Hair Führer's Big Cookie

One of my favorite cinematic scenes is from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, in which Pee-Wee meets the rich kid Francis on the sidewalk.  Frances says his dad says he can have anything he wants.  He's decided he wants Pee-Wee's Red Rider bicycle. Pee-Wee playfully teases Francis until their argument ends with both of them screaming, "I know you are but what am I?"  While patently silly, the scene does such a good job of describing demand politics, and more specifically, the key factor of petulance, or a certain regression to a childish state in which demands for love take the form of "give me a cookie" and, then, an ensuing tantrum. 

Demand politics typically refers to insistent struggles over resources or the use of force in respect to some claim of recognition. At some level all forms of recognition are pleas for love (hence the demand first emerges in childhood).  Demand politics are responsible for some of our most celebrated achievements as a liberal democracy, including civil rights.  Rights are a common sort of cookie.  But the thing about demand politics is that it must be pursued at the same time as other forms (compromise, technocratics, development, and so on) for a semblance of balance and reason, and to stave off a kind of addiction.  Demands are drug-like in their addictive quality.  Moderation is hard to manage when demand is concerned, however, striving for moderation can lead to more secure, long-term gains. 

One of the most conspicuous features of the Trump presidency is that it consists—at least in the public screen---almost entirely of a politics of pure demand: Veruca Salt's "I want it now!" chorus keeps coming from the White House and usually through Trump's unfortunately ugly mouth.  That few seasoned statespersons, even his supporters, are unwilling to comply with all of his demands make them only stronger.  His incessant demand for "a wall" is like the most superduper jelly-centered cookie, the big one and, given his qualifiers for describing it ("big, beautiful"), it must certainly promise the greatest love of all.  I suspect at least one side of any successful part of the wall that is actually completed will be mirrored. 

Yesterday the POTUS held a press conference with what he's calling "Angel Families," or those who have lost loved ones to immigrant violence, in hopes of shifting attention away from the abhorrent "zero tolerance" policy that has separated some 2,000 children from their families. Despite numerous studies that have shown no link between immigration and crime, ever since he announced his candidacy, Trump has consistently described immigrants in racist and dehumanizing terms to flame support for building his Big Cookie.

The optics of the scene were petulant and recall to mind adolescent fantasies of neighborhood tribunals during which competing neighborhood tribes vie for ownership of the dirt hill in the empty lot for bike jumps.  Arrayed on stage were a number of families who had a loved one killed by the hands of an illegal immigrant, no doubt a fact.  But the empirical statistics and research we have at our disposal on the topic suggests, of course, these families are more of an exception than the rule.  That this is an orchestrated optical illusion is exhibited by Trump's decision to autograph the posters featuring portraits of the deceased.  What the autograph is meant to communicate is unclear, except for the fact that such a press conference was not for these families; it was a platform for Trump to make his demand for "immigration reform" and get his Big Cookie.   The families' victims, in effect, get victimized again. 

This kind of media spectacle, meant as a form of misdirection, is something Trump and his handlers repeatedly orchestrate.  Some readers may recall in October, 2016, just prior to a presidential debate, Trump invited self-described victims of sexual misconduct by both Bill and Hillary Clinton to a press conference.  The women repeated their stories and expressed admiration and support for Trump, who sat in the middle like the messiah with his characteristic, neck-bearing smugness.  I have no reason to doubt these women; what is startling is that they would agree to rehearsing their claims to assist Trump in his bid for the presidency. As I have argued elsewhere, such grandiloquent display of exploitation rehearses the logic of sexual assault by using victims to support a larger cause, using them as vehicles of communication and expressions of power (e.g., Rubin's conception of "trafficking in women").  Of course, such deflecting spectacles are meant to erase memory of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump expresses he is above the law and, because of his fame and power, can grab any woman he wants by the genitals.

The "I know you are but what am I?" presidency puts petulance on the world stage, to embarrassing and deadly consequence.  Given the well-acknowledged, perverse logic of spectatorship as such, Trump's presidency is the most perverse reign we have ever seen.

Mango-man in Jerusalem

Music: Pendant: Make Me Know You Sweet (2018)

Apparently goaded by top advisor Stephen Miller, the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy is separating thousands of children from their guardians as the government pursues prosecutions for illegal immigration.  The optics were of course deliberate, and the willful suspension of any sentiment of sympathy is seemingly total. Yesterday Trump erroneously claimed that the U.S. government was only "enforcing the law" (this is his enforcement policy, not a law), a point that was repeated, uh, repeatedly by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. "We will not apologize for the job we do," she said, "or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do."

Numerous public figures have criticized the policy as fascistic and reminiscent of Japanese internment.  What is not emphasized enough, however, is the logic or type of affected thinking that willfully justifies the blind enforcement of cruel policies: "I'm just doing my job," or as Hannah Arendt termed it, the "banality of evil." 

Reporting for The New York Times, Arendt famously covered the trial of one of the major coordinators of the "Final Solution," Adolf Eichmann.  Rather than finding a monster she found a man who misinterpreted Kant's moral philosophy by installing Hitler as the arbiter of the categorical imperative (a superego) and, unable to think for himself, a drone who just followed his orders and the (constantly changing) law (first it was emigration, then extermination). Well, sort of.  He did help orchestrate massive deportations and the murder six million human beings. What is banal here is the complete absence of original thought; what is evil here is the complete absence of original thought too---but, paradoxically, an ability to make an independent extension of the unoriginal.  Could we say Eichmann was creative?  Or relatedly, that the spectacle of family separation is a rather creative means to justify a political win?

I don't think so.  Thinking of the ends, which means envisioning possibilities and consequences, is not in play here.  The "end" is already set.  As with the Dick the Dark Lord Cheney, Bannon and Miller scripted it all out before the president moved into the White Dump. It didn't go the way that was planned, but governance continues to move toward the desired direction.    

I've been thinking and reading a lot these days about creativity and its relationship to play: what is creativity, really?  We seem to know it when we sense it, but something remains elusive.  Many creative types will often tell you they don't know where their creativity comes from (hence, the muses and such). Even so, creativity seems to be a form of "original" thought and doing, apparently emerges in childhood play, boundary testing, and problem-solving that can be aggressive (even violent) at times but, as we mature, gets channeled often toward the aesthetic or sport.  I put "original" in scare quotes here because I do not mean to implicate autonomy or the individual genius model, but rather something like an openness to surprise or inspiration that gets channeled into something "new."  I mention my current reading habits because listening to the news today---this "we're only enforcing the law" routine---reminded me of the banality of evil but also how the Trump administration is completely devoid of creativity.  The end is set, they just gotta fund and build The Wall, and act-out the well-worn script that sounds like spectatorship but starts with the letter "d."  While I am not particularly fearful this kind of power will ever be achieved because at least some checks are getting balanced, the script is still getting filmed.

Apparently one White House custodian described the Trump Doctrine as, "We're America, Bitch!" which of course implies the coda, "get over it."   

We've had a similar rhetorical doctrine before with the Bush II presidency, which reminds me of the theme song (NSFW) for the Team America: World Police puppet fiesta by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  Unlike the lapsed Mormon comedians, however, the "Get Over It" doctrine implicates a faceless humanity that is expendable (while a term of endearment for many, in this national, political context "bitch" is assuredly meant as a dehumanizing term), a faceless but brown-skinned humanity drowning in floodwaters but worthy of getting thrown at least roll of paper towels.  Or maybe a hydrogen bomb. Yet the "Get Over It" doctrine, which is apparently deliberately sabotaging friendships with powerful democracies and cultivating dude-bro relations with tyrants and dictators, is so banal in its historical plagiarism that it is, well, also stereotypically evil: build a wall; deport a perceived minority as a threat; demand "law and order," and so on . . . it's as if the Republican National Convention was, indeed, the Nuremburg Rally all over again, and the acceptance speech should be titled,  "I have a struggle too, bitch."  (For my hot take on the rally around the time it happened, see this Medium post). 

And is one really shocked that Trump had affairs with adult entertainment stars? Isn't that the key plot device in the How to Be a Bad Boy script? What about all that gaudy gold? Isn't that what rich winners get? Gold toilet seats, like golden showers, are really rich and naughty, right?

Two more points related to the dangerous direction of uncreative flow: the U.S. has more mass shootings than anywhere in the world, now on average about once a month depending on how one defines "mass shooting." Note that nothing about a mass shooting is a surprise; it's a fantasy that's been churning in U.S. culture for at least half a century, if not longer.  There is nothing more banal and evil than rehearsing a fantasy of mass atrocity---there were even some short-lived video games---since the script is well known, as is the demographic profile: a male, usually someone who feels like an outsider, obsessed with weaponry and hoarding it, a paranoia complex of some sort, simmering, years long grudges, an inability to see others as humans instead of faceless foes, a sense of entitlement, and the desire for a suicidal ending of bullet-blasting (or chest exploding) glory.  No creativity there, just a script. Mass shootings are also contagions: one script inspires another, and so on, usually among (young) men with the same "profile," now inclusive of "incels."  It's victims all the way down, a logic of cinema: to feel omnipotent something must disappear from the frame.

Second, the logic of the banal actor of evil is perverse, meaning that he (and it's usually a he) knows violence and cruelty is wrong but does it anyway, usually out of a sense of duty and inevitability and above all righteousness (or its flip side, revenge)---because it is gloriously wrong and perceived as transgressive! But it's not really transgressive, because it's a compulsory script—it's plotted already.  The pervert does not transgress, but rather makes demands.  The making of demands begets more demands---it has a certain addictive character.  Relatedly, the clinically perverse tend to have something in common: they have little capacity for creativity, but rather, are more interested in policing the rules of the game, which have been previously unfairly applied or enforced.  Everyone must be treated the same, by the rules, no exceptions (except, of course, the folks responsible for the policing, since they are not suckers like most of the players). This is the logic of "both sides" moral equivalency, of why the civil rights advocates are just as responsible for the violence in Charlottesville as the white supremacists.  This is the logic of deliberately splitting families up as a deterrent for an "epidemic" of illegal immigration and violence that is not in reality an epidemic or violent. This is the logic of dehumanization, which prepares the way for the only thing worse: disappearance. 

Rhetorical Criticism as Violence

Music: The Rumor Said Fire: Crush (2018)

After months of travel and unexpected meetings, I've finally managed to get in something of a rhythm for my book in progress.  The working title is "Perverse Rhetorics: Political Aberration in the Age of Trumpeteering."  The book is also somewhat unexpected, as I didn't realize I had written so much about perversion over the past few years.  But, there you are.  Trying to get it all down.

In the theme of the unexpected, as I was completing the introduction I realized I was writing a bit too much about rhetorical criticism itself, as if to justify it as an academic subject (as a friend and mentor recently said to me, publishers don't see rhetorical or cultural studies as places of "knowledge production"). So I cut the intro in twain. It's turning out to be a chapter on "method without method," on doing psychoanalytic rhetorical criticism, drawing on many of the metaphors and heuristics I teach in the Ph.D. seminar of the same.  Taking after my mentor Karlyn Campbell, I often repeat that rhetorical criticism is not a method, it is a perspective or craft.  

Given the early, scientific ambitions of Freud, the key critique offered up here, ironically, is the way in which criticism was turned into a "science," or something like it, which is how Edwin Black opens his landmark book on rhetorical criticism: we're not a science, but we should be more like scientists.  That's a bit too simplistic, because he also insists the critics take is to judge and make sense of the human condition (taking on, then, much more of a burden than social scientists, he suggests).  I mean to work through this tension in the chapter--not quite there yet.  And, of course, I cannot share it all here or no one will publish it!

Anyhoo, here is a teaser from the introduction of the chapter, tentatively titled "On Psycho-Rhetorical Criticism."  The original title, "On Critical Violence," seemed a bit too, uh, jarring.  

Because in Deconstruction there is always a disparity between the conscious intention of the author and the actual function of the text, a text is like Frankenstein's monster: it acquires a life of its own that is, from the standpoint of its creator, both independent and malevolent.

--Edwin Black       

Even the most dismissive gesture betokens a body.  As Friedrich Nietzsche once taught, as a craft or producerly art (techne), the stuff of rhetoric is gestural and rhythmic, a bodily act, a kind of singing and dancing that is perhaps most familiar to us as music.  And yet the ancients taught us that rhetoric is not only to be understood as emanating from a body—that is, rhetoric is not simply embodied—because it is also bodied forth and sends forth bodies, or as the holy Saint(s) John once evangelized, the ultimate, über-rhetoric is the "word made flesh" (which some liberals eat, by the way, perversely perpetuating the cycle).  It may be tempting to declaim, then, that criticism is "flesh made word," an alchemical transmutation of sensorial effects into tropes and logic and generic patterns in what amounts to a form of amputation.  Indeed, the study of rhetoric has always concerned itself, in one way or another, with the disposing of bodies, or at least with a gesture of precision regarding a body's parts.      

By way of a vivi(secte)d analogy, pace Black, I begin with a decomposed illustration that is particularly demonstrable of a default, disciplinary disposition toward the critical act and its object, albeit in a more conspicuous, perverse manner. Had I the space and patience, I would describe two visual metaphors, the first from Peter Greenaway's renowned 1996 film, The Pillow Book, which depicts an obsession with the painted body and the sensuous pleasures of writerly gestures and cross-cultural love.  As would be typical of a Freudian, though, I prefer to focus on a grotesque counterpoint: if we've learned anything from the 60s and 70s, in the Age of Aquarius and Nixon, pathology is the place where the sun shines in.  My interest here is an offensive and hilariously gruesome autopsy scene in Paul Morrissey's infamous 1973 B-movie, 3D-schlockfest, Flesh for Frankenstein (Flesh).   Whereas The Pillow Book explores interpretation through the gentle caress of a body, Flesh exploits bodies for a Master, leaving them lifeless.  

Erroneously marketed as Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein (Warhol had little to do with the film), Morrissey's comedic take on Shelley's classic is a critique of the ideologies of racial purity and eugenics as well as the excesses of commercial romanticism.  The film depicts the sexually repressed but ambitious Barron Frankenstein and the hedonistic exploits of his insatiable sister and spouse, Baroness Katrin Frankenstein.  Driven by a perverse compulsion to build two "perfect" zombies to breed and proliferate a superior race that he alone commands, the Barron sews together the most attractive body parts of multiple cadavers while, nevertheless, expressing a complete detachment from his own compulsions.  Sexual and bodily pleasures have nothing to do with the inner-life of others; Frankenstein is obsessed with body parts for slaves who never quite unify into whole persons, despite all the sutures.      

In an incisive scene, the Baron begins to open the abdomen of a nude woman to inspect her internal organs. As the Baron is preparing the body and snipping stitches, his assistant Otto looks on in overacted, wide-eyed jealously.  Once the bowels are opened, the Baron slips his hands inside, feeling and squeezing and naming the organs:

Baron: Beautiful, we are very fortunate to find such a perfect torso in one piece! . . . Ready?

Otto: [nods yes]

Baron: I go into her digestive parts. [snips sutures, blood gushes]

Otto: [stares at the Baron and wipes his forehead with gauze.]

Female cadaver: [opens her eyes, revealing she is really not dead.]

Baron: Separate. Spleen. [heavy breathing.]. Kidneys. Gall bladder!  Liver! [pulls out the liver and caresses it.] Umm. Umm. Umm.

As the Baron plays with her "organs" he appears to climax in a paradoxically clean headshot (we only see a face in ecstasy).  Soon thereafter Frankenstein molests his "zombie" again and, having climaxed a second time, proclaims triumphantly, "to know death, Otto, you have to f--- life in the gallbladder!"  Such an absurd statement is pivotal because of a gag at the film's end, in which Otto also molests the female monster and kills her, a violation of the paternal authority and alternative necrophilic, primal order sought by the Baron.

In addition to its critique of sexual indulgence (gore is just pornpourri), Morrissey's critique of commercial romanticism is that its sexual excesses trend toward the fetishization of objects, not people, and the parts of people, not whole people, such as the exposed breast focused on for the duration of this scene, or even less conventionally, the gall bladder! As an allegory for the critical act, Baron Frankenstein's perversion issues a warning about the excesses of fixation and the aggressivity of criticism: approaching an object too surgically, too methodically or mechanistically, eviscerates it, amputates it, dissolves the whole into something offal.

The Rosewater Chronicles has Moved!

I started my weblog, "The Rosewater Chronicles," in the fall of 2002 in order to join my colleagues and friends who had left Friendster, Livejournal, and MySpace for personal-public writing on WordPress.  I had written the equivalent of numerous books there, mostly on academic life and scholarly topics, but there were more than a few musings on daily life too.  My first post was about moving to Baton Rouge from Minneapolis and comprehending the charms of culture shock, including the shift from indoor to front porch life, or what my new neighbor Shappy and I dubbed "Front Porch Action." 

In those early days I discovered a recipe in the letter of a Civil War general (I forget which side) for Mint Juleps (originally "Juleb") that called for the cold, fresh water from a spring, mint, lovingly smashed ice, and a touch of rosewater.  That's where I got the name for the blog, writing as I sipped a julep--not Kurt Vonnegut.  Although the premise of the novel is fitting, as it refers to the establishment of the Rosewater Foundation by Lister Ames Rosewater: anyone who visited got gobs of love and money.  Would that I could say the same about the thousands of visitors to my blog over the years! 

Alas, the readership dwindled with the arrival of social networking, especially the "micro-blogging" features of Facebook and Twitter, and so I only took to updating the blog on a weekly basis, then a monthly basis, and eventually a yearly basis.  Eventually RoseChron became a personal mirror-site for more public posts on Medium.com. 

Since The Great Dwindling of Bloggington, large hacking-bot operations repeatedly attacked the RoseChron.  WordPress spam and virus filters protected it, for the most part, but deleting hundreds of comments consisting of broken English and nonsensical twaddle got tiresome.  I mostly haven't given the blog much attention in recent years, although I did consult the archive from time to time for discussions I remembered that seemed important (such a frequent interactions with a couple of friends who are, sadly, no longer with us).  It was important for me to keep the archive, because much has happened in sixteen years.  I also had some good writing ideas from time to time that ended up on the blog but nowhere else (e.g., I remember a psychoanalytic take on Tom Cruise and Scientology that I'd like to turn into an essay one day). 

A couple of months ago, however, I discovered someone and hacked my account, changing the template.  That's when I knew I had a problem.  I changed my passwords and the template hoping this would do the trick, but in a week or so the blog was completely taken over by Malware, mostly in perverted php index files and invisible files that I cannot figure out how to delete.  After having no luck with my service provider (DreamHost, whom I would not recommend to anyone who does not program), I decided it was time to move to a different service provider.  The next step is to figure out how to save the archives and port them here.  I have a few friends, thankfully, to consult for that process.

In the meantime, though, like the return of vinyl and community radio, there appears to be a trend back to blogging. Recent paranoia about security and privacy issues on Facebook is, apparently, leading folks back to the long-form, anti-micro approach.  Perhaps, I don't know.  I know I won't have the time to post every other day, as I did when the blog-thing began.  But maybe there will be a place for blogging in my life once again.  We shall see . . . .