Looking on with something akin to horror

I have been asked on occasion why I pay so much attention to American politics on this blog and not so much to Canadian. There are a couple of reasons, perhaps the biggest one being that it goes more or less hand in hand with my academic specialization—I am an Americanist, and one who focuses on issues in postwar and contemporary American literature and culture. Given that my approach to literature is broadly historicist, much of what I teach and study is thus necessarily politically inflected. (In teaching a 20th-century American novel course last year focused on issues of race and identity, it would have been an egregious elision not to couple it with material on civil rights and the legacies of slavery, to say nothing of the immediate context of Obama’s historic campaign and election).

There is also the significant factor of being the outsider looking on at times with something akin to horror. There are those who characterize Canadian politics as boring, which is not an evaluation I agree with at all; that said however, we do seem to lack the extremes of American political discourse and the virulence with which those extremes are expressed. Which is not to suggest that Canadian politics is genteel (just watch your average Question Period), but that we have a broader ground for consensus.

The ongoing debate about health care south of the border has really brought this into sharp relief. I have found it extremely educational, while with every passing day making me not just proud but relieved to be Canadian. So much of the debate seems to me fraught with nothing less than profound cognitive dissonance, but then that probably betrays my own cultural prejudices—as a Canadian, the right to health care is a no-brainer. Nor is this a specifically Canadian sentiment, but one shared by most of the developed world, in which even our most conservative governments won’t scale back public health care. The U.S. is the odd man out on this issue. Advocates of a public option or single-payer model in the States must grind their teeth in frustration at the specter of the rest of the developed world looking on in puzzlement at America’s apparent inability to enact what Europe and Canada have had for decades.

I really have been watching the debate unfold with something akin to horror, and that has proceeded less from the ideological argument than the fact that what we’ve been seeing is not ideological so much as rabidly partisan. The ideological argument would at least be interesting, and would be educational in what it would have to say about the social contract. However, from where I sit it seems to me that the opponents of public health care would have difficulty making the ideological argument—the position they can’t make candidly is the principle that health care is not a right, but a luxury.

As far as philosophical positions go, this one is fair enough. I obviously disagree vehemently with it, but would have more respect for American lawmakers if they would at least be honest. However, this is not a tenable position, considering that poll after poll shows an electorate that wants, at the very least, a public option, and I can’t imagine standing up telling people they don’t deserve health care because they’re not wealthy enough would result in many victories come election day—especially considering the fact that employees of the federal government have about the best health insurance in the country. Further, the free-market fundamentalism espoused by the American right, which hews to the dogma that private business is invariably more efficient, cost-effective, and competent than government-run anything founders on the reef of the actuality of the American health insurance industry. We must always remember that private insurance companies make their money in not paying out claims; if you grant the principle that health care is a right, the horror stories one hears of people being denied coverage for major surgery based on inaccuracies or elisions in the way they filled out their policy—or the cynical practice of writing legal loopholes allowing the company to deny coverage into the policy—become that much more egregious.

I firmly believe that health care, like education and really anything that protects the health and well-being of citizens (ranging from water treatment to the police force), needs to be firmly in the public sphere, for privatization of these sectors of society puts the focus on profit rather than where it should be—namely, the citizenry these sectors serve. The conservative argument would contest this with the position that the bigger government this necessitates is inefficient, wasteful, and intrusive, and that private ownership would result in a situation not only more streamlined and effective but also one in which individuals’ access to these services would be proportional to their own success and hard work.

Well and good. I’m happy to have that debate with any comers, but again, if we’re seeing these positions articulated in the current American health care debate, it happens obliquely at best.

There are two principal arguments being made against “Obamacare,” one valid and the other cynically mendacious. The valid argument is over paying for health care reform, and while the numbers have been twisted and spun on both sides, at least it proceeds from a genuine concern.

The second argument isn’t so much an argument as a strategy, as it contains a multitude of arguments of varying degrees of untruth. This strategy is, very simply, to smudge and obfuscate the Obama administration’s message, and if it also manages to scare the crap out of some people, so much the better. A representative selection:

—under Obama’s plan, you will be denied treatments that a faceless government bureaucrat deems too expensive or unnecessary

—the government will dictate your choices in everything from hospital to doctor

—public-run health care is socialism

—access to your doctor will be complicated by a series of government bureaucrats you’ll have to get through first

—seniors will be visited by government employees and made to decide how they want to die


This last one is my favourite, and seems to have been the falsehood that has—predictably—gone the most viral (so to speak).

All of these claims are at the best disingenuous and at worst cynical falsehoods, and can all be disproven by the simple expedient of looking at the public health-care options already provided by the federal government—Medicaid, Medicare, and USVA coverage. Medicare in particular is an excellent example of an extremely popular public program, to the point where any legislator seeking to repeal it would be committing political suicide. In fact, in a misapprehension that would be comical if it weren’t indicative of the disconnect at work in this debate, many seniors have expressed their fear that the Obama health care reforms would eliminate Medicare.

The right has done a good job of propagating such misunderstandings, and while the deliberate falsehoods are appalling enough, the cynical political brinksmanship on display is breathtaking. The Republicans, probably correctly, see that a loss for Obama on health care would cripple the administration, and so are doing everything in their power to block, slow, dilute, and crush the nascent legislation. Meanwhile, public support for the Obama plan has been eroding steadily, pretty much in direct proportion to the loss of progressive elements—that is to say, each hint that the public option will be weaker or gone altogether denudes support, which of course the right wing opportunistically points to as evidence that the electorate doesn’t want health care reform.

As I said at the outset, all this makes me happy, proud and above all relieved to be a Canadian. Our health care system is by no means perfect, but it is an extraordinary comfort to know I’ll never have to take out a second mortgage to pay for a procedure because I was denied health insurance for leaving off my childhood bout with chicken pox.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

Hello, my name is Christopher, and I am an addict.

I am addicted to Moleskine journals and notebooks. My shelves groan with them.

It is a problem I've had for some time now. Whenever I am at Chapters, I am drawn like a satellite to a gravity well to the Moleskine display. If I can make it out of the store without purchasing a new one, it is a victory of willpower. Alas, those times are the exception to the rule. If bookies were to lay odds, you could make a tidy profit betting that I make it out moleskine-free, but I would encourage you not to risk your money like that.

If only the things weren't so bloody useful in addition to being aethetically pleasing I might stand a better chance. I have a pocket-sized notebook I carry everywhere with me, a hardcover journal into which goes the miscellany of my days, a hardcover reporter's notebook that I use exclusively for teaching, a handful of larger cardboard-covered notebooks for research notes, and a slew of the smaller cardboard-covered ones because, well, I just really like them.

They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Is there anyone else out there with this pernicious addiction? Perhaps we can help each other.

Happy birthday to Zachary!

As I have joked in the past, my brother and his wife have concentrated the birthdays of their children at the end of July for the sake of efficient parties. Or perhaps there's something about November that ... no, I just don't care to speculate.

Anyway, five days after Morganmas, was now have Zachmas! My nephew Zachary, pictured above, is two years old today. And if I didn't already love Zach enough, there's the added bonus for my entertainment that he seems to be my brother reincarnated, right down to his distinctive shock of platinum blond hair.

And why, you ask, is this entertaining for me? Because Matthew was a particularly energetic and rambunctious child who ran my parents ragged and took particular pleasure in tormenting his elder sibling (i.e. me). He still does, come to think of it. Over Christmas Matt and I went out for a beer and he regaled me, in an exasperated tone of voice, with Zach's newfound game--making Morgan wail. Morgan, who loves to read, will often perch on the couch with a book open in her lap, and this draws Zach like a bee to honey. He runs up, grabs the book from Morgan, and with a mischievous grin, holds the book just out of reach as Morgan howls and grabs for it. (Keep in mind, this kid is all of two years old).

Matt told me me this, and other stories much like it, with the air of a father looking at the prospect of playing diplomat for the next sixteen to twenty years (we can only assume this torment will reach a fever pitch with the onset of adolescence). Trying to keep the grin of schadenfreude off my face, I mumbled something about chickens coming home to roost. Morgan, I feel your pain.

For all that, Zach is an amazingly affectionate and sweet kid. He is now always smiling and inquisitive, which is a bit of a change from his first few months of life, when he constantly wore what I came to think of as the Zach look--an expression of resigned bewilderment at the world in which he found himself.

Now the world is an amazing and wonderful place, with many trains to watch (he loves trains) and a serious sister to torment. Happy birthday, little guy -- your uncle loves you.

Weekly wisdom

“You should try everything in life once, except incest and Morris dancing.”

—Arnold Bax

A constitutional question

So it has been suggested that the media backlash against Lou Dobbs’ ill-advised support of the “birther” conspiracy theory—that Obama was not in fact born in Hawaii and is therefore not a natural-born American—will go to great lengths to subdue the movement, as high-profile endorsements will likely be scarce now. I’m skeptical, but here’s hoping.

Instead, I have a constitutional question. I read this article in Salon.com this morning arguing that the law prohibiting American citizens born elsewhere from being president should be repealed by a constitutional amendment. It makes a good case, but what makes me curious is that the law specifically excludes the President and Vice President, with nothing said about the rest of the line of succession. If both the President and Vice President die or are unable to govern, then the Speaker of the House becomes president; after Speaker, the President pro tempore of the Senate, then Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General … then from there on down through the cabinet.

There are no laws prohibiting U.S. citizens who immigrated from elsewhere from being elected or named to any of the positions listed above. So my question is this: if a catastrophe occurred that eliminated a chunk of the line of succession (if the Capitol Building was bombed during the State of the Union, say) leaving the Secretary of Education as the next in line, would that person be legally able to assume the office of the President if he or she was not a natural-born U.S. citizen?


As a postscript to all this, the Salon article points out that the two categories of “natural-born” citizenry are “to be born on U.S. soil, to U.S. citizens or foreign nationals” and “to be born to one or more U.S. citizen parents abroad.” Huh. So unless the birthers want to challenge Obama’s mother’s citizenship, their argument is kind of moot, no?

Supplemental zombie post

After my post a few days ago about my forays this summer into reading zombie fiction, I was reminded by my friend Jen Hale (aka Nikki Stafford) of the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Canadian author Tony Burgess. I read it when it first came out (1998), and while it didn’t resonate with me then as much as it would now in the mild zombie obsession I seem to have fallen into, it was both a harrowing and fascinating read. Pontypool, for those unfamiliar with southern Ontario geography, is a small town northeast of Toronto about two-thirds of the way to Peterborough, and it is the site for Burgess’ zombie outbreak.

(Point of serendipitous trivia: not long before I read the novel, a guy I’d worked with had purchased a house in Pontypool, opting for a long commute into T.O. in exchange for the affordable property. Many discussions at work ensued about the general loveliness of the town, I think as much for him to convince himself as for anything else. This all was the first I’d ever heard of Pontypool, so when the novel came out I felt a little thrill of being in the know. Small victories, yes).

William S. Burroughs notoriously called language “a virus from outer space” and Burgess’ novel takes this to heart and makes the infection linguistic—that is to say, it spread by way of language. Something slipped inside the mind when an infected word was heard, and those infected lost the ability to make meaning, repeating random words and phrases over and over until they finally went mad, attacking non-infected people and trying to eat through their mouths to get at their words.

Or something to that effect. It’s been eleven years since I read it, and I loaned my copy to the guy I worked with so he could better imagine a zombie pandemic outside his door.

More recently however, Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald—he of Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo—teamed up with Tony Burgess and adapted the novel to film. The result, Pontypool, was featured at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and garnered a significant amount of critical acclaim. After reading Jen’s comments apropos of my zombie fiction post, I dropped by Blockbuster this past weekend on the off chance that they had the DVD. And much to my surprise, they did (only two copies, but that’s pretty big for Blockbuster).

Burgess, who wrote the screenplay, has changed the setting and the characters. While the novel is something of a horrific picaresque for protagonist Les Reardon through a town that has become a killing zone, Pontypool is a deeply claustrophobic experience, set entirely in a radio station in a church basement. There are very few characters, limited principally to the disk jockey, producer and assistant producer—a trio who listen to early morning reports come in of inexplicable violence and try to make sense of it all. There is a nod here to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, though in reverse, as the three of them are uncertain of whether a hoax is being played.
We don’t actually see the zombies until well into the film. The assistant producer becomes infected, and the requisite invasion of the small space does happen, but only a good three-quarters of the way in (and does not unfold at all in the typical way). For the most part, we experience the pandemic as the three main characters do—we hear it all unfolding as the jumbled and confused reports come in over the phone, and this works to make the entire experience a whole lot creepier.

This motif of listening, besides being deeply disturbing, also works very nicely in terms of Burgess’ innovative re-imagination of the zombie narrative. Language is the site of infection, and in making the protagonist a down-at-the-heels shock jock named Grant Mazzy (played by Steve McHattie, one of those brilliant but innocuous character actors Canada seems so adept at producing), who finds himself working in a small-town church basement because he’s managed to piss off all his former employers, the film gives itself a powerful thematic fulcrum. Talk is Mazzy’s raison d’être, and he drops references to semiotics and linguistic theory casually into the rants his producer angrily tries to curtail. McHattie’s embittered Mazzy is endearing but also evocative of the anger and alienation that marks the phenomenon of talk radio. When it becomes apparent that the spoken word is the infection’s vector, Mazzy has to weigh the dangers of talking on the air against the imperative to get the word out.

(I was reminded, obscurely, of the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, an American expatriate in Germany during the rise of Nazism, who is encouraged by the OSS to accept a job offer as a propagandist for Goebels on the radio—his contact would give him coded phrases to embed in anti-Jewish tirades that would communicate key intelligence to the Allies. But neither the fact of his espionage, nor that he did not believe any of what he broadcast, can balance the very real impact of his words. As his father-in-law, a devout Nazi, sourly tells him at the end of the war, “I always knew you were a spy. But I didn’t care, because in the end everything you said helped us.”)

Beyond the fact that Pontypool is an extremely taut, terrifying and intelligent film, what interests me is that it represents a continuation of the trend of appropriating the zombie genre into more subtle and nuanced productions. It seems that if the 1980s was the cyborg decade and the 90s the era of the disaster film, the ’oughts are turning into the decade of the zombies. Beyond the slicker and larger-budget films like Dawn of the Dead 2004, I am Legend, Quarantine, the Resident Evil films, and George Romero’s own Land of the Dead, we’re seeing some very intelligent and innovative takes on the genre like 28 Days Later and Pontypool, as well as sharp satire like Shaun of the Dead. I was also turned on to a great little British mini-series called Dead Set in which the only survivors of a zombie pandemic are the contestants on Big Brother. And there’s a film version of World War Z in the works—let’s hope it continues the trend.

So, the question I want to throw out to my readers is what does it mean to have a genre traditionally so emphatically lodged in the B-movie category become fodder for sharp, intelligent and even innovative filmmaking? What kind of cultural preoccupations does this reflect?

Happy birthday Miss Morgan!

The end of July has three anniversaries of significance for me: the births of my beloved niece and nephew, and my move out to Newfoundland. That was four years ago, which to me seems at the very bizarre, if not unbelievable. That also, incidentally, means that this blog is celebrating its fourth birthday, as I started it as a means of keeping friends and family updated on my comings, goings, thoughts, and maunderings.

And one of the very first posts -- and the first of any import -- was four years ago today to announce the even more unbelievable fact that my younger brother Matthew had reproduced and helped bring a beautiful baby girl into the world.

As much as I love my life here in St. John's, as much as I have grown comfortably into it, it is a hard thing to know that I am mostly not around to see my niece Morgan, and her brother Zach who followed her two years later, growing up. The frequent pictures Matt and Michelle post to Facebook at least allow a sense of continuit -- I get to see them getting older -- but it's no substitute for being there.

So happy birthday Morgan -- your Uncle Chris sends you the best wishes on this day and all his love, and wishes he could be there to watch you run Grandpa ragged with your incredibly complexly imagined games (I once stood in for Grandpa while he cooked dinner ... alas, Miss Morgan made it quite clear that I was but a poor substitute).

For those who have followed this blog, let me tell you that Morgan is an incredibly smart and articulate four-year-old, with a mind and a perspective that never fails to startle. If you want a good snapshot, this is one of the best:


If you think she looks like a pint-sized Cecil B. DeMille giving direction, you're not alone. Here she gives her grandfather very specific instructions about what he is to do while she goes and takes care of something.

That's Morgan in a nutshell. She has very clear ideas of how the world should work.

And to recap the last four years:

Conspiracy theory du jour

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:

Weekly wisdom

"I also don't trust Caribou anymore. They're out there, on the tundra, waiting ... Something's going down. I'm right about this."

--Joss Whedon

Summer reading, parte the firste: Chronicling the zombocalypse

I have something of an odd fascination for the zombie sub-genre: odd, because I find the whole thing fascinating, but of all horror genres it is the one that is the most deeply disturbing. As I’ve confessed on this blog before, I’m a wimp where scary movies are concerned, but most of them only affect me for the time it takes to watch them. Zombie films however fill me with a lingering dread that makes me lose sleep for days after. Even a comedy like Shaun of the Dead had me awake—not fearing the oddly-situated shadows in the corner, but spinning out in my head the post-apocalyptic narrative that is the basis of most zombie films. Where would I go? What would I do? Who would be left? What do I have in the house that I could use as a weapon?

Perhaps that is the true horror of it. Most apocalyptic films are essentially about purging, and ultimately about hope—the survivors find themselves in a suddenly depopulated world that they may then rebuild. The disaster or plague of the zombie genre however dictates that the “purged” population doesn’t go away. The dead remain, and want to turn you into one of them.

I recently did a guest lecture for MUN’s interdisciplinary humanities Master’s program, in a class about the grotesque. I settled on the theme of excess as my focus, and assigned readings by Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, as well as the prologue to Don DeLillo’s magnificent novel Underworld, which has a lovely sequence involving Pieter Breughel’s painting “The Triumph of Death.” As I started writing the lecture, I found myself using the Breughel painting—which features the dead returning to torment the living—as a springboard into a lengthy riff about zombie films. After about an hour of feverishly working through my thoughts, I reread what I had and fired off an email to the professor running the class asking if she could, in addition to the readings I’d assigned, ask the class to watch a zombie film. Any film would do.


This was back in May. I was in London, ON at the time, returning to St. John’s in June. And having incorporated zombies into my guest lecture, I felt now justified—for research purposes, of course—in buying several books I’d noticed. One was a collection of short fiction titled The Living Dead that included a whole bunch of fantasy/horror luminaries (Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Stephen King); the second was The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, which I’d heard good things about; and the last was World War Z, also by Max Brooks, which is a novel about the “zombie war” as chronicled in a series of “interviews” with survivors ten years after the fact.

The Living Dead was an interesting collection, uneven as these anthologies tend to be but including some entertaining and even innovative takes on the genre. The Zombie Survival Guide can be found in most bookstores’ humour section, but there is very little that is tongue-in-cheek about it: it addresses its subject very seriously, and in the process becomes a novel by other means—predicated on the assumption of the existence of a zombie virus (called “solanum”), it details both the steps to take to defend oneself, and provides a series of narratives chronicling historical outbreaks.

But it is the third book, World War Z, that took me by surprise. Brooks is very obviously someone who has spent a lot of time working through this particular thought experiment, and where he applies it to practical issues of survival in the Guide, he asks in World War Z what a genuine zombie pandemic would look like, how people and nations would respond, and how they might ultimately fight back.

All of this might sound (to non-enthusiasts) rather juvenile or frivolous, but Brooks accomplishes something remarkable in this novel. It is surprisingly thoughtful, rigorously imagined (and obviously extremely well researched), and like all great dystopian fiction, provides a substantive critique of the present. The novel is structured around a series of “interviews” with people around the world (its subtitle is “An Oral History of the Zombie War”), and moves from the initial outbreak to the ensuing “Great Panic,” to nations’ and people’s belated recognition of the threat and the subsequent steps taken, to the war fought against the undead, and the aftermath.

One of the things I loved about this novel is that it filled in a lot of the holes usually left by zombie films, such as the medical details of the virus and its effect; the lifespan of zombies (this one always bothers me, because if the whole thing is infection rather than sorcery, how long can a reanimated corpse “survive” before it literally rots away to nothing? According the Z, three to four years—shorter if it is in a damp climate, longer if in a hot and dry one); the effect of cold (below zero, they freeze solid in Brooks’ imagining, leading to one harrowing account where people flee to northern Canada, only to suffer the privation of the Canadian winter); and finally—and this is the novel’s greatest strength—how do people on a large scale deal? Most zombie narratives involve small, besieged groups of people. Here we go global, and Brooks’ “interviews” tell us the stories, among others, of a Chinese doctor who first encounters the infection; an Israeli intelligence officer who first recognizes the threat; an astronaut stranded on the International Space Station and who witnesses the events of the zombie war from space; an American pilot downed in the midst of infected territory; a soldier in the vanguard of the force that fights back. And that’s just a sample.

The novel is wide-ranging in its accounts, as the list I just offers indicates, and provides some intresting curiosities, like the use of medieval castles in Europe as refuges, or the (really rather horrifying) tale of fighting the undead in the Paris catacombs. There’s the story of the “K-9” corps, and the use of trained dogs as scouts and lures. There is also the story of a Chinese nuclear submarine, which offers a glimpse as well of the attempts by thousands of people to escape to the sea, with varying success.

Overall? Great summer reading. I recommend it even to non-enthusiasts. Also, as a side note: Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. Interesting.


***Postscript: As you can see, I link to a second blog on which, two years ago, I started writing, for fun, a zombie screenplay set in St. John's and on MUN campus. To date it has exactly one instalment, the prologue, posted. I haven't abandoned it, but I am reluctant to add more posts until I can reliably post regularly. To that end, I haven't stopped writing it (well, I did for a while, but have returned to it), I'm just not going to post anything new until I've got a substantial number of pages in the can. So stay tuned.

Summer reading

During my recent long silence on this blog, I conceived of numerous posts, all of which (obviously) didn’t make it to the stage of actual composition. Some of them are now past their prime and so won’t see the light of day; some I’m still toying with writing; and some may emerge in heavily modified fashion. We’ll see.

The most frequently thought posts over the last few months have been of the “what I’m reading now” variety. As anyone who knows me well will attest, I am a reading junky. I always have been, for that matter; Lockett family lore says that when I was very young, I was anxious to learn to read, and pestered my parents with the repeated question of when?? When will I learn to read? To which they always said: “Grade One. You’ll learn to read in Grade One.” So after my first day of Grade One I came home sulky and just generally pissed off …. because, as I said accusingly to my parents, they hadn’t taught me to read. (For the record, I have no memory of this. It is however a story my mother has told many times).

I’ve always been an omnivorous reader. I devoured whatever I got my hands on as a kid. Fiction, sure, but I partly identify my grade school years by what my obsession at the time was: Grade One was dinosaurs; Grade Two, insects; Grade Three, World War II; Grade Four, private detectives; Grade Five, Ancient Egypt. And so on.

When I started university, I unconsciously started focusing my reading, limiting myself to “literature”—a rather pretentious affectation in which it only felt worthwhile to me to read that which felt like it had some sort of artistic imprimatur. What knocked me out of that headspace was Annie Dillard’s beautiful Thoreau-esque memoir Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which details a year she spent living in a cabin in the woods. Dillard’s meditations on nature and self, rendered in stunning prose, were augmented with facts, anecdotes, and curiosities from the various books she read over that year—most of which were notably un-literary and included entomological studies, medical memoirs, encyclopedias, natural history, and science journals. Reading Dillard’s fascination with seemingly and often obscure facts made me miss my own previously omnivorous reading habits.

I’m happy to say I’ve gone back to that, and will often as not buy bed-time reading from the history or politics section of the bookstore as from fiction. Anything to feed the addiction.

Seriously: reading is an addiction, which while contributing a great deal to my career choice and making a large portion of that job easier, can also hamstring things a bit. To wit: my insatiable need for reading material doesn’t necessarily extend to my professional obligation to keep up on the most recent scholarship, literature, or teaching material. Often it does (usually in reverse order of the three categories just listed), but often enough I have to fight upstream against the desire to pick up a book I’m reading for pleasure in order to sit down with one I’m reading for work. This is especially true during the summer months, when warm weather and a comfortable seat out in my sunny backyard make one less inclined to read a sheaf of peer-reviewed articles than a nice chunky novel.

During the summer, of course, I’m also playing catch-up. Ever since I first started university, during the school year I keep a running list of books I want to read but don’t have time to get to. Come summer, I’d work my way through the list, with the usual expected diversions in the form of spontaneous additions to the list (usually occurring during impulse buys at the bookstore when picking up titles from the main list). That much hasn’t changed.

So, the long and short of it is that I have, since May, read a significant number of books—some for research purposes, some for pleasure, and a few in that indeterminate space between that makes me love my job. Given that we still have over a month of summer left (I count the end as Labour Day, not September 20), I will devote a series of blog posts between now and then to talking about some of the standouts on the 2009 summer list.

Robert McNamara, 1916-2009

It is, I suppose, a testament to the impact Robert McNamara had during his tenure as Secretary of Defense between 1961-68 that his death has not been eclipsed, like almost every other story in the last week’s news cycle, by that of Michael Jackson.

Indeed, there has been a significant amount of discussion about McNamara’s legacy, with a lot less forgiveness for his failings than one tends to see in eulogies for major figures. His death has opened a lot of old wounds. It has served in part as a reminder to the post-Vietnam generations of just how traumatizing that conflict was. While some commentators have offered McNamara’s later-in-life contrition for his mistakes as a mitigating element—contrasting his honesty and willingness to admit error with the bloody-mindedness of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz troika—at least as many have said there can be no forgiveness for the primary architect of the Vietnam War.

For me, as for many of those who have written about McNamara this past week, the irreducible sticking-point, the element that no amount of contrition can efface, is not that he admitted he was entirely wrong about Vietnam. It’s that he admitted he knew he was wrong about Vietnam as early as 1964—that he looked at the war and realized it could never be won the way it was being fought. And he then proceeded to be silent as the conflict deepened and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese died.

Nor was this a man given to timidity or who blushed in the face of authority. If there is any aspect of his legacy that could serve to balance Vietnam, it was that he stared down the Joint Chiefs during Kennedy’s presidency. He arrived in his office at the Pentagon in 1961 and found himself faced with perhaps the most hawkish American military command in history, and who were, we now know, seriously considering a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, and who tried to use the Cuban missile crisis to manipulate the Kennedy Administration into war.

That someone with the stones to stare down the Joint Chiefs would keep silent about what he recognized as a futile and useless war is baffling, and ultimately that is what is unforgivable.

I’ve been reading Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco, which is about the buildup to the war in Iraq and the series of mistakes, blunders, misapprehensions, and sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the civilian leadership and some parts of the military that led to, well, the fiasco that Iraq for the most part has been. Reading what has been written about McNamara and the legacy of Vietnam, it is discouraging to see the same sort of mistakes made, in many cases willfully so. McNamara, one of Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” is an example for history of how sometimes the brightest aren’t always the best.

Weekly wisdom

"A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come."

--Det. Lester Freamon (The Wire)

Some thoughts on politics and craziness

On the heels of my post on Sarah Palin yesterday, I am compelled to wonder aloud: what is going on with U.S. governors?

I used to have a theory that batshit insane people in politics tended to concentrate themselves at the mayoral level—that mayor was about the highest office you could hold before craziness became an impediment to moving up the political ladder.

I arrived at this theory through the serendipitous conjunction of three things I saw/heard in the space of a day or two a while back: (1) New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s notorious “chocolate city” speech; (2) Rick Mercer’s “Canada’s Craziest Mayor” contest; and (3) former St. John’s mayor Andy Wells haranguing City Council. This serendipity got me thinking: sure, there are lots of batshit insane people in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as a couple of wingnuts who get elected to our own House of Commons, but there seems to be a definite tendency towards loopiness in mayors.

One is tempted to dismiss the wingnuttery that surfaces in legislative politics for the reason that it tends to have less affect; the vagaries of day-to-day life, however, are far more influenced by municipal considerations, so one would think we’d be more concerned to have mentally stable mayors. Crazy-ass congressmen or members of parliament can spout off with little effect at the level of parking tickets or property taxes, but we still seem to elect—consistently, and repeatedly—municipal chief executives whom I wouldn’t trust to house-sit for me.

Seriously, I think—or used to think—that there was something about the nature of the job of mayor that allowed (or even encouraged) not just the election of narcissistic, sociopathic, paranoid, bellicose and/or reality-challenged individuals, but their re-election again and again (for some reason, Mel Lastman springs to mind here). Honestly, I think this deserves serious study. What is it about the office of mayor? Is it something to do with the parochial nature of municipal politics that enables this phenomenon? Is the talent pool at the municipal level simply that shallow? Is it a combination of limited voter turnout and pay-to-play politics? Or is it a tendency to look at mayors less as leaders than mascots, so that we see their insanity as endearing rather than worrisome?

At any rate, this was my theory, and while I think it still holds water, I’ve been watching in horrified fascination as a string of U.S. governors prove that you can be batshit insane at the gubernatorial level as well. If there is any cause for befuddlement these days, it’s that Arnold Schwartzenegger has emerged as a model of stable, moderate, reasonable governance while numerous governors in states-not-California (which further compounds the weirdness—if you figured on a crazy governor, you’d think California would be the ideal place for it) have been proving themselves booby-hatch-worthy. Nor is this limited to Republicans, given that Exhibits A and B—Rod Blagojevich and Eliot Spitzer—are both Democrats. Blago I would have thought took the cake—you weren’t likely to find another person so narcissistic and politically tone-deaf as the chief executive of a major state. An aberration, many said, a product of the morass that is Illinois politics.

And then along came Mark Sanford. Where to even begin?


He just doesn’t stop—he’s like the Energizer Bunny of crazy. What should really have been an open-and-shut adultery scandal, his “Appalachian Trail” disappearance notwithstanding, has turned into the Saga of Sanford’s Great Love. You know, when members of your own administration start saying loudly and publicly that you should really just shut up, you have to wonder how far from the fold you have wandered.

And in a turn almost beautiful for its symmetry, the governor staying in office when his resignation seems a no-brainer is followed by the governor who suddenly resigns with eighteen months remaining in her term, presumably as a scandal pre-emption. If you haven’t seen or listened to Sarah Palin’s goodbye speech, by the way, you should:



It’s a veritable classic of Palinese, filled with the kind of contradictory sentiments, elliptical allusions and logical cul-de-sacs that make George W. Bush seem like Cicero by comparison. (For a great parsing of the speech’s absurdities, see Maureen Dowd’s column in it). Perfect, really, for her departing word—though as I said yesterday, it’s unlikely to be her last. The big question for me is is: who’s next? And will it be another Republican presidential hopeful? And come 2012, will Mark Sanford still be holding forth on the saga of his Great Love? My bet is for yes.


**EXTRA CREDIT ASSIGNMENT: Is Sarah Palin’s gubernatorial craziness merely an extension of her mayoral craziness, or is there a qualitative difference between the two? Discuss.

Oh Sarah Barracuda, we hardly knew ye

I must admit to a profound ambivalence about Sarah Palin’s surprising retirement last Friday, though it proceeds at least in part from entirely selfish reasons—namely, I’ll miss having her around on the national stage as an object of ridicule. That being said, perhaps it’s all for the best … she did, after all, make it a little too easy.

In all seriousness however, I am genuinely ambivalent, because on one hand I’m relieved that the Palin saga, surely one of the most discouraging in recent history for anyone desiring high-minded political discourse, finally looks to be ending. On the other hand, her departure removes a singular embodiment of intellectually bankrupt nativist conservatism that would, I think, have ultimately hamstrung the Republicans for years to come and finally mobilized thinking conservatives to reimagine the Republican brand—the first eventuality benefiting liberal-left politics in the States, the latter benefiting the country overall. I have to believe that this will happen anyway, but Palin made for a useful galvanizing figure on this front.

Of course, her abrupt departure has fuelled all sorts of speculation about what she’s up to. I think we can safely say that this isn’t the first step in setting up a 2012 run for the presidency, for the simple reason that William Kristol claims that it is. Given that pretty much everything Kristol has claimed, declared and predicted over the last seven years has been not just wrong but exactly wrong, I think we can safely say any remaining presidential aspirations on Palin’s part are a non-starter.

(As an aside: never mind Kristol’s consistent wrongness on everything from Iraq to the 2008 presidential campaign, his bafflingly stubborn cheerleading of Palin even to the present moment dictates that he has to surrender the moniker “prominent conservative intellectual.” Being wrong is forgivable, but why would someone ostensibly valuing intellect and intelligence so consistently champion someone epitomizing the opposite of that? To quote Milan Kundera, he’s acting as the brilliant ally of his own gravediggers).

So we all now wait for the other shoe to drop. I’m putting my money on an ethics scandal—the good word seems to be that this investigation into the awarding of contracts in exchange for favours (specifically, the building of her house) is going to blow up into something big, and she’s getting out to get ahead of the story. Or perhaps she’ll get a talk show. Either way, I suspect she won't be out of the public eye much, so my ambivalence about her departure is probably premature.

Sometimes, it really is just magical

One of the things I’ve really come to love about living in St. John’s is the way this city, and in particular the landscape, finds new ways to stop me in my tracks with an unexpected vista. It happens fairly frequently: I’ll be driving, lost in my thoughts, and turn a corner to see that the sun, the snow, the fog, the rain, the sea, or whatever combination of elements are tag-teaming it that day, have transformed the landscape into something approaching the sublime.

This weekend it has been the fog—thick, living fog that has settled on Signal Hill and the Narrows and which sends twisting shreds on the wind up the length of the harbour. I spent yesterday afternoon reading at Atlantic Place, looking out through its huge harbourside windows at this amorphous, shifting wall of white rolling up and down Signal Hill. I kicked myself for not having my camera on me, but my mother—who daily checks St. John’s weathercams and is more conversant in the local weather than I am—sent me the above image, and I thought I’d share it with all you.

The half-dozen or so of you who still check up on this humble blog in the hopes I might overcome my laziness and start posting again, anyway. Sorry about that. I let these long patches without posting pass, and in the last two months I’ve given thought to discontinuing it, especially considering that it’s my browser homepage and so every time I fire up the internets I’m reminded of my laziness of late.

I’ve decided to keep on, however, even though I probably have a rather tiny readership at this point. I would miss the blog .... and besides which, I use it as my portal for the sites I read on a regular basis.

So I’ll be back, and I’ll try not to let so much time lapse again.

Teabagging update

Well, the Tax Day Tea Parties in the States have come and gone. In lieu of boring everyone with a recap of the absurdity of it all, I leave the commentary to those better suited. First, Jon Stewart.

And secondly, a guide to conservative teabagging.



That is all.

Weekly wisdom

"Getting an education is a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on."

--Terry Pratchett

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.

Postscript: tea parties take a sharp right turn into absurdity

As the lead up to the Tax Day Tea Party Protests continue, the question arises: just how stupid are these people? And by "these people" I mean the rally organizers and their spokesmen. They are now enjoining people to mail tea bags to the White House and to Congress in symbolic protest. And in a particularly unfortunate turn of phrase, they are referring to this process as "teabagging." As in: "Teabag the White House!" "Teabag Obama!" And so on ...

For the sake of my more delicate readers who may be unfamiliar with the colloquial meaning of "teabagging," I direct you to a definition here. Take a moment ... we'll wait.

Yup. Sigh. It's vaguely irritating that this happens right on the heels of taking the time and thought to write out a measured and serious response to the Tea Party Protests, seeing as how this little bit of absurdity really kind of makes treating this with any degree of seriousness kind of a waste of time and energy.

Because really, the only decent way to respond is with snark, and here's Rachel Maddow doing so brilliantly. I can only imagine what kind of mileage Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will get out of this.

Some thoughts on civil disobedience and the uses and abuses of history

Sorry, another interim post here before continuing on with the issue of the paranoid style—though a post that is related, at least tangentially. One of the much-ballyhooed responses to the Obama Administration is a series of planned “tea parties,” modelled on the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The Boston Tea Party, an iconic moment in the history of the American Revolution, was a spontaneous protest against British taxation in which a mob dressed in the guise of American Indians boarded three vessels in Boston Harbour and threw all the tea in their holds into the water.

The story is actually a lot more involved and complicated than that, but the basic story is this: Britain’s autocratic treatment of the American Colonies, especially in terms of their arbitrary taxation coupled with the refusal to allow representation in Parliament—“taxation without representation”—was essentially what formed the basis of what was to culminate in the Continental Congress and the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party became one of those mythic historical moments accruing far more significance to itself than the actual events merited, but then that’s how history becomes myth. A rag-tag (probably drunk) bunch of angry protesters destroys some cargo; but in doing so at a pivotal moment become exemplars of cheeky American obstreperousness in the face of tradition, models for the future of civil disobedience and resistance to tyranny. All of which is fair enough.

Of course, what happens with mythic history is that it tends to get appropriated years, decades, centuries down the line by those wishing to invoke its symbolic power and associate themselves with people, ideas, or events that have become irrevocably romanticized in the popular imagination.

The current “tea parties” are a series of ostensibly spontaneous protests against the Obama Administration’s tax increases, spending, and apparent moves to expand government. They started mid-March, and there are a bunch scheduled to take place on April 15 (the American Tax Day). They have been characterized as grass-roots protests by “ordinary Americans” aghast at Obama’s policies. They are, according to their promoters, examples of ordinary joes and janes rising up like the 1773 rabble-rousers. Here’s assbutt Glenn Beck holding for to Fox News talking head Neil Cavuto:


Now, I’m all for civil disobedience and robust critiques of power and government, so while I disagree with the arguments being made by these people, more power to ‘em. Speaking however as someone occupationally preoccupied with symbolic economies, I do think it’s important to make a few observations here—probably observations made any number of times already, but since I haven’t encountered them, I’ll risk being repetitive.

It’s pretty obvious what the organizers of these rallies had in mind when they named them “Tea Parties.” That is to say, they’re evoking the spirit of spontaneous grass-roots protest against distant and unfeeling governance, tyrannical governance at that, which was acting in an arrogant and high-handed manner. The 1773 protesters have been memorialized as the embodiment of the American spirit: simple men, moved beyond the bounds of polite dialogue by anger and provocation; get-it-done individuals sick of merely talking (they spilled out of a meeting being held by Samuel Adams, who vainly exhorted them to remain calm); and finally, honest and hard-working souls driven to an extreme by and interfering, remote government.

The narrative is pretty straightforward, and it’s not unusual: it tends to get trotted out in its various incarnations by activists, pundits and politicians wanting to self-identify as somehow authentically American (just see how frequently the phrase “Founding Fathers” gets employed on both the left and the right as a means of lending weight to an argument). But as the wonderful Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan argues in her slim but powerful book The Uses and Abuses of History, we need to be alive to the ways in which the appropriations of historical myth manipulate or deform their original sources. In this case, we don’t really even need to revisit the particulars of the historical Boston Tea Party—the deviations of the current incarnation from what it represents are sufficient. To wit:

The 1773 Tea Party was not a protest against taxation, but against autocracy. Remember, the rallying cry was “no taxation without representation.” It wasn’t the taxes that were the problem: it was that the citizens of the thirteen colonies had no say in them. Taxes are onerous, certainly, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out, they’re the price we pay for civilization. Perhaps the colonies would have agreed that the tea tax was worthwhile, perhaps not. The problem was that they had no opportunity to say one way or the other. Today, of course, there is no King George taxing Americans—just their democratically elected president, who for good or for ill was elected. Which was kind of what the American Revolution was fought for to begin with.

The tax hikes that “ordinary Americans” are rallying against are (a) not tax hikes—they are the expiry of the tax cuts made by the Bush Administration. Obama isn’t taxing Americans back to the Stone Age, he’s essentially doing nothing as the Bush tax cuts run out the clock. And (b) for all the attempts to portray this as populist rage, the Obama Administration has (or is planning to) cut taxes for anyone under $250K.

Of course, there’s also the issue of the expansion of government and increased spending. Which begs the question: where was this populist rage for the past eight years while Bush radically grew the government, rolled back civil rights, instituted invasive policies of wiretapping and rendition, and took the government from a healthy surplus to a massive deficit? The protests of Glenn Beck you see in the clip above—representative of the right’s historical revisionism—are at best disingenuous, at worst overtly mendacious. They were for everything George W. Bush did, until they weren’t.

These rallies are not just the protests of the citizenry, but have been enthusiastically embraced by congressional Republicans, many of whom will be featured speakers. This is not itself wrong or really even objectionable, but it does highlight a certain amnesia, and indeed hypocrisy. Let’s remember that the 1773 Tea Party was a specifically anti-government event, and that is the spirit being evoked in the naming of the current rallies. It strikes me as ever so slightly disingenuous for elected members of Congress to join attempts to undermine government when (a) they were part of the chorus over the past eight years decrying any criticism of the Bush Administration as un-American at best, treasonous at worst, and (b) Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, in spite of nearly losing her seat after she suggested that Democratic legislators should be investigated for un-American beliefs and behaviour, is at it again; and in an almost endearingly naked retread of Joe McCarthy, Representative Spenser Bachus (R-AL) has declared that there are seventeen socialists in Congress. Those two should really get together.

Finally, there’s this whole spontaneity issue. That’s at the heart of the Boston Tea Party mythos: it wasn’t a conspiracy, it wasn’t planned for weeks with scale models of the harbour and contingency plans and code names, and it wasn’t perpetrated by the 1773 version of the Navy Seals. Although it could have been all those things, the mythology of the event lies in its spontaneity—its suddennesss. A bunch of angry guys, and one of them has an idea: “Hey, let’s dress up and injuns and throw all the tea in the harbour!” (Alternative historical theory: it wasn’t actually political protest, it was a serendipitous fraternity prank). In reality, the contemporary Tea Parties have all the spontaneity of a Martha Stewart garden party. Beyond the explicit support of Fox News, which has been hyping them since the start (and will be providing keynote speakers in the form of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and Greta van Susteren), these events have been sponsored and organized by the conservative think-tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. And lest the term “think tanks” lends these organizations an aura of neutrality or objectivity, you should know that they are operated and funded by lobbyists. They are well-organized and well-funded, and have been taking care of the logistics and publicity (with a helping hand from Fox News, of course). So any depiction of these events as “spontaneous” expressions of populist rage needs to be taken with a grain of salt or five.

Kumar goes to the White House; sadly, Harold stays home

This just in: actor Kal Penn, Kumar of Harold and Kumar fame and late of House, has been hired by the White House as an associate director in the Office of Public Liaison. His job will be to act as a liaison between President Obama's administration and Asian-American, Pacific Islander and arts community constituents.

In keeping with this week's paranoia theme, I would like to observe that Penn was a terrorist and a Guantanamo Bay escapee. This appointment is obviously a blatant move on the part of the Obama Administration to bring the United States ever closer to Islamofascisocialistarianism. People, be warned.

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!

Still breathing, just lazy

OK, so I haven’t posted in a full month, and I feel properly chastised. I’m in a posting slump, which I hope to pull myself out of. I’ve had a couple of ideas for longer posts running through my head, but haven’t really had the time/energy to sit down and work through them. I have however started writing one, so expect something substantive in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll catch you up. Here is how March panned out:

• Went to Barbados for a week at the beginning of the month. Yup.

• If I’d been more blog-assiduous, I’d have posted a celebration of Jon Stewart ripping Jim Cramer a new one. Brilliant. If you didn’t see it, here’s the link here.

• While the contrast between Barbados and St. John’s weather was just as stark as you would imagine, the weather for the remainder of March was actually relatively pleasant. Which has me wondering if the other shoe is set to drop in April.

• U2’s new album=yummy goodness. While No Line on the Horizon isn’t the boys’ best outing, there’s a remarkable texture to the songs that has me finding new stuff with each listen. My current favourite track (it changes day to day) is “Breathe.”

• I didn’t teach on April Fool’s day this year, which made me sad. I usually manage to pull one over on my students. Last year I distributed an exam rubric with sample questions that would have confounded Einstein’s literary equivalent. This year I had to settle for convincing a former student now abroad, as we chatted over Facebook, that they’re building a nuclear reactor in Holyrood.

• Speaking of April Fool’s, Car & Driver magazine posted a joke article claiming that Obama was ordering GM and Chrysler to cease and desist any involvement in NASCAR. This in itself wasn’t that funny. What was funny was that Anne Coulter read this and immediately wrote a column attacking Obama for dictating business policy. Mmmmm, that’s good fact-checking.

That’s it. More later.