Art As War

Dr Strangelove (1964)

 

From time to time, as tensions rise in one part of the world of another, someone will bring up the idea replacing war with art. I had a friend who took that idea and ran with it. He wanted to top ICBMs with "art-heads." So for instance, his suggestion was that when diplomacy broke down, and it was time for action, that a group of artists would be at the ready to sculpt, paint, code, cook, whatever - a response, calculated to shaping events. Their art, rather than atomic payloads, would then be loaded onto missiles that would be fired into the enemy combatants. Culture "artwar," fought by means of conceptual bunker busters, new aesthetic daisy cutters, and social practice fat man and little boys. My friend's idea was absurd but attractive. An actualization of artistic avant-gardist pretension. Artists as actual shock troops. It occurred to me today, remembering my friends idea, thinking of Crimea, Syria, Afghanistan, et al, that we are already fighting wars by means of art; that intercontinental missiles, loaded with cultural content are flying over head. Movies are the nukes - weapons of mass-illumination. Music is another artistic weapon of mass-reproduction. Contemporary visual art, is a wholly conventional form of artfare - targeted mostly at elites.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Tory author Lewis Carroll and, presumably, a more progressive Occupier.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

My father, who made his living as a psychologist, warned me to beware anyone who speaks nonsense words. "They're up to something" he'd say. "Their up to something that they are ashamed of." His example was always the conservative author, and likely pederast, Lewis Caroll: "All that cutsy shit is cover for what he really wanted, but was ashamed to say clearly." He told me. "Straight shooters shoot straight." Occupy Wall Street has to start talking strait or they are going to be mistaken for perverts and are not going to get what they want.

Star Wars and Postmodernism

Boys and their toys, Then, and Now

Like most boys, I spent a lot of time playing war. But unlike American boys of the 50s and 60s, who grew up imagining themselves as patriotic GI Joes, my friends and I didn't play with army men. We were born into the rain shadow that followed the Vietnam War, during which, Hasbro stopped making soldier toys. We still played war, but instead of American soldiers,  played with Star Wars. Unlike boys just a few years older than us, we were no longer fantasizing about being grunts of the Greatest Generation defending American freedom from Fascism; our imaginary enemies wielded weapon of mass destruction and were fascists with a lowercase "f' (I spell out the difference I see between Fascism and fascism HERE). The story we were all reenacting was an upside-down fantasy of North Vietnamese-like space guerrillas battling American Modernism in Nazi drag. We were replacing the story of one kind of authority, with a new, very different story of authority. It looked like a childish fad, but, in the context of that particular moment, it was subversive. 

Michael Moore is the Lamest of All Jedi and Sarah Palin is nothing more than a Sith Lackey

A gaggle of lame Jedi, including the lamest of them all, Michael Moore.

 

You cannot live in America without having lots of friends on the far Right of the political spectrum. For those of you wringing your hands in Europe about the rise of the Right, you have no idea what Right Wing actually means. Anti-immigration fear-mongering is kid stuff - little more than distracting hand waving. Europe hardly ever gets past that hand waving. Here in the US, we get to see what is behind the waving hand. For us the the Right means no social safety net beyond the world's highest rate of incarceration. 

“Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick; Dick, Dick, Dick.” - Part 2: Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois ( 1982), Terrae Motus - Dennis with Flowers, (1983)

(Return to Part 1)

The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is most famous for his impropriety, which is not entirely fair. He was part of a generation that brought B&W chemical photography into the mainstream of the art world (color and digital prints would come later). He will forever be remembered however for being one of the first to introduce hard-core S&M to the general public.

The Anglican Communion Has The Force

My brother-in-law, Steve Mesler, just published a modest proposal on his Huffington Post Blog about the economic value of legalizing Gay Marriage. It's a fun and friendly piece and worth reading.

When he told me his idea for the post I told him about a homily my father gave (my father is an Episcopalian Priest) while I was visiting him on the West Coast this past spring. As it happened while I was out west he married a young couple. Because I was there, and available, and his son he asked me to assist him during the service (this entailed wearing a frilly red and white alter boy outfit straight out of Heaven Help Us - I so love my dad).

Steve ended up quoting my father's homily at length, The part where my dad spoke about gay marriage in particular. I thought I would just post a bit he did not quote in his post (but he does provide a link to my fathers' entire response to his request for the homily).

Before the wedding I was pretty much obsessing about the fact that I was going to have to appear in public dressed as an alter boy so had not thought to ask my dad what he was going to talk about. When the time came he spoke at about the Church's long struggle to incorporate sex into religious life. He pointed out that the early church was apocalyptic, so all sexual unions were suspect:

There are plenty of signs of patchwork efforts to reconcile biology and apocalyptic expectations, but nowhere are there any indications of church “blessings” of sexual unions – of any kind, never mind same-sex. Other sex is not necessarily better, may be more troublesome, and leads to all kinds of new questions. It might be fun to ask the fundamentalists what they make of Paul’s (that’s Saint Paul’s) warning that a man who resorts to a prostitute for sexual union becomes “one flesh” with her.

Somewhere in the 10th or 11th century – at least one thousand years into this so-called Common Era some newly-married couples began a custom of presenting themselves in the “porch'’ of a church, where, at the end of the Liturgy, the presiding and assisting Clergy came, from the altar, said some prayers and sprinkled them with water of blessing, then leading them back up to the altar rail to make their communion. (Still, the blood runs thicker than the Holy Water, was the cynic’s way of assessing the value of these rites.) “Not that there’s anything wrong with this” was the message (to anticipate Seinfeld), even though monasticism is still better and a way of gaining credit on the divine ledgers.

Now, another thousand years have passed. Old ideas about marriage, its nature, its social purpose, its stability, and its sanctity have been steadily questioned ever since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the discovery of reliable birth-control. This has occasioned a great deal of uneasiness, as any disruption of custom and expectation is bound to do, and with this comes viewing with alarm, denunciations, and rear-guard efforts to paste up the shreds of patriarchal history.

Knowing this, there is certainly a touching confidence revealed in the continuing idea that sacred ceremony can serve to safeguard any personal (and commonly all-too-often impermanent) efforts at fidelity and solemn covenant. When same-sexed couples who treasure each other’s being in the world want to present themselves somewhere regarded as sacred space, and to act in what they want to be a sacred way in declaring their desire to love and to cherish each other throughout the vicissitudes of mortal life, it seems grudging to argue that they must be refused whatever strength and consolation may come through a priest’s prayers and acts of blessing. We can only hope that now, in a turbulent time of change, it may help them, when they encounter refusal, to remember that for one thousand or more years any sexual union of any kind was refused this blessing.

My father the Rev. Robert L Powers marched in Selma Alabama in March of 1965, answering Martin Luther Kings call for religious leaders to join him in and support the Civil rights marchers. I am very glad that he and the Anglican Communion are are out in front again. There is more to read. Again I urge you to check out Steve's post.

The Oppression of the Sith

When Bill Kristal explained on Special Report last year, “So Thursday we will have Obama versus Cheney, which is going to be fun, don't you think? Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know. And I want to say that I was always on Darth Vader's side, even when I saw the movie. And I'm sticking with him.” I think he intuitively got his and the other NeoCon’s place within the Star Wars Universe almost exactly right.

They are Sith all right; but they are not Sith Masters, just latter-day lackeys and leeches. The NeoCon response to the September 11^th attacks has been a consistent campaign of fear mongering. They have made every effort to prolong the corrosive paranoia of Containment, Americas's post war response to the Soviet Union. And their policy responses have had no relationship to the reality of the threat (My father says the halmark of a bully is poor threat assessment). In his book The First Total War David A Bell writes that:

"Since September 2001, the United States has been involved in a War on Terror that has, to date, cost the same number of American civilian lives that are lost every two and a half weeks in road accidents on American highways. It is the same number of lives that the soviet Union lost every six hours, for four agonizing years, during World War II. Our opponents in this new conflict, for all their stated desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, have so far demonstrated no ability to wield anything more powerful than knives, guns, and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat. Yet the languages in which we speak are used to discussing war and peace make it difficult for this point to emerge."

A lot has been made of the fascist imagery in Star Wars, from the uniforms of the Imperial forces to the unfortunate resemblance between the Award Ceremony at the end and Leny Riefenstahl's nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. But the 1930s imagery in Star Wars was not limited to Fascist allusion.

In The Disappointment Artist Jonathan Lethem, admitted to seeing Star Wars twenty one times the summer of 1977 and to having found C-3PO sexy: "Its as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in Metropolis has carried forward to the bland world of Star Wars.” And he is exactly right. C-3PO's appearance was based on Maria's. Additionally Luke's Land Speeder was a fragment of the very same deco future past that produced his golden robotic companion. It looks like it was produced by the same assembly lines that produced the massive airships in the 1933 film Things to Come. Those ships were as crisp and new as ebonite of course, and the Land speeder was love worn, but both were unmistakably stamped with the look of 1930s design.

Toward the end of Gates of Eden, Morris Dickstein’s account of the 1960s, he wrote “It didn't take long for us to become nostalgic for the thirties, when we hadn't even been born.” Gates of Eden was published in 1977, in the immediate wake of the period he was celebrating, and the same year Star Wars premiered. He and his friends, he tells us, “looked back wistfully at the excited ideological climate of the thirties, about which we knew next to nothing.” I think Lucas and his young crew were very similar to Dickstein and his young friends.

But waking up today and hearing on the radio that it is the 160 anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, made me want to unpack the “War,” in Star Wars. To those of you who think Star Wars is about the Allies struggle against capital “F” Fascism in WWII, or "an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire" - please reconsider. The struggle the film re-imagines, is the Cold War, but it was the struggle against the lowercase “f” fascist pigs in the US government. The Rebellion was a resistance modeled on the North Vietnamese communists.

Here is what Lucas said at the time:


"I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue on Apocalypse Now. I had worked on Apocalypse Now for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. I wanted to do it, but could not get it off the ground... A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured I couldn't make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you'd have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings... a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire... The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a 'total control' police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs" The Making of Star Wars: 7-8,17.



According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, fascism is an all-but meaningless term, or what he called “a floating signifier whose function, is essentially that of denunciation.” I believe the real ghost that haunts Star Wars is not the WWII struggle against fascism or even the Cold War Struggle against the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Deathstar was a denunciation of the American Cold War tactics used in the struggle against domestic dissent.

To be clear: this conclusion is my own. I’ve have never heard Lucas or anyone else say this in anything I have read about Star Wars, but Lucas does say the Imperials are Nixonian gangsters. And more recently explained on his audio commentary for the Revenge of the Sith DVD that:

“When I first started making the film [the first Star Wars], it was during the Vietnam War, and it was during a period when Nixon was going for a third term - or trying to get the Constitution changed to could go for a third term - and it got me to thinking about how democracies turn into dictatorships. Not how they’re taken over where there’s a coup or anything like that, but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant."

Nixon was a cold Warrior. He was an active and aggressive anti-communist crusader. If the battle fought in Star Wars was Vietnam – a war that did not mark America’s defeat, but did mark the collapse of the by then septic policies (both domestic and abroad) of the Cold Warriors. When Obi Wan mentions the Clone War to young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars the struggle it evokes is the Black Lists of the 1940s and 50s and the rolling terror of the House Committee On Un-American Activities.

In no way do the Storm Troopers uniforms evoke Nazis, but they do seem like a natural progression from the robots in Lucas’ first film THX 1138. The robots in that film wore white riot helmets exactly like the ones worn by the American police who stood against and often beat protesters around the country as the Vietnam War withered and Cold Warriors became frantic to control the American public’s morale. It is as if in Star Wars the helmet grew to completely encapsulate the Clones.

Additionally those chrome faced robots repeatedly asked “Are you now or have you ever?” The robotic cops were a conflation of two of the ugliest chapters of American Cold War politics: the Post-War anti-communist witch-hunt of the 40s and 50s (a time when careers were destroyed by the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”) with the police riots of the 60s and 70s.

In Star Wars Lucas served us “a floating signifier” of such fantastic scale it is difficult to recognize the thing it is. The Deathstar can be imagined as many things, but at its core is an angry young fist raised up and flipping the bird back at the Cold Warriors. This one is for you Dick Chenney.

Happy Anniversery all you pinko Jedi.

Question Time

Sith Lackeys: Senator Jar Jar Binks; President George W. Bush

Like everyone else I know, I was blown away this week by President Obama's amazing exchange with the Republican caucus. There is a grassroots push to make this a regular event. There are a lot of very smart people on both the left and the right arguing against the idea. Its not surprising that the Republicans are weary - they got their asses handed to them. But I was disappointed that Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod pooh poohed the idea as well.

Pat Robertson is a Sith

Sith Lords: Pat Robinson and Emperor Palpatine

Secular life has been under attack for a long time now in America and abroad. And while I was interested to see the books by the New Atheists won a wide readership and have garnered a lot of attention (both positive and negative), our shared secular life should be defended as atheist. By doing so secularists are ceding valuable rhetorical ground to religious reactionaries like Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden.