Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

I got all teary-eyed around November, 2008, just like every other non-australopithecine American. But unlike most of my co-evolved concitoyens I was not a sucker. I was delighted that we would now have a rational and evidently morally decent person, rather than a cretinous one, volunteering to take on a role that is for structural reasons morally compromising. But I did not think for a second that this was the dawning of some sort of new era. That would be to misunderstand what a president is.

We have what in places like Turkey is lucidly described as a 'deep state' (though in Turkey it's principally the army that is had in mind, while for us it's a more composite beast). The deep state  limits drastically what elected officals can do. It is the permanent structure that endures behind the constant electoral spectacle, and it ought to be the only thing of interest to political analysts. Do I blame Obama for the continuation of the Iraq War, the non-closure of Guantánamo, etc.? Just a little bit more than I blame his tailor. For Obama is, as they say, a suit, and many, many people conspire to maintain him as the presentable image of American power. I am incapable of conjuring any commiseration with the conventional liberals who believe disappointment in Obama the person is an appropriate reaction to his record as president.

However little Obama interests me, the current clamoring of the Republican candidates is of an altogether different order of uninterestingness. The constant din they are permitted to sustain for so many months ought, as someone put it, to be of no more concern to us than the gossip on Jersey Shore. And doesn't the decision to tune in or not to any one of the endless 'debates' feel exactly like the rest of your television viewing habits: passive, recreational, irrelevant, kind of fun?

But I was never a big TV fan, and I feel a bit betrayed by the Internet in recent years for having sneakily transformed into something so TV-like. It could have been a rejection of everything TV tells us to care about. Instead the blogs and the pundits work in perfect tandem, encouraging us for example to take an interest in the details of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney is a classic plutocrat; of course he's getting away with as much as he can. The problem is not this or that indiscretion in any given year's filing. The problem is that one has to be a plutocrat in order to stand any chance of being elected.

Nor do I care about the dog on the roof of Romney's car, or the miscarried child the Santorums brought home and fondled for a few days. Hell, if it helped them get through it, why not? Stranger rituals have been documented in the rich variety of human experience.

Still less do I care about Newt Gingrich's infidelities. I have heard the argument that it is not Gingrich's personal life itself that interests progressives, but only his hypocrisy: the fact that he dogged Bill Clinton in the 1990s for his extramarital affairs, and now turns out to be no better. But we can still be better: we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, and agree that an aspiring politician's sex life is wholly irrelevant to our assessment of his capacity to govern.

As a good rule of thumb, I don't care about anything, really, that Maureen Dowd cares about. She cares a great deal about Newt Gingrich's sexual prowess, for example, and about Callista Gingrich's fashion sensibilities, whereas I don't. Dowd is a fawning courtisane who satisfies an evidently widespread middle-brow craving for page-six gossip by wrapping it up in faux-feminist indignation and moderately witty word play.

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

And still less do I care about the simple existence of Ron Paul. I myself have splashed around in the swamps out of which creatures like Paul congeal. They are my extended family. They are the cranks on the call-in AM radio shows that were always on when I was a child (KFBK AM 1530, to be precise). They are the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who nevertheless, for some reason, still don't add up to WASPs. They feel cast off, left out, and the world-view they conjure up as a defense reaction is so muddled that for brief moments it can look as though it's motivated by genuine concern about the betterment of the world. But it never is. 

I will not vote for any of them, not Obama, not the others. This is, I insist, itself a legitimate use of my right to vote: it is a refusal to get sucked into the spectacle.

Alright, next post: back to Rilke, and to things that are beautiful and that matter.

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Cargo Culture

If we high-brows were really interested in 'world cinema', we would be following things like this:

 

If I am hearing correctly, the voice-over assures of Ramon Film Productions that 'We do our best to stun'. How nice it would be to hear such an earnest avowal of striving, towards a goal evidently out of reach, from Disney, Pixar, or Universal! Of course, Ramon's 'best' is constrained by its microscopic budget, yet does Tebaatusasula not stun at least as much, in its own way, as any Paul Greengrass feature?

What is stunning, to me, is that the basic form of the action feature is retained in the absence of any of the means that in Hollywood --or even in France, Russia, or China for that matter-- would be considered necessary for pulling it off. Even fragments of language from the old social context of movie debuts ('Coming soon!') are deployed, regardless of the fact that there are almost certainly no movie theatres at all in Uganda (for comparison: there were, at last count in 2007, only 13 left in all of Romania), and in this sense what it is for Tebaatusasula to 'come' is something entirely different from the comings that first breathed the life of anticipation into that phrase. Yet the phrase lives on, as do the conventions of exploding cars and karate kicks.

There seems to be, I want to say, no clear boundary between adoption of conventions and imitation of conventions. This fact should cause us to reconsider the conventional understanding of the cargo cult phenomenon, and perhaps also to conclude that something very much like the cargo cult is at the root of all cultural diffusion. The primary instances of cargo cults --airplanes carved in balsa wood by tribespeople, entire life-sized models of airports complete with runways erected in the highlands of New Guinea, and so on-- were distinguished by the fact that the things made by the members of the traditional society in imitation of the technologically more advanced invaders did not function, did not fulfill the same ends as the things of which they were imitations. The wooden airplanes did not fly, and there does not seem to have ever been any expectation that they would.

But many products of the dominant global culture --e.g., movies-- have a function that is far less easy to pinpoint than that of an airplane. Moreover, airplanes themselves fulfill many other functions than flying: they also serve to project an image of modernity, or wealth, or prestige. These are functions that are also fulfilled by movies. For the past several decades, Hollywood has had a near monopoly on the power to project in this way, and it is of more than just aesthetic interest (in fact it is of very little aesthetic interest) that China now has blockbusters, and even its own version, so it is said, of Steven Spielberg. Uganda, for now and for the foreseeable future, can only imitate, can only produce semblances of the products of Hollywood without any of the projective force that the studios enjoy. I don't see any fundamental difference between these semblances and the semblances of runways in New Guinea.

If the cargo cult is not distinguished from the 'real thing' in view of the functionality of its objects, perhaps instead we should look to the system of licensing or legitimation by which products of human industry are recognized as being the sort of products they are. Folk-healers are non-doctors in part because their remedies are generally less efficacious, but also simply because they are not licensed. (Village sages, similarly, are non-philosophers in part because they are less rigorous than members of academic philosophy departments, but also because they do not belong to the same professional bodies, and do not move on the same conference circuit.) A Congolese airport that is blacklisted by the IATA is from an official point of view only a 'semblance' of an airport, even though for the moment planes continue (with some success) to take off and land on its runways. 

Cargo cults are all over the place. Graduate students write research papers that are imitations of journal articles; adolescents have 'relationships' that imitate marriages without the full official recognition of society and all the rights and responsibilities that come with this recognition; and so on. Sometimes these imitations develop into the 'real thing', sometimes they don't. But if they are able to cross over, this will be mostly because of a licensing action on the part of the people or institutions with the projective power to determine what counts as, say, an article or a relationship, rather than as a result of internal transformations of the imitative project.

I note also, no doubt with excessive honesty, that jehsmith.com is itself an extended exercise in cargo-cultism. What I would really like to be doing is writing for the London Review of Books. But no one has yet invited me to do so, and so instead I sit here on my primitive island and churn out, in the form of mere electronic 'posts', semblances of the articles I see printed on paper, issuing from the great Metropolis across the ocean.

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