While revolution spreads in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and around the Middle East, most of us in America watch via live feed from Al Jazeera, receive up to the minute feeds on Twitter, and join groups on Facebook. All of our interactive participation with the revolt acts as a way to stay informed. But isn’t this access — our very ability to stream a revolution live — part of the problem?

Much credit was given to social media in allowing hundreds of thousands of citizens in Egypt to collectivize, rally and demand change. Not to put too fine a point on it, but instead of tweets and status updates, I would credit decades of autocratic oppression, marshal law, poverty, violence and unemployment as what “allowed” the people to revolt. Egypt ranks amongst the most corrupt countries, and while Facebook and Twitter surely made communication and coordination easier, it was three decades of brutality that made it possible. The “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook campaign is both inspiring and monumental, but how many thousands of other anonymous “El-Shaheed” (the Facebook account holder’s name, which is Arabic for martyr) were disgraced and brutalized before Said’s experience resonated, not as a random tragedy, but as a ubiquitous experience among the people?

For most of us, the life of Mohamed Bouazizi is beyond the horizon of our understanding. Dropping out of school to sell produce from a pushcart on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, in order to provide for his family, Bouzazi was subject to regular police harassment and extortion, having his cart confiscated or damaged time and again. The final straw came when a female officer slapped him, spat on him and overturned his cart while other officers watched. When he tried to file a complaint, the local government refused him; humiliated and defiled, Bouzazi set himself on fire.

… the perspective one gains from dislocation is, of course, not only retrospective but prospective. Exile places one at an oblique angle to one’s new world and makes every emigrant, willy-nilly, into an anthropologist and relativist; for to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute — it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seemingly natural aspects of our identities and social reality are constructed rather than given and that they could be arranged, shaped, articulated in quite another way.
— Eva Hoffman

“Freedom Has Come and Gone” — Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra

Imagine the view
From a helicopter gunship
A man comes into view
And you hit that switch, and when you hit that switch
All of heaven shits on you

Since 1950, the US has provided money and military aid to Egypt ($1.3 billion annually, second only to Israel), and in exchange the US relies on Egypt as an ally in achieving its goals in the Middle East. The unfortunate consequence of this exchange is exacted on the citizens of Egypt; three decades of marshal law and repression. It’s a dangerous pattern that we repeat often: Pinochet, Sadaam Hussein, Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto, Zia ul-Haq. Brutal dictators find US support, and in the event of a popular uprising, Washington is quick to “counsel” the wayward dictator toward democracy. This two-faced world leadership isn’t news to anyone. For Washington, as long as it accords with strategic and economic objectives, brutality is an acceptable consequence of “foreign policy.” For citizens, this hypocrisy, while hard to swallow, is made possible by our passivity. Naturally, as concerned, thoughtful people, we empathize with oppressed people and engage them through altruism: charities, humanitarian efforts, medical aid, and so on. But don’t our admirable remedies for curing the evils of the world prolong the disease of evil? The remedy is part of the disease.

JOIN THE UNDEFEATED

A simple example of prescribing the poison as the cure is America’s “green revolution.” We re-design our lifestyle to be part of the solution to the world’s ecological problems: We donate our used, un-green items to charity, thereby helping people in need; We eat organic food, free of pesticides and genetically modified organisms, in an effort to tread gently on this earth; We buy Ethos water and Tom’s shoes and Newman’s Own products that allow us to speak our ethics through our dollars; We buy reusable cloth shopping bags to avoid adding plastic to landfills; We practice yoga, sharing in the holistic benefits of eastern wisdom; We demand that our iPhones, iPods, iPads, laptops and desktop computers have “conflict free” minerals so women in Africa aren’t raped in order for us to browse the Internet.

We go on living within this system that is fueled by the suffering of others. In the case of Egypt, this disproportionate access to “freedom” sustained thirty years of marshal law. Of course it breeds hatred! How could it not? It’s immoral to use the system of exploitation as an alleviant to the horrible evils that directly result from that very system of exploitation. Our remedies, however thoughtful or altruistic, do not cure the evils of the world, they prolong them.

“Where There’s A Will” — The Pop Group

Each and every one of us
Shall pay on demand
Our part of sacrifice
Knowing we’re all together

It’s interesting that there’s no taxpayer backlash at thirty years and billions of dollars in weaponry to support autocratic brutality in Egypt. Why was this not one of the first things in the debates on wasteful spending between McCain and Obama? And, amidst all this talk of “re-tooling” our society, why are these costly military “aid” packages not re-tooled into billions of lunches? Wouldn’t a well-fed, suitably housed, work-ready populace be less likely to revolt? Why is pumping guns and tanks to autocracy not seen as using the poison as the cure to “the war on terrorism?”

It’s no surprise that the bullets fired on Egyptian citizens, the tanks patrolling the streets, the tear gas canisters fired into the crowds, were part of America’s “military aid” package to Egypt, and bore the insignia, “Made in U.S.A.” It’s a painful irony that while all of our manufacturing jobs disappear and our unemployment rises, one of the few remaining exports we offer acts as an expedient for the import of other’s hatred against us.

Washington greeted the uprising of democracy in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with duplicity. Just days before Washington conceded the Egyptian people’s destiny; it counseled them to allow Mubarak to transition “orderly.” One need only think back to another democratic implementation, that of Firdos Square in Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled, and within minutes Washington declared democracy. Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.”

“Cenotaph” — This Heat

A war to end all wars
And the war that came after that

There were roughly two hundred Iraqis who participated in unseating Sadaam’s statue. As we later learned, those Iraqis were hired by American forces to participate in the charade to symbolize the end of an oppressive regime. The scene in Tahrir Square, Cairo, with roughly a million participants — five thousand times as many people than Firdos Square! — was, at the very least, an order of magnitude more convincing a display of spontaneous democracy. Yet Washington was damn near the last to acknowledge what it was first to claim for the people of Iraq. Why?

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

While confirming our suspicions that Washington carries out villainous misdeeds under the guise of making the world a safer place, isn’t watching the situation in Egypt unfold more a case of realizing our position within democracy as equivalent to being among the envious exclusivity of hierarchy? In his speech after the overthrow of Mubarak, Obama quoted Martin Luther King, saying, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” In this sense, democracy is circumscribed by the red velvet rope; access to the VIP section isn’t available to just anybody. From inside, aren’t we aware, as participants in democracy’s exclusivity, however explicitly, that if everyone is allowed into the party it will totally kill the vibe, and, almost as a natural reflex, we understand the need for circumscription and, almost automatically, separate “us” from “them”?

Was this covetous distantiation not apparent in the WikiLeaks controversy? The leaked diplomatic cables contained revelations (US contractor DynaCorp used taxpayer dollars to host a party for Afghan policemen where young boys were auctioned for rape!), but more than verifying our suspicions and igniting public outrage, the media and concerned citizens (us, collectively) impetuously admonished Assange in a rap colloquialism: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” We didn’t demand DynaCorp be shut down, we didn’t march on Washington in disgust at the misuse of tax dollars, we debated whether Assange was a rapist. Another relevant rap colloquialism: Stop snitching!

There’s a veil of symbolic function that operates in a democracy, usually couched in presidential platitudes (“It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war”), that acts as a “first rule of fight club”-type warning of the consequences of pulling back the curtain to exhibit how the sausage is made, as it were. Assange, as freedom’s player hater, lifted the curtain, revealing the unprincipled aspects of democratic principles, and was treated the way we treat any partygoer who lets his dimwitted, bucktooth cousin from Cheyenne beyond the velvet rope: We laugh and point and call him a fag. Or in this case, “rapist!”

Who wants to hear about 1,000 peasants lying dead?

As a country obsessed with recycling, isn’t WikiLeaks a modern recycling of the Pentagon Papers? As a war strategist turned peace activist, Daniel Ellsberg “suffered” a change of heart as the result of witnessing atrocities in the name of democracy: lies that stretched across four presidencies, hundreds of thousands dead, bombing countries we weren’t at war with. For Ellsberg, seeing top secret plans for systematically destroying Southeast Asia unveiled the symbolic function that allowed him, as a war strategist, to believe he was making the world a safer place. Whatever ideological presuppositions were at work before he read the documents, failed afterward, leaving him enmeshed in an aporia that saw the illusion of power as the power of illusion. Unable to rationally reconcile his beliefs with his reality, he “snapped,” and acted “irrationally.”

“America” — The Au Pairs

Why don’t you get a bayonet?
Mince up a peasant or two
Remember… America’s right behind you!

Ellsberg’s break was a Derridian deconstruction that shouldn’t be underemphasized. How many people have the “opportunity,” either by choice or by force, to radically de-construct their entire worldview? And it was precisely this opportunity that caused Ellsberg’s defense attorney (Ellsberg was sued under the Espionage Act) to try and exclude middle-aged men from the jury. Specifically because it’s the middle-aged man who, partly out of envy and partly out of contempt, looks at another man who’s radically re-shaped his life, and sides against him. Deconstruction taught us that we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our un-freedom. Ellsberg, having his life up to that point ruined by finding the language to articulate his un-freedom, immediately became an “enemy of the people” (as Nixon called him) once he found the language to articulate freedom. The illusion of power is only the power of illusion, in that the fundamental level of ideology is not of an illusion masking the real state of things, but an unconscious fantasy structuring our view of reality itself.

Similarly, isn’t the very thing we fear in a terrorist this same notion of a radically re-shaped worldview? That is, as a “normal” follower of Islam, we sense no threat, yet when the same Islamist is “radicalized,” he becomes an “enemy of the people.”

The case against Ellsberg was declared a mistrial when the covert operations of the White House Plumbers were uncovered: His home was bugged; There was a plot to dose him with LSD before a public speech to make him seem crazy; His psychiatrist’s office was burglarized in search of damning evidence to use against him; Later through the release of the Watergate tapes, we learned Nixon not only wanted Ellsberg assassinated, but he thought carpet bombs and napalm weren’t radical enough to subdue the Viet Cong, he wanted to use the nuclear bomb.

The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
—Justice Black (New York Times v. United States)

The Pentagon Papers caused a huge scandal, damning evidence was revealed about the war and the leadership of the country. Towards the end of Nixon’s first term as president, as more secrets and more scandals were revealed, the country became disillusioned and enraged. Nixon was caught red-handed. The 1972 presidential election, amid the scandal and lies of the Pentagon Papers, shamed Nixon into a whopping 49 state victory! Proving what Ellsberg’s defense attorney knew: Deconstructing the veil of symbolic function comes at the expense of unraveling daily life, and most people aren’t willing to risk salto mortale — the leap of faith into the unknown for the hope of something different.

“Burn Baby, Burn” — Jimmy Collier

I really wanted to be somebody
I really wanted some scratch
I really wanted to have a decent job
But all I had was a match

A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP?

In keeping with the recycling theme, aren’t we, as survivors of the Great Recession, living in a re-enactment of the Great Depression? I’m tempted to call this period, The New Deal II, The Sequel. Or, The Great Depression 2.0. It was after the ’29 crash — when unemployment skyrocketed, farmers lost their land to dust, and the demand for US industries plummeted — that measures were taken to safeguard the country from ever having to suffer such a catastrophe again. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act made it easier for people to own homes. The Securities Act of 1933 created the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to regulate the stock market and prevent corporate abuse. The New Deal put people back to work reinvigorating the infrastructure of the country.

Starting in the ‘30s, with the rise in home ownership, and as the idea of living on credit came into existence, the baby boomers were emblematic of what Marx called commodity fetishism. Job security, a living wage, owning a home, and so on, all framed the new dominant ideology. This worldview, this sense of ownership, was the very thing that Daniel Ellsberg’s attorney was up against in the Pentagon Papers case. While the world was upside down during the Vietnam War, and people took to the streets in protest, the ideological underpinnings of the populace remained hard to shake. They were substantially invested, and the very thing that caused the economic collapse operated as its own counter-agent.

All your private property
Is a target for your enemy
And your enemy is … We!
—Jefferson Airplane (“We Should Be Together” — lyrics cribbed from an Up Against The Wall Motherfucker leaflet written by John Sundstrom)

By replacing the “problem” industries of the Great Depression (farming, mining, logging, factory work) with industries of capitalist accumulation, we replaced the one-to-one value ratio with an intangible commodity value that is self-engendering. In other words, today we don’t make money from labor; we make money from money.

In the process of using our money to beget money, we got blinded by greed and engaged in deregulation, sub-prime lending, fraudulent underwriting and over-leveraging. As the market crashed again, and unemployment skyrocketed and people lost their homes to foreclosure, the SEC (the very agency created to prevent such circumstances, which relaxed the regulations that could prevent such a collapse) announced the program that allowed investment banks to supervise themselves was, “fundamentally flawed.” No shit?

THE AUDACITY OF TROPES

While the architects of the collapse are forced into retirement with billion dollar severance packages, and the post-bailout mid-term election promises of wiser spending fade away, what are we left with now? The senate is threatening a government shutdown until crucial cutbacks are made. Crucial cutbacks! Cutbacks such as art, public television and Planned Parenthood. No shit?

“America’s Got the Cutback Blues” — Muntu Meloncon

Cutbacks on social security
Cutback on childcare
America, why don’t you cut back on all of your warfare?
And while you’re cutting back, why don’t you
Cut back on bullets and guns and more
That you send to El Salvador

Can’t we use what Marx called the “symbolic existence” (paper money operating as a representation for the worth of gold) as a lens through which to view the way we reconcile capitalism within democracy? Symbolically, we understand that it is a government of the people for the people by the people, and as “the people,” our government works for us. The overwhelming evidence that contradicts this symbolic existence operates parallel to our reality. While we doubt the actual representation of our elected officials (fraud, campaign promises unfulfilled, scandal, disproportionate wealth, etc.), it doesn’t stop us from parallelisticly participating in what we doubt. So, much like we use money to make money, we use the idea of democracy in place of democracy. Thus, democracy mimics the market — self-engendering. As such, democracy functions on an ideological level, without the need for anyone to actually believe that it works in order for it to work. Much like the presidential platitudes, democracy’s message resides in its very abstention from delivering a message. The uroboric recycling of a petitio principii.

Isn’t Julian Assange the perfect example of what happens when the irreconcilable differences between capitalism and democracy are elevated out of the symbolic exchange into reality? While we may believe in the First Amendment protection of whistleblowers and the public’s right to know what our representatives are doing in our name, what WikiLeaks does is reveal a parallactic blind spot that is irreconcilably lodged between or symbolic order and our reality. Just as the Pentagon Papers lead the country to outrage and re-election of Nixon, so WikiLeaks confronts us with outrageous material that we can’t wholly alchemize within our horizon of understanding. No one will argue in support of DynaCorp using taxpayer money to throw parties where boys are auctioned as rape toys, and the shock and outrage we feel about such behavior is real, but shouldn’t the rational reaction to such revelation be irrational? Shouldn’t we “snap” at learning of such terrors? Instead, we say that we “can’t believe” what happened, and insofar as deconstruction serves as the ultimate form of disbelief, it’s true — without a radical redefinition of our way of understanding, we are stuck with a kind of disbelief. Isn’t this why normal citizens taking to the street is seen as the ultimate form of “crazy” behavior? Renouncing everything, walking in front of a tank, throwing stones at an armed militia, running towards the fire — this behavior symbolizes looking beyond the horizon of understanding. Radicalizing one’s worldview.

Short of such a break, we uncomfortably see ourselves, consciously or not, as conspirators in an irreconcilable symbolic exchange, trading our disbelief of democracy in for reality’s comfort from capital. The alternative — radical reinvention of our belief system — is beyond our horizon of finitude, and, as something not possible, creates a blind spot, separating “us” from “them.”

“He Keeps You” — Boscoe

Seem the good white folks done blessed us with a curse
Things ain’t gettin’ better, things gettin’ worse

As Americans, we are the inheritors of a recycling historic phenomenon: Dreams for a better society erupt into revolutionary upheaval, relapsing into a new version of order that reproduces itself through its inherent transgression. Doesn’t living with this sequel establish the defeated notion that a revolution succeeds not in toppling a regime, but dismantling one to put another in it’s place? And don’t we as participants in this simulacrum, seeing those on the outside clamoring to get in, view them with equal parts sadistic circumspection at their inability to get past the velvet rope, and sad certainty in knowing what awaits them is the hollow ideal of a self-replicating dream?

“They” struggle to achieve democracy, and we, like a crowd watching someone get beat up, assume that someone else will step in and stop it. As Obama quoted Martin Luther King to the people of Egypt, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom,” we found poisoned pleasure in the squinting eyes of those on the outside looking in at the blinding light of our freedom.

THIS ROOM’S SO BRIGHTLY LIT 
I CAN’T SEE SHIT

The Egyptian détournement of Obama’s “yes we can” campaign slogan to read, “yes we can too” reveals an envious willingness of the Egyptian people to assimilate into the Symbolic Order of democracy. That their struggle is beyond the horizon of our understanding is plainly illustrated as the revolution unfolds next to a competing headline in the New York Times, using the same language of the revolution: “Fashion Week Attendees are Facing the Bitter Cold with Extreme Bravery, and Style!”

It’s cynical, but a cynicism informed by a post-“Change We Can Believe In” mindset, which voted for a nebulous something that symbolically embodied difference. We are now reconciling what we got with what we expected. While Obama has made numerous changes, some monumental, what hasn’t changed is the paradigm within which he operates. It’s this lack of radical re-imagination of our reality, I believe, that finds most people disillusioned in his presidency. And, in this sense, wouldn’t it be more accurate, if, while toggling between the live stream of millions of protestors in Cairo and the Mercedes-Benz-sponsored Fashion Week coverage, the Egyptian sign read: YES WE CAN, ACTUALLY!

With Obama as the first black president, we voted for revolutionary change before we had a chance to revolutionarily change the system in which we elected him to operate. The racist backlash (“SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE, HUSSEIN!”) reveals the sticky subject which we’ve yet to be able to discuss openly as a people; we remain a melting pot, sort of institutionally indivisible but separately equal. In this sense, as inheritor of a leadership born from a system of exploitation, Obama is in the unfortunate position of being a black man administrating a white supremacy.

“Oh” — Fugazi

Lapse of luxury
Lapping waste
Cruising towards a bruising crash
Thread held, anvil’s gonna break
When the letter returns to the sender
I can hardly wait

Tracing the series of tragedies in the last decade: the September eleventh attacks, the war(s) on terror, Hurricane Katrina, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the financial collapse, the BP oil spill, the Georgia prison strikes (the biggest in US history), etc., it’s easy to think of these as end times. Instead, we should see this as capitalism functioning efficiently.

Marx published Capital in 1867, and every generation since has made predictions about the death of capitalism. Instead of dying, what happens is capitalism grows more robust, more resistant, more adaptable. In digital vernacular, capitalism has gone viral. Much like the “Doomsday Machine” in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, capitalism functions as a similarly self-engendering mechanism — either within our Symbolic Order (Wall Street! Trickle Down!) or running roughshod over our reality (Main Street! “Dude, Where’s My Job?”) — past the point of the fail-safe. Much like our democracy functions only through our ideological faith in a practice of envious exclusivity and institutional exploitation, capitalism function through our belief that everyone has a shot at the brass ring, and the waste produced from such aspirations paradoxically create security.

REAL SHIT

Capitalism’s biggest byproduct is waste, the excreta of exploited resources. In order for a capitalist economy to function, there needs to be need, and luxury goods function as the apex of symbolic need. In other words, luxury goods, by definition, are unnecessary yet symbolically they represent the ultimate capitalist achievement (luxury=success), and as such, become necessary if one intends to succeed in society. Kropotkian wisdom taught us if everyone were well fed and comfortably situated there would be little discontent, little to envy, and without envious discontent, capitalism is nonessential. Thus, the more shit produced, the more capital thrives.

Capital waste is an acceptable byproduct. Just as our daily lives are sustained by the management of waste (sewers, garbage trucks, landfills, etc.), the market is sustained by the management of capital’s excrement. Our culture of consumption, with rewards reserved for those who copiously consume, is a culture that produces endless waste. The irony of the current “green revolution” is that in re-tooling our lives to be more eco-friendly (hybrid cars, energy efficient appliances, disposal silverware made of biodegradable corn, and so on) we are redoubling our consumption in the process of re-buying a “green” replacement for everything we already own. This process is somehow not seen as ridiculous, but acceptable. It’s only when the definition of waste creeps into our daily lives — when one’s home or job become a “byproduct” and are deemed worthless — that the general acceptability of waste smells a lot different.

Isn’t this why things like celebrity fascination and reality television are so popular? Our captivation with celebrity is not merely indulgence in spectacle, but more importantly, it assuages our complicity in the meaninglessness of capital waste. However much waste our lives generate, Kim Kardashian’s wasteful engagement in luxury makes our shit seem trivial. The paradox, of course, is the more shit you produce the higher your societal ranking, and while the Kardashian life is condemnably trite, her position in the hierarchy of capital exclusivity is enviable. Similarly, we don’t believe that reality television is really real, though we allow it to symbolically function as a simulation of fame, or “everyday celebrity.” Fame Lite! Isn’t reality stardom, then, Joe Normal enjoying the fruits of celebrity without all the waste? Genuine fame without the waste fame produces. Fame and its antithesis all in one. Green Celebrity? Eco-Friendly Fame? Hybrid Luxury? Isn’t our participation in such spectacle the same as buying local, organic milk at Wal-Mart? We are supporting the antithesis of exploitative big business (local milk) while actually supporting exploitative big business (Wal-Mart). Reality television allows us the simulacrum of fame while finding contempt in all that fame represents.

Isn’t the loop created by short-circuiting fame and its antithesis what makes American Idol is so popular? As viewers/voters in the process of exalting an everyday, “normal” person into the limelight, we are re-enacting the symbolic function of democracy within the sphere of celebrity. Isn’t that what happens in news coverage as well? Headlines of Gaddafi’s troops killing his own citizens next to up-to-the-minute Oscar coverage; similarly, headlines of Mubarack’s ousting running next to Fashion Week coverage. In order to watch a video of protests in Libya, I must first sit through a Gucci commercial. By having our news sponsored by luxury goods, as both the symbol of eminence and waste, the real conditions of the world get deicticly imbued with the conditions of commercial consumption. Luxury is symbolically re-enacted in the sphere of tragedy, and we get a prurient, Pavlovian experience of news.

I AM THE LOWEST OF THE LOW
IT’S HELL BEING ENLIGHTENED!

In the same way that our luxury goods quickly become obsolete, so do our “reality” idols. American Idol is not just the most popular show; it airs constantly. The same repetitive function (consume, excrete, repeat) that frames the hierarchical caste of celebrity also structures growth in the capital markets. In order to be a “good” capitalist, one must produce the most waste to guarantee a position atop the market. The same pyramidical conditions exist in celebrity. There’s only so much room at the top, and the most attention is spent on the smallest section of the population. The majority (us) who are not atop the pyramid become then, in every functioning way, the minority (even though, by head count, we’re the majority). We are, then, The Silent Majority. Or, something that counts as nothing.

“Worst Case Scenario” — Babyland

You’ve got to live with what you know
What you don’t know

An interesting mix of celebrity, charity and revealing the inhumanity of capitalism came in the form of a Super Bowl commercial. Groupon, one of the fastest growing businesses in the world, set to include China among the markets in which it operates, released a self-depreciating, humorlessly funny commercial for a charity drive called, “Save The Money,” in which Groupon matched all donations to four targeted charities. The commercial could easily be mistaken for a snarky Saturday Night Live sketch, and since it was without tits and monster trucks, it seemed rather out of place in the Super Bowl roster. I don’t think this misplaced placement was lost on Groupon. With billions to burn, Groupon chose to advertise their philanthropy during the most expensive time slot. Instead of the usual celebrity spokesperson sincerely pleading with those less fortunate (“us”) to think of those who are even less fortunate (“them,” aka, Tibetans), Groupon poked fun at themselves for getting rich through facilitating people’s daily indulgence of deals. In the first half of one of the commercials, Timothy Hutton talks about the problems of the people of Tibet, and as the camera pulls back we see he’s sitting in a Himalayan restaurant, and he says through Groupon he was able to get his meal for half price. In a meta- way, the commercial pokes its finger in the eye of commerciality. And since there were no tits or monster trucks, Super Bowl fans were kinda tazed by the meta-ness of it all, or meta-tazed if there is such a thing?

The commercial was, almost immediately, derided for it’s bad taste and insensitivity to the people of Tibet. Groupon eventually pulled the commercial as the result of the backlash. When Andrew Mason (founder of Groupon, heralded on the cover of Fortune Magazine as one of the smartest businessmen of today), in his wisdom, questioned the consumption that made him rich, consumers were insulted. Isn’t the meta-question he asked — “is over-indulgence good?” — the kind of thing we normally reward companies for asking? Don’t we favor those companies who create products that minimize waste, have ethical work practices, and engage in charitable work? Isn’t this commercial a meta-illustration of the very principles we look for in a “good” company?

When a billionaire such as Andrew Mason (the pinnacle of capital wealth/waste) voices criticism of the very process of capital, he effectively short circuits the symbolic exchange that runs in the background of functioning ideology. We, as outsiders/consumers, are not only denied the opportunity of jealous indignation, but with the loop of symbolic function shorted out, we can’t take “credit” for the waste (Andrew beat us to it), and our consumption, operating in one dimension instead of two, is invalidated. Instead of a two-dimensional uselessness signifying luxuriousness, we get a one-dimensional useless as useless.

If this were a Saturday Night Live sketch, and Timothy Hutton performed the same bit at the expense of Groupon instead of in the employ of Groupon, I think it would be regarded as comic genius. Doesn’t it have everything that we require in ridiculing and/or condemning capitalists/celebrities? (Scorn, cynicism, snark, actual celebrity, taunting convention, bad taste, etc.)

As a commercial, it successfully short-circuited the parallax blinding symbolism from reality, which is exactly why it failed as a commercial.

China, besides being a prospective market for Groupon, should be viewed in context as the next logical phase in capitalism’s development. America’s trouble with markets is that democratic ethics are a sticking point in unrestrained exploitation. Finding acceptable standards of exploitation and waste in the pursuit of growth proves problematic. In the case of China, as an authoritarian capitalist system, the unrestrained market proves much more productive. When the dead weight of morality is shed, growth is exponential. Sadly, looking at the shit produced is proof.

While the effect on the people is severe (government corruption, human rights violations, state censorship, poverty, drought, industrial pollution, poor health and food safety, etc.), China is the world’s fastest growing economy. The unfortunate condition of the citizens contrasted with its thriving economy, China is an illustration of the inherent inhumanity of capitalism.

The Comfort You’ve Demanded is Now Mandatory!

Voicing discontent was the domain of the left during the ‘60s and ‘70s (civil rights, women’s liberation, nuclear disarmament, the peace movement, gay rights, socialism), and today that radical opposition has been radically sublimated into an idea of “change we can believe in” without disrupting the luxuries of life. The real change has turned symbolic. Or, in the Robespierrian sense, we want a “revolution without revolution.” Rather than radicals taking to the street in demand of a “new world,” today’s left operates closer to the center, rallying everyone to fear the catastrophe present in this world. The voice of discontent, abandoned by the left, now belongs to the radical right, and so comes the opposite extreme: distrust of government, deregulation, hatred of foreigners and gays, return of the red scare (“Socialist!”), and so on.

“Message From Our Sponsors” — Jello Biafra

Stay in your homes!
Do not attempt to contact loved ones…
All sports broadcasts will proceed as normal

The post-Watergate ‘70s and ‘80s were informed, on the left, by the public’s right to know, conspiracy theories, exposés, shocking truths, and the tireless work of “waking people up.” The demand for transparency ushered us into the digital age, and strangely, continues today. Is truth being held from us today, or is it, instead, that we are deluged in truth? Literally, we are leaking truth. It’s a pornographic discharge of truth from every orifice in the country: whistleblowers, documentaries, blogs, newspapers, social media outlets, photo and video sites, books, and so on. We are more informed than we’ve ever been. The overabundance of truth paradoxically paralyses us, making it hard to quantify truth. On any given day the left (CNN), right (Fox) and cynical center (Comedy Central) jockey for ratings on truth. Consequently, the populace is largely desensitized.

The days of an Orwellian 1984 are behind us, literally. They are also, in a cyclical (recycling) sense, behind us, in that we’ve consumed them already. But doesn’t the loop of the “reduce-reuse-recycle” waste hierarchy leave us with an Orwellian absorption? Post-Consumer Newspeak! In that sense, haven’t we integrated the Orwellian foreshadowing into our forecasting? Like the short-circuited loop, we eat our tails.

Jello Biafra’s jokingly serious “message from our sponsors,” about marshal law that turns your boss into your doctor into your god is, in the short-circuited sense, at the same time irrelevant and prescient. The pre-digital era of science fiction (where computers ruled the world and robot killing machines ran free) is today, both comically untruthful and mundanely true. Our most significant moments in life are digitally controlled (banking, taxes, baby cam, cyber sex, transportation, etc.), and death is modulated by machine (drone bombers, life support systems, etc.). And through it all, we’re nonplussed. Is this not confirmation that we’ve fully recycled Orwellian paranoia, post-consumingly integrated it into our worldview ideologically? A perfect example of how obscene authority operates in the background of our life was comically typified in the story from 2009 when Amazon remotely deleted copies of Orwell’s novel, 1984, from Kindle devices without the permission or knowledge of the Kindle owners. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone, though the underlying ideological implications remained, ironically, in the background. That it could even happen both concedes, in hindsight, Orwell’s paranoia, and foreshadows absorption of that same paranoia. The short-circuiting of Orwellian authority loops Jello Biafra’s idea of marshal law, turning it from something inflicted on us, to something innate within us.

We could apply a Situationist détournement to Biafra’s punchline, “the comfort you’ve demanded is now mandatory” to be more appropriately fitting in this loop theory: The comfort you’ve demanded is now a side effect of your comfort.

The answer of the conservatives amidst this liberal circle jerk of freedom and democracy is to invoke Reagan and become even more fundamentally conservative. We see this in the attacks on Planned Parenthood, PBS and NPR. Speaking of Jello Biafra, it’s a recycling of the Moral Majority. Looking at pictures of Libyan anti-government rebels, I can’t help but recall the rightwing propaganda Brat Pack-cum-Dirty Dancing war porno that was Red Dawn. If tempted to imagine the script used when this Middle Eastern push for democracy gets sublimated into primetime entertainment, I envision a tasty, “braised militancy”-type divertissement:

SCENE: Padma (as an ambiguously ethnic cultural tie-in) greets a “troop” of tattooed and daring-haired chefs at an “undisclosed” “bunker” far off in the “desert” and after “ordering” the challengers to “battle”, unveils the special guest judges… recently liberated Libyan freedom fighters! I can just smell the dishes now: “Head of Gaddafi” (Bazeen bearing resemblance to the former colonel, surrounded by a blood-red broth of Sharba Libiya, with dried dates for eyes — “His view of justice has run dry!”), and for dessert, “Drunk on Revolution!” (alcohol, which was formerly banned,-infused Asida with dyed-green ghee to match the Libyan flag).

It’s ridiculous, but it’s imaginable, right?

“Freeze Up” — Operation Ivy

Static and division is increasing like a storm
We are sheltered, we are forewarned
Nothing can be changed except ourselves

«« mieux vaut un désatre qu’un désêtre »»

I don’t contend that these are new ideas. Quite on the contrary, they seem to have been, in the Heideggerian sense, “always-already” present in society. In 1548, Etienne de la Boétie wrote, “so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him…” As an updated recycling of Boétie’s thesis, Buadrillard wrote, in From Domination to Hegemony, “In the face of this hegemony, the work of the negative, the work of critical thought, of the relationship of forces against oppression, or of radical subjectivity against alienation, all this has (virtually) become obsolete.”

Isn’t Baudrillard’s work of critical thought, of radical subjectivity against alienation, apparent in religion today? Hasn’t religion become a self-engendering process as well? In people’s cynicism about the existence of God, or in a lax attendance to faith, don’t we find the same unattended authority running in the background? Thus, we should reexamine Jesus through this same Baudrillardian “face of hegemony.” Jesus can be used as the ultimate blueprint in becoming “radicalized,” and as such, shouldn’t we see his death as a radical renunciation of his role, as him condemning us to the responsibility of freedom?

If we think of the torture photos from the Abu Ghraib, or the impulse of television shows like “To Catch A Predator,” or this decade long search for Osama bin Laden, or the defeat and spontaneous re-proliferation of al-Qaeda forces, or the way in which we overindulge in celebrities, doesn’t all of this have the structure of misdirected persecution, misdirected resurrection, misdirected servitude? Doesn’t being overwhelmed with luxury and opulence on one hand, while being overwhelmed with the crushing market forces that make luxury impossible on the other leave us, not only unable to reverse the loop, but jaded as we attempt to? In our jadedness, being inured to the forces against us, don’t we detach, grow apathetic, and enact a misguided revenge on easier targets? In believing pedophiles are “animals,” Middle Easterners are “terrorists,” Mexicans are “aliens,” aren’t we driving the wedge further between “us” and “them?” Doesn’t this humanitarianism born of disengaged cynicism act inhumanely?

The short-circuit that allowed us to take teachings of compassion and turn them against ourselves works in the background of what we convince ourselves that we believe. The contradiction is evidenced in how we react to things like oppressive autocracy, Groupon, WikiLeaks, celebrities, and even Jesus. This ideological torsion disguises our malevolence as the work of benevolence. In the process of leading the world into democracy, we’re driving a deep wedge between different classes and faiths, between “the people” who democracy is supposed to represent. In an effort to rid the world of crime we find more and more ways to see ourselves as criminal.

In the deconstructionist sense, feeling free because we lack the very language to articulate our un-freedom, shouldn’t we start then by deconstructing our idea of freedom? Isn’t it the cynical cycle of reflexive aporia that has us ignorantly reenacting the crucifixion upon our enemies in misguided devotion to He who we crucified? The title of the Facebook group memorializing the Egyptian man who died as the result of police brutality, “We Are All Khaled Said,” and the page being attributed to “El-Shaheed” (“martyr”), invites us all, in joining the group, to become him; identifying with the martyr in protest of he who brutalized him. Isn’t the blind spot, then, in our inability to see ourselves, not as the martyr, but as the perpetrator of brutality? Isn’t the way to end the need for martyrdom in seeing our ability to brutalize?

Instead of a “change we can believe in,” shouldn’t we first believe that we can change? We need to see ourselves “radicalized,” and, until then, aren’t we just going to keep simulating the cynical short-circuit, continuing to reenact the obscene disbelief that made the crucifixion possible?

“The Burden of Hope” — Grails

To discover and reveal something a little closer to truth…

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
—James Baldwin

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