Randall Amster's excellent dismantling of the horrid HB 2281 has been making the Facebook rounds, and I thought that, as an addendum to my previous post (which you should all read), I'd highlight two excellent points he makes about this bill. First, as he points out, the "perverse" (and it is indeed perverse) "Declaration of Policy preamble," which apparently frames the entire bill, and which actually promotes racial tolerance and respect for difference, is seemingly at odds with Arizona's own policy of racial profiling. Second, as Amster puts it:
HB 2281 contains an exemption for teaching students about episodes such as the Holocaust, genocides, and "the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race, or class." In essence, combined with the provisions noted above, this means that students of a particular group can be taught about their history of subjugation but not about their spirit of solidarity; they can focus on their decimation but not their emancipation.
In essence, HB2281 is the legal equivalent of what I termed "tolerance chic" in the post below. At the same time that the bill annihilates a history of racial solidarity and extends a brutal policy of racial profiling, it also celebrates a notion of racial difference based wholly on victimization. To paraphrase Pink here, HB2281 champions the "dirty little freaks" who are "wrong in all the right ways" while at the same time identifying and exterminating the "dirty little freaks" who are "wrong in all the wrong ways." And that is "tolerance" in a nut shell. Beware of those who tolerate you, because somewhere these same folks are building camps.
I am my own pet virus. I get to pet and name her. Her milk is my shit. My shit is her milk. -Nirvana
To begin, I want to compare two recent videos which feature lactating women, and, no, this has nothing to do with porn. . . at least not in any conventional sense. In fact, the first video is way more offensive than anything found on any lactation porn site. It's Katy Perry's "Firework":
The second video is Pink's "Raise Your Glass":
Playing ad nauseam and often back-to-back on MTV, these two videos epitomize a recent craze for tolerance which commenced with Obama's election but which, in the wake of Obama's failure (particularly on LGBTQ issues), has become a veritable pop culture mania for self-affirmation and "acceptance." As it has become increasingly apparent that the Obama administration plans to continue the repressive policies of George W. Bush, which are anything but tolerant, pop culture has responded with this rash of "feel good" ephemera insisting, with a telling intensity, that we must respect difference. We are all fireworks; we are all snowflakes or rather dirty little freaks; we are all Lady Gaga's "little monsters"; we are all "beautiful" in the eyes of Christina Aguilera:
Note the parallels here. The mandatory girl with the eating disorder. The mandatory scene of dudes kissing. The mandatory kid getting picked on. Katy Perry practically pins us down and screams in our faces: "IT'S OKAY TO BE GAY. YOU MUST LOVE YOURSELF! YOU MUST LOVE EVERYONE! THE MILK OF MY TITS COMPELS YOU!"
The above videos are inseparable from the whole "It Gets Better" cyber(non)event which demands both tolerance and self-love. All of these videos, with the exception of Aguilera, dropped at about the same time that the media was concocting a (non)eventual "rash" of homophobic bullying and "gay teen suicides." You see, not unlike the town in Shelley Jackson's "The Lottery," straight America occasionally celebrates "homosexuality" by hyper-publicizing certain cases of violence perpetrated upon queer bodies. Remember Brokeback Mountain? That wasn't really a film as much as it was a self-flagellation ritual whereby straight, liberal America absolved itself from any responsibility for the homophobic structure of society. The same holds for the media hysteria over these "gay teen suicides." We can only love, or rather tolerate, the gay body when its enjoyment, suffering and death are made public and then our love is really nothing more than a performance of disavowal and self-exoneration:
I am not homophobic because I cried during Boys Don't Cry, and by crying I proved my tolerance! I proved that I want gay people, fat girls, bald kids with cancer, scrawny boys, etc. to all survive (except of course for the ones who are already dead which are the only ones I actually recognize). Weepy texts like Brokeback, Boys Don't Cry and the sensational stories of "gay teen suicide" then are about the failure of tolerance, or rather, intolerance. Conversely, the videos of Perry and Pink are about a utopia of tolerance. Our choices are between offing ourselves or having a 40 with Pink and grinding in the heavenly skatepark of diversity.
Which brings us back to the curd of the matter. What does this "tolerance chic" have to do with Katy Perry's magical mammary glands? And, more importantly, why is it necessary for our very survival that we suckle from the teat of Perry? Why is it absolutely imperative for us to "raise our glass" with Pink, over and over again? What is this sustenance which we require? Taking a second look at the Perry video, I'm struck by the rather dismal lyrics with which the song commences:
"Do you ever feel like a plastic bag/drifting through the wind/wanting to start again?/Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin/like a house of cards,/one blow from caving in?/Do you ever feel already buried deep?/6 feet under screams but no one seems to hear a thing/Do you know that there's still a chance for you/'Cause there's a spark in you"
Emptiness, despair, alienation, invisibility, premature burial. We begin in a state of living death, but then Perry, thank god, informs us that there is a "spark in us." Whatever could this spark be? We're not sure, but it appears to be ejaculating from Perry's nipples and penetrating certain people who are all stand-ins for "us." There is the fat girl afraid to jump in the pool, the gay boy afraid to make a move, the wimpy son who doesn't have the courage to stand up to his abusive father, the lone kid being mugged, the kid with cancer and finally the fetus. We are all united and, indeed, resurrected by Perry's boob sparks which, in turn, implies that, prior to our milky immolation/transubstantiation, we were all equally dead. Gay people are to cancer patients as fat girls are to fetuses. Not only does Perry's nipple nectar fill us with life, it enframes us all as a miasmas of either living or dead humanity.
Riddle me this: what transforms all difference into sameness or, in other words, makes a fetish of difference? What articulates, quantifies and manages this mysterious and utterly generalized element known as "life." I'll give you a hint:
That's right, it's capital, spuds! If we look more closely at the scenes in Firework, they are predominately bourgeois parties, urban centers, Western hospitals and middle class homes. To "love oneself" and to "tolerate" each other is to treat oneself and each other precisely as commodities. That is, tolerance and "coming out" are inseparable from plugging into capitalist society.
Katy Perry lactating capital
But to take this argument to the limit, this tolerance is the only means of survival. It is the only way to continue living. So what is the meaning of life according to Katy Perry? Coming out. Appearing like a firework! Dancing in the street! In order to survive, we must make a spectacle of our difference. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mandatory "two guys kissing" trope, repeated in the Perry, Pink and Aguilera videos alike. Like Foucault mixed with dated synth pop, we must confess our sexuality upon the dance floors of exclusive nightclubs, and if we can't afford to get into these clubs, we might as well return to our graves. But don't worry, Perry will feed us the capital we need to be good little producer/consumers. Boom, boom, boom.
Which leads me to the other image of lactation here -the calf drinking breast milk in Pink's video. At first, I wanted to read this as radical vegan propaganda. But something else is going on here that is more in keeping with Perry. Basically, Pink is training us in our consumption and our enjoyment. In occupying various stereotypical roles, Pink ultimately embodies the liberal humanist subject. She's "just a regular old human being, yo!" and, so are we, as long as we "raise the proper glass." And, the only other option is to be less than human, to occupy that bizarre scene of lactation where we are punished for our "bad" consumption:
"Bad" consumption
You see, it's fine if we consume each other (there is even a shot of a baby raising her baba), but the true horror is to be consumed by and consume the inhuman. The true horror is to be "inhuman" and thus to be dead. In other words, as much as I have an affinity for Pink, I must admit that she is drinking from Katy Perry's tit as well. Her cup and her 40 ounce runneth over with Perry's lactating tolerance.
Okay. You know what? Fuck tolerance. If one more goddamn pop star tells me I'm okay or tells me to tolerate difference, I'm going to slit my wrist and throw the blood in your face. Here's why tolerance is fucked, Katy Perry's milk is curdled and no one wins in a dairy challenge.
The first problem with this whole discourse of tolerance is that it directs all attention to either the victims or some demonic representation of the perpetrator (that dastaredly bully!). It tells queer kids, for example, that they just need to get along and muddle through and, somehow, by the holy grace of Katy Perry's boobs, things will get better. And, in turn, it relegates homophobia and other forms of xenophobia to some monstrous representation of "the bully" straight out of a cheesy Stephen King short story. As if no one had ever read Lord of the Flies. The bully is us. The bully is me, and the bully is you. No one gets a pass. The second fucked up thing about "tolerance chic" is that it validates the authority of the current system. We must ask not only the asshole bullies, but, more importantly, the entire xenophobic system, for "acceptance." "Oh please, please tolerate me sir. I promise I'll be a good little consumer. Just let me live this shitty fucking life you've set out for me." And finally, as Alain Badiou points out, the third asinine thing about this rage for tolerance is that it always presupposes some Other that we needn't tolerate. Lingering just outside of the frame of Perry's video are the others who don't get invited to the human party, the ones who consume poorly or don't enjoy themselves with the proper intensity -namely, the terrorists. In fact, the whole discourse of tolerance is set up to identify those who are inhuman and thus not worthy of being tolerated.
Thus, it is no coincidence that "tolerance chic" exemplified by "It Gets Better," "Firework," "Raise Your Glass" and finally the cultural fart that was Lady Gaga all converge with the seemingly endless "war on terror":
Let's all get together and recognize how similar we all are and how different we are from those horrible terrorists who refuse lap at Katy's kittie bowl. So what would be the alternative to "tolerance chic"? What can cure us of our addiction to Katy's life fluids?
I call for a return to self-loathing. For all his failures, Marylin Manson's snide masterpiece "Beautiful People" is far more subversive then Aguilera's celebration of our shared "inner beauty." The self-destructive nihilism of the so-called grunge aesthetic that reached perfection with Nirvana's last studio album perhaps provides a much more honest and affecting voice for disenfranchised American youth than any "It Gets Better" video:
It doesn't get better, and you are not "okay." Oh no, it's going to get so much worse. Take a gander out your window, my blue-eyed son. The larger world is even more colossally hateful, selfish and cruel than your high school, and, given that you are a product of this world and your high school, there is a part of you (a large part if we want to be honest) which is also colossally hateful, selfish and cruel. And, both your survival and your suicide will only grease the gears of the shit factory.
Now you might be asking how such a dismal message might prove more "helpful" to "kids at risk" or how such nihilism might be politically effectual. Perhaps kids want to see how the gears are turning. Perhaps kids don't want to be bullshitted either about themselves or about the world since all they ever get is bullshit:
And remember? We all knew it was bullshit. We all knew it wasn't going to get better. We all knew we were pretty fucking far from okay. Let's get serious: Columbine made a lot of sense to most of us, at least those of us who didn't escape from the memories of our youth into a Prozac haze.
In Theory of the Subject, Badiou outlines two kinds of nihilism: active nihilism, which can become a springboard for revolution and passive nihilism, which gives way to reactionary conservatism. My point here is that suckling from Katy Perry's teat and inundating kids with "It Gets Better" douchebubbles fosters a sort of passive nihilism that only conserves the dominant order. What we need to do instead is cultivate an active nihilism which tells kids that they are correct to feel despair. They are right to hate themselves and want to die. They are right to feel that there is no hope in the world as it is. They are right to feel like they are stuck in a web of absurdities. But, the world can change and they can be a part of this change if they have the courage to sacrifice something that matters. No one is certain what this sacrifice will be, but it will almost certainly entail the destruction of pop music and fandom as we know it:
For the inaugural post to this blog, I will share with you my New Years resolution: identify all Juggalos. This resolution has come about because we need to isolate, identify and take very seriously an emerging culture of postmodern fascism. Now, I'm not talking exactly about the U.S. led global police force which is of course imperial military arm of American fascism. What I'm talking about here is a culture of fascism which, in a sense, is nothing new but which has morphed into what I'm calling Juggaloism.
Indeed, the Reagan 80s spawned its own version of postmodern fascism perhaps best encapsulated by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. This was cynicism with the slick smile of Ronald Reagan or Alex P. Keaton -a Baccchanalian liberalism which could revel in "We Are the World" humanitarian gestures while at the same promoting the most authoritarian and callus socioeconomic policies. The contradictions of this 80s brand fascism are epitomized by Band Aid's disastrous "Do They Know It's Christmas":
Want a definition of narcissism? Volià! We see Western rock stars, isolated safely within a recording studio, singing to "you" the Western subject also nestled safely behind your "window," guarded from a "world of dreaded fear." And what is your prayer, dear listener, as you sit in your bubble, gazing at cathode ray projections of starvation porn brought to you by the Christian Charity Fund? Why, you're thanking god that it's the Africans suffering and not you! Smug, self-righteous and superficial -this was 80s fascism. A postmodern fascism to go along with a properly neoliberal culture.
But as David Harvey has suggested, we're not neoliberals anymore; we are now neoconservatives. No more Sally Struthers encouraging us to to purchase our liberal sense of do-goodery along with a can of soda and a cup of coffee:
No more Phil Collins pontificating about homelessness. No more Hands Across America. Perhaps the final gasp of 80s fascism, which certainly extended well beyond 1989, was Woodstock 99, an empty corporate simulacra which yielded nothing but a sexual assualt in the mosh pit during a Limp Bizkit performance (Fred Durst being something of a proto-Juggalo).
We all know what happened next: 9/11:
So much for "our finer instincts." On that day of "de plane" we opted for the mercenary greed. I don't want to set up the whole "9/11 Changed Everything" argument because in a sense it has been business as usual on fantasy island ever since. But 9/11 did shift the narcissism of the 80s/90s into hyperdrive or, in other words, accelerated an ongoing cultural transformation from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. From Bono to the Juggalo.
Now, the pop culturally impaired might be asking, "What is a Juggalo?" The term actually refers to the followers of the horror-rap group Insane Clown Posse (ICP). At one time known for their ultra-violent lyrics and deranged circus aesthetic, ICP have more recently promoted Creationism and Evangelical Christianity. ICP's shift from gangsta clowns to born again Christians was solidified by the track "Miracles," a video that was laughed at and dismissed by most of the world (non-Juggalos) but which is. . . wait for it. . . one of the most important songs of the decade:
Resist the impulse to laugh at and dismiss this douchebuggery, and forget about every song released in the last ten years. With "Miracles," ICP has defined the aughties. As horrific as it is to admit to ourselves, "Miracles" is this decade's version of Johnny Rotten sitting down on stage and asking the audience if they "ever get the feeling they've been cheated." And indeed, this is a complete and apocalyptically successful inversion of punk. Doubly catastrophic because ICP's earlier nihilistic and rebellious image flows seamlessly into this pastel and hyper-filtered brand of Christian mysticism and because the many fans of ICP, the Juggalos, have integrated this rigid "ask no questions" conformity into an image of rebellion.
The brilliant vlogger who you should all watch, Zinnia Jones, gives us a razor sharp critique of the video, and many of Jones's observations hold just as well for the larger culture of postmodern fascism I'm delineating:
"The essence of ICP's philosophy seems to be 'I don't know, I don't want to know and don't you dare try to enlighten me, motherfucker'." Is this not also the maxim which assured a second term for George W. Bush? Is this not what Kid Rock is ultimately bellowing every time he opens his well-paid cake hole to deliver more military propaganda? Is this not the mantra of the Tea Party? Is this not the underlying message of every "new country" song playing on CMT? This tautology has crashed into American discourse like a meteor, bringing with it a green fungus called Sarah Palin.
To be clear here, my point is not that Juggalos are stupid. I must stress this. I am not dismissing Juggalos, ICP, Kid Rock, Sarah Palin, CMT, Creationism, Birthers, The Tea Party etc. on the grounds that these phenomena are dumb. To the contrary, these Juggalos are the zeitgeist.
As Jones rightly points out, Juggalo culture is not stupid but rather something much more dangerous: the willful "endorsement of a ferocious breed of ignorance." That is to say, the postmodern American fascist - the Juggalo - wields his/her ignorance like a weapon. Often this ignorance is merely a performance of privilege and domination: "it's not that I don't know; it's that, as a Western subject, I needn't be bothered to know because nothing will ever effect me, and thus I am utterly disaffected:"
Now, you may be wondering why I'm using this as my first blogpost since this all seems rather obvious. We all know that there is a "lunatic fringe" of "right wing nutters" out there. This territory is well-tread, and I'm sure this sounds like preaching to the choir.
SO HERE'S THE POINT: As marginal as it might be, Juggalo culture which is the cultural extension and capstone of postmodern fascism, marks a militant resistance to "education." The Tea Party, for example, does not "need to be educated." Contra John Stewart, their "sanity" does not need to be "restored," and any time we dismiss these Juggalos on the grounds that they are simpletons, we ourselves become Juggalosbecause they already view themselves as a proudly ignorant minority. More to the point, they claim a "right to their ignorance." Thus, the Tea Party needs John Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity." They need to be called "idiots" and "buffoons" because idiocy and buffoonery comprise their very identity. They have affirmed these labels, and this affirmation is a a declaration of war, not an appeal for "education." For the Juggalos, the debate is finished, and what's left is the brute force of the tautology. And I mean brute force. Juggaloism is absolutely central to our current military occupations. Note, for example, the presence of nu metal both within military culture and representations of this culture epitomized by the band Drowning Pool who were "honored" that their music was being used to torture prisoners at Gitmo: http://www.buzzgrinder.com/2008/drowning-pool-music-used-to-torture-prisoners/:
"Nothing wrong with me." A self-righteous sense of persecution used to justify a seemingly senseless violence. This is the new militant narcissism -a narcissus who will defend his precious echo with concentration camps and drone air strikes. This Juggalo declaration of war is a very real threat regardless of the numbers of actual practicing Juggalos because, although they might sometimes champion "democracy," the Juggalos operate by coercive force. They are authoritarian and fascist. They are the enemy.
My New Years resolution then is to identify Juggalos which is not as easy as one might imagine. As should be apparent by now, Juggalos do not always paint their faces nor are they always ICP fans. Instead, they are defined by this willful and violent affirmation of ignorance, an affirmation which may seem harmless now but, on this increasingly authoritarian planet, might soon come to be the dominant subjectivity. Sporadically on this blog, I will identify certain instances of Juggaloism, and I encourage you to do the same.
