’m a little grateful to Assbutt and his compatriots at Fox and on the right side of the aisle in Congress. Grateful because their bloviating has taken a decidedly conspiratorial and paranoid turn. Beck is in the vanguard, but is by no means the only voice in the chorus. All of the Obama Administration’s moves, from the stimulus package to the budget to the firing of GM’s Rick Wagoner to his actions at the G20 summit, are all being characterized as evidence that the United States is moving toward totalitarianism of some form—socialist, communist, fascist, it’s unclear. But certainly, the government will be coming for YOU very soon.
Why is this good for me? As it happens, this sort of behaviour—what historian Richard Hofstadter termed the “paranoid style”—is sort of my specialty. I wrote my dissertation on representations of conspiracy and paranoia in postwar American fiction, film, and popular culture. Since defending my thesis in September 2004, I have made a handful of half-hearted attempts to return to it and rewrite it for publication in book form. There’s a sort of window of opportunity to do this: the longer you take, the more cringe-inducing your own writing becomes to you, and the more like probing the nerve of a tooth it becomes. Also, I had the added strike of having written on a more or less contemporary topic, and with the passage of time I became increasingly concerned that the whole conspiracy theory thing was becoming passé.
Because honestly, when you think of it, there was not a great deal of conspiracy-mongering happening during the Bush years. Oh, there was the usual expected fulminations, most notably with regards to 9/11—an event that big and that shattering will attract conspiracy theorists like moths to a flame. There was however very little in the way of cultural production: not much in terms of film, almost nothing in fiction, and television series pretty much universally reversed the conspiratorial trajectory of The X-Files, shifting the locus of conspiracy from inside the government to external threat (mostly, anyway—the current season of 24 is bringing it back within U.S. shores in the form of a Blackwater-style private militia). In fact, as I tended to say wistfully, the Bush Administration sort of negated the conspiratorial frisson by being so bald-faced in its malfeasance. It made one nostalgic for carefully calculated cover-ups of Nixon or Reagan.
However, all that seems to have changed. Spearheaded by Beck, but supported by the other talking heads at Fox and by such political types as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) and Newt Gingrich, the Paranoid Style seems to be making a triumphant return. We saw the first grumblings of it during the presidential campaigns: Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Obama In League With Terrorists and the Plot To Put Bill Ayers In The Cabinet, and so forth.
All that however, which might well be dismissed as simply the kind of mud one sees slung in any election, was just the warmup; since Inauguration Day, the self-appointed Paranoid Spokesmen (and women) have really been hitting their stride. And they’re doing so in interesting, albeit a little scary, ways.
I’ve been culling examples for the last few days from the news, from blogs, and online sources with an eye to possibly writing something on this topic. Certainly, I will need a new introduction to the thesis to address the years intervening between my defense and finally picking up the threads again; I’m also considering an article for a media studies journal, but am not yet sure if what I’ve been seeing will have the substance for it. I do want to offer commentary in some forum, however, so I thought I might make use of my blog as something different: a space for working through some of the issues and ideas. I’ll throw stuff up against the wall here, in other words, and see what sticks. So for the next few posts: the paranoid style redux!
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