We are witness to the latest fake scandal and apparently all-consuming mass-mediated emotional bonfire whomped up by America’s marginal right-wing minority. The obviously legal and admirable Manhattan Muslim Community Center, Cordoba House, with its mission of community support and inter-faith dialogue – a strictly local concern involving zoning ordinances and neighborhood needs – has been cynically transformed into a site of nationalist agony by the inflammatory discourse of the right-wing’s opportunistic irresponsible (I mean this literally, few have elected responsibilities or publicly accountable job duties) celebrity megaphones who decry it as a kind of Hellmouth portal through which long-exploited sexually-deranged well-armed brown-skinned armies will pour into the Mall of America transforming the continent into a terrorist amusement park celebrating the mass-murder of wholesome white Americans who want nothing more than to be left to the ruggedly individualistic pursuit of profitable innovation and landfill accumulation between prayer meetings and reality shows.
It is easy to mis-read moments like this in contemporary America, when everybody seems driven to cough up the same hairball of Yeatsian reflection, namely that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Before we all start hyperventilating again about the Center not Holding (given the reactionary drivel that passes for “The Center” in public discourse today the loss of its hold seems to me no bad thing), I think it pays to contemplate the actual ritual work that is being accomplished in these brief brou-ha-has that barnacle non-issues like the “Ground Zero Mosque” that isn’t -- And for whom this work is being done -- And in the context of what larger structural realities this work seems so needful for those few to whom it is filling a need.
Look, the pleasures of buttsex are weaving the affection of two gay men into a long-term loving bond in your town right now. A pissed off anti-war activist is seriously contemplating burning a goddamn American flag. Tax paying Americans who happen to be Muslim are praying in a mosque and others are building a new one. A prosperous inter-racial couple are drinking coffee in a sunlit kitchen in a television commercial to the envy of millions of everyday citizens. A young woman is getting an abortion because she wants to have a life. Teenagers in a public bus are laughing about the cluelessness of an obtrusively evangelical classmate and the hypocrisy of his parents.
It isn’t going to stop. Ever. No law will be passed to stop it. The Constitution is not going to be amended to re-write America in the image of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. That train has left the station. It went to Hogwarts. They’re witches, you know.
The culture wars happened. We won. They lost.
All these crazily expansive fireballs of deranged emotional energy that fill our discursive field for a time and then vanish without a trace when the alcohol has burned away, the flag-burning crisis, the duct-tape craze, the swift-boat liars, the mass hysterical blindness in the face of a Presidential birth certificate, the death-panel conspiracy, and on and on and on, each one gloms on to a non-issue because real issues can be dealt with through deliberation, they attach to a non-problem because real problems are susceptible to collective solutions or resolutions through compromise.
The lack of a practical policy recourse or discursive space is indispensable to the work of these non-issues as spaces for the endless elaboration of faux-controversy and real-derangement, each one of which opens up a kind of bottomless pit of outrage and despair which are the farthest imaginable thing from means to political, moral, or policy ends, but are ends in themselves. The rituals are testaments to the outrage and the despair of the losers of the culture war who now live as vanquished enemies in the landscape of the America of the victorious sexually-permissive default-urban middle-class-identified secular-convivial majority-minority multiculture.
There can of course be no resolution to the outrage and despair given vent to in these cruel crazed joyless rituals, there can be no redress to the existential victimhood testified to in these conflagrations. We won. They lost. There is no getting around the realities to which they are responding. They confess the nature of their distress in the very names they choose for themselves: “The Silent Majority” “The Moral Majority” “The Real America.” But they are a white-racist patriarchal-prick minority aging fast (check out the average age of the average Fox News audience member), a neo-confederate rump ever more conspicuously incapable of governing a whole nation.
Both the hysterical desperation of their Tea Party rallies and the authoritarian-army discipline of their Base's Get-Out-the-White-Vote-Disenfreanchise-Everybody-Else Election Drives bespeak the same awareness that they are an unwelcome klatch of Orcs in the Hippy Shire. Sure, the inertial tug of weary corporate-military broadcast-industrial-extractive institutions still resonates with their deathly death-dealing worldview, but the saber-rattling is ever harder to distinguish from the annoyance of ghosts rattling their chains. The whiny white guys still have piles of cash and seats on the Board of Directors, but they look more like wizened mummies by the day and their kids have queer friends and they date brown people and they all know that global warming is real.
The dissatisfaction of liberals with the slowness of change and our tendency to sit out elections we should be organizing to win testifies to precisely the same underlying realities that drive the insanity of the wingnuts. We know we’ve won as surely as they have. Even in the maddening murderous depths of the Killer Clown Administration it was hard to reconcile the fantasies of the Mayberry Machiavellis with the reality at hand. When conservatives decry the liberal bias of the media, it actually is a bit off point to reply, as we tend to do, that the extreme right-wing and center-right skew of pundits and policies on news programs is anything but liberal, inasmuch as the liberal bias they are surely responding to is the one in which America’s Player on Big Brother is the fey gay guy college teacher pining for his long-time partner or the teen heroine of a night-time soap takes a trip to the abortion clinic because she wants to go to college and leave her loser boyfriend, the square-jawed captain of the football team, to become an ACLU lawyer or the number one music video clowns around about how lovely it is to smoke weed. What these wingnuts decry as a liberally-biased media is of course a liberally-biased reality roughly reflected by the media (pretty much everywhere except for its news programs, which may account for the vanishingly small audiences of even the most popular news-programming), which they despise but can no more change than they can turn back the tide.
It is much to be regretted that the winners of the culture war have never run their victory lap, but seem instead never quite to believe our victory puts us in a position to dictate terms. I think that the commonplace experience of leaving a parochial small town or neighborhood for college or for a job in the big city has mislead too many people into imagining that that small town or neighborhood is still there, still the same, still the Real America, when the truth is that all America left that small town behind, that small town left that small town behind, we all grew up together, that backward benighted cul-de-sac is not the Real America at all, the Real America is actually Us.
We won the culture wars, and America is our multiculture now. They lost and from time to time they lose their minds in noisy hurt and hurtful spectacles that testify to that larger loss. We should pay no attention to them, and we should ridicule those who do. Needless to say we should all of us be prepared to hold out a helping hand to those in distress, but only after they stop throwing these awful absurd tantrums of theirs. That’s what it means to win and not to lose, especially when what you win is a multiculture like ours. There are still political wars, social wars, environmental wars to be fought, and the winning of the culture wars is helpful but not adequate to the necessary winning of the others. But the fact remains that we did win the culture wars, that the victory actually matters more both to the winners and the losers than the winners seem yet to have grasped, and that the terms of other progressive and democratizing struggles really should change to reflect our victory the better to facilitate victories to come.
It is easy to mis-read moments like this in contemporary America, when everybody seems driven to cough up the same hairball of Yeatsian reflection, namely that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Before we all start hyperventilating again about the Center not Holding (given the reactionary drivel that passes for “The Center” in public discourse today the loss of its hold seems to me no bad thing), I think it pays to contemplate the actual ritual work that is being accomplished in these brief brou-ha-has that barnacle non-issues like the “Ground Zero Mosque” that isn’t -- And for whom this work is being done -- And in the context of what larger structural realities this work seems so needful for those few to whom it is filling a need.
Look, the pleasures of buttsex are weaving the affection of two gay men into a long-term loving bond in your town right now. A pissed off anti-war activist is seriously contemplating burning a goddamn American flag. Tax paying Americans who happen to be Muslim are praying in a mosque and others are building a new one. A prosperous inter-racial couple are drinking coffee in a sunlit kitchen in a television commercial to the envy of millions of everyday citizens. A young woman is getting an abortion because she wants to have a life. Teenagers in a public bus are laughing about the cluelessness of an obtrusively evangelical classmate and the hypocrisy of his parents.
It isn’t going to stop. Ever. No law will be passed to stop it. The Constitution is not going to be amended to re-write America in the image of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. That train has left the station. It went to Hogwarts. They’re witches, you know.
The culture wars happened. We won. They lost.
All these crazily expansive fireballs of deranged emotional energy that fill our discursive field for a time and then vanish without a trace when the alcohol has burned away, the flag-burning crisis, the duct-tape craze, the swift-boat liars, the mass hysterical blindness in the face of a Presidential birth certificate, the death-panel conspiracy, and on and on and on, each one gloms on to a non-issue because real issues can be dealt with through deliberation, they attach to a non-problem because real problems are susceptible to collective solutions or resolutions through compromise.
The lack of a practical policy recourse or discursive space is indispensable to the work of these non-issues as spaces for the endless elaboration of faux-controversy and real-derangement, each one of which opens up a kind of bottomless pit of outrage and despair which are the farthest imaginable thing from means to political, moral, or policy ends, but are ends in themselves. The rituals are testaments to the outrage and the despair of the losers of the culture war who now live as vanquished enemies in the landscape of the America of the victorious sexually-permissive default-urban middle-class-identified secular-convivial majority-minority multiculture.
There can of course be no resolution to the outrage and despair given vent to in these cruel crazed joyless rituals, there can be no redress to the existential victimhood testified to in these conflagrations. We won. They lost. There is no getting around the realities to which they are responding. They confess the nature of their distress in the very names they choose for themselves: “The Silent Majority” “The Moral Majority” “The Real America.” But they are a white-racist patriarchal-prick minority aging fast (check out the average age of the average Fox News audience member), a neo-confederate rump ever more conspicuously incapable of governing a whole nation.
Both the hysterical desperation of their Tea Party rallies and the authoritarian-army discipline of their Base's Get-Out-the-White-Vote-Disenfreanchise-Everybody-Else Election Drives bespeak the same awareness that they are an unwelcome klatch of Orcs in the Hippy Shire. Sure, the inertial tug of weary corporate-military broadcast-industrial-extractive institutions still resonates with their deathly death-dealing worldview, but the saber-rattling is ever harder to distinguish from the annoyance of ghosts rattling their chains. The whiny white guys still have piles of cash and seats on the Board of Directors, but they look more like wizened mummies by the day and their kids have queer friends and they date brown people and they all know that global warming is real.
The dissatisfaction of liberals with the slowness of change and our tendency to sit out elections we should be organizing to win testifies to precisely the same underlying realities that drive the insanity of the wingnuts. We know we’ve won as surely as they have. Even in the maddening murderous depths of the Killer Clown Administration it was hard to reconcile the fantasies of the Mayberry Machiavellis with the reality at hand. When conservatives decry the liberal bias of the media, it actually is a bit off point to reply, as we tend to do, that the extreme right-wing and center-right skew of pundits and policies on news programs is anything but liberal, inasmuch as the liberal bias they are surely responding to is the one in which America’s Player on Big Brother is the fey gay guy college teacher pining for his long-time partner or the teen heroine of a night-time soap takes a trip to the abortion clinic because she wants to go to college and leave her loser boyfriend, the square-jawed captain of the football team, to become an ACLU lawyer or the number one music video clowns around about how lovely it is to smoke weed. What these wingnuts decry as a liberally-biased media is of course a liberally-biased reality roughly reflected by the media (pretty much everywhere except for its news programs, which may account for the vanishingly small audiences of even the most popular news-programming), which they despise but can no more change than they can turn back the tide.
It is much to be regretted that the winners of the culture war have never run their victory lap, but seem instead never quite to believe our victory puts us in a position to dictate terms. I think that the commonplace experience of leaving a parochial small town or neighborhood for college or for a job in the big city has mislead too many people into imagining that that small town or neighborhood is still there, still the same, still the Real America, when the truth is that all America left that small town behind, that small town left that small town behind, we all grew up together, that backward benighted cul-de-sac is not the Real America at all, the Real America is actually Us.
We won the culture wars, and America is our multiculture now. They lost and from time to time they lose their minds in noisy hurt and hurtful spectacles that testify to that larger loss. We should pay no attention to them, and we should ridicule those who do. Needless to say we should all of us be prepared to hold out a helping hand to those in distress, but only after they stop throwing these awful absurd tantrums of theirs. That’s what it means to win and not to lose, especially when what you win is a multiculture like ours. There are still political wars, social wars, environmental wars to be fought, and the winning of the culture wars is helpful but not adequate to the necessary winning of the others. But the fact remains that we did win the culture wars, that the victory actually matters more both to the winners and the losers than the winners seem yet to have grasped, and that the terms of other progressive and democratizing struggles really should change to reflect our victory the better to facilitate victories to come.
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