So, on a recent trip through the northeast US, I ran across no shortage of these flags, and other signs of this ‘tea party’ movement which has lately drawn the attention of the media. No less a luminary than Noam Chomsky has publicly equated these gatherings with the masses of Nuremberg, claiming that

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Normally I defer to Prof. Chomsky’s judgment on matters political, and though my own anarchic political leanings lie slightly to the right of Chomsky’s, I consider myself a fellow-traveller. But I think he’s grossly misapplied the ‘fascist’ tag here, as have many others drawing this connection, and I think Chomsky’s mistake speaks to the wider issue of invoking ‘fascism’ in public discourse. So here, I’d like to offer a few comments about the misapplication of an early 20th-century Italian political movement’s name to any vaguely populist, vaguely scary political clique which one opposes.

First off, we have to think a little about what National Socialism and Italian Fascism really were. It’s crucial to not fall into the trap of conceiving them simply as collections of racist mobs which gave rise to autocratic regimes. If this were all it took to qualify a government as ‘fascist,’ we could find examples leading back many centuries. While racial ideologies, crowd phenomena, and totalitarian dictators were their most obvious manifestations, these movements need to be considered on their own terms, as forming – in the minds of their leaders and adherents – a relatively specific and consistent political ethos. Taking the German example as my case in point, some crucial additional elements to be taken into account when drawing comparisons such as Chomsky’s are their völkisch character, their corporatism, and their Führerprinzip. While individually the Tea Party movement may present parallels with certain aspects of these elements, taken together they make it clear just how far the Tea Partiers are from Fascism.

It is worth pointing out that, as clichéd as such comparisons became toward the end of his presidency, the reign of Bush II was much more closely aligned with the policies of National-Socialism than is the Tea Party ‘ideology’ (if one can call it that) of today. Amongst other policies, its insistence on ‘homeland security’ and the exclusion of ‘undocumented workers’ can be interpreted as means of emphasize the twin dimensions of communal ’security’ and ‘purity;’ its claiming of a ‘right-wing,’ small-government lineage while overseeing an enormous expansion of government powers and a blurring of the lines between government and business presents obvious connections to Nazi corporatism; and its doctrine of an ‘executive privilege’ which transcends the rule of law is a direct borrowing from Weimar-turned-Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his doctrine of the ’state of exception.’

Now consider, point by point, the Tea Party. To be sure, its mass rallies have many features in common with those at Nuremberg, and crowd phenomena more generally. There is a sense in which a mob is simply a mob, irrespective of its ideological justifications. The 1920s/1930s German mobs, like the contemporary American ones, were spurred by economic catastrophes – the ruinous hyperinflation which followed the Treaty of Versailles, and the recent housing crisis, respectively – and a diffuse sense that the current regime was making things worse. And while I think it clouds the issue to simply call either set of mobs ‘racist,’ there can be no doubt that in both sets there were a higher-than-average number of overt racial supremacists, and a far larger cohort of individuals feeling, to greater or lesser degrees, that the traditional positions and privileges of the dominant ethnic group were being usurped by ‘foreign’ populations. In other words: while few Tea Partiers would throw around racial slurs in public, the NYT reports that they “are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” In the contemporary context, the anti-Semitism of earlier movements (while no doubt still present to some degree) has been supplanted by a conviction that blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups have unjustly benefitted from social welfare policies and programs such as Affirmative Action. This means that, while Tea Partiers are overwhelmingly white, there are some middle and upper-class blacks and Latinos who can identify with the movement. Hence it shares many crucial similarities with the völkisch movements of early 20th-century Germany, but its ideology is not as unambiguously or explicitly ‘racist’ (as in the ethnocentric ideology which became known as ‘Blut und Boden‘ under National-Socialism).

There were many völkisch movements which were not ‘fascist’ in the sense of Hitler’s NSDAP, however, and many similar populist movements which have led to very different sorts of regimes in other parts of the world. Thus the two other elements, corporatism and Führerprinzip, are of the essence in determining a specifically ‘fascist’ trajectory, and I contend that the Tea Party movement not only lacks either but would actively resist steps in those directions. While I have no interest in defending the movement per se – as I will suggest, I think it could lead to any number of frightening dystopian scenarios if some variant of its ideology ever came to power – I reject the label of ‘fascist’ for it, specifically because it is laissez-faire and individualistic where fascism is centrally-organized and corporativist. While the people who make up this movement likely have no idea of the nuances which distinguish communist from broadly fascist dictatorships, and in fact would be the sort to reject National-Socialism out of hand for its name (disregarding its having nothing to do with Marxist socialism), there are any number of steps down the road to Fascist serfdom that the Tea Partiers would unquestionably reject.

Consider, for instance, the origins of the Tea Party movement: could a group which began organizing in response to a simple government transfer of wealth to large businesses possibly accept the kind of close integration of government, corporations, and trade unions that was a first principle of both Italian and German fascism (ie, corporativism or national syndicalism)? No doubt many of the Tea Partiers are as resistant to ‘Big Companies’ as they are to Big Government, especially when they perceive these companies as mismanaged or as the beneficiaries of government aid; indeed, as a side note, I have often felt that a huge step in bringing these libertarian movements around to a more sensible ideology would be to recast large corporations as the main villains with respect to ‘handouts’ in their collective imagery, in place of the imaginary ‘welfare queens’ of Reaganite rhetoric. What of the necessary step toward a smoothly-functioning Fascist state, whereby firearm ownership by the general public is made illegal? We all know what these and other well-armed groups in the US think of even the slightest steps toward that particular policy. In these and other respects, I think that any steps toward a traditionally fascist type of government would be violently resisted by the Tea Party.

While this by no means precludes the usurping of the movement’s political clout for purposes contrary to its original ends, I would say that the Tea Party is individualistic and fragmented enough that it could never lead to something closely resembling twentieth-century Fascism. It has its disturbing, charismatic, and often eerily dictatorial figureheads, like Glenn Beck, but in general its only rallying points are a very basic economic individualism (‘keep your hands off my stuff!’) and a hazy dissatisfaction with the current order of things. Even though they sometimes slavishly parrot the talking points of Fox News, in no way do they have anything resembling the coherent, autocratic ideology of the NSDAP’s Führerprinzip. (I find, in fact, that it grates even to call it an ‘ideology,’ lacking as it is in any internal logic.) Even its leaders are wildly inconsistent and incoherent, while its members have difficulty reconciling their individualism with the benefits they receive – to the point that they can shout at politicians to keep their ‘filthy government hands’ off their Medicare. In this sense, I find such right-wing populist movements generally less frightening than left-wing ones: insofar as left-wing populism is more coherent and already prepared to let its leaders abrogate individual rights (to whatever ends fit the ideology of the particular movement), it may lead more readily to authoritarianism; a movement like the Tea Party, by contrast, is so deeply fragmented and resistant to any perceived encroachment on individual rights, that I think it can ultimately accomplish very little but a destabilization of the Republican voting base.

My point in this is not simply to attack a brief remark of Chomsky’s, but to point out the importance of rethinking the ‘fascist’ analogy. If we speculate a bit on what sort of dystopian future might come of the Tea Party movement, a few possibilities arise – none of which resemble twentieth-century fascism in any important respects. The closely-aligned programmes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, along with the so-called social policy of the present administration, give us some interesting clues. Perhaps the future which would arise from the Tea Party would have to be such that individual rights were quietly eliminated without any real government oversight, and with any possibility of resistance by arms rendered irrelevant. Consider, for instance, that in the midst of our ostensibly democratic societies there are myriad authoritarian structures called ‘corporations,’ and that these are progressively taking over many of the functions traditionally reserved to government in the United States (from criminal justice to military operations, intelligence gathering, and who knows how much further afield). All the connotations of an analogy with fascism misguide us, inasmuch as they lead us to imagine futures according to a collectivist model of totalitarianism. Perhaps we might imagine an individualistic dystopian future in which one’s access to security, justice, and medicine were still more closely and formally linked to one’s wealth; where still more of the elements of government have been transferred to nondemocratic corporate entities, and the privileges of citizenship are reserved to stockholders; and where resistance has been foreclosed either by technological means (either much better weapons, drugs, à la Brave New World, or other advances in biotechnology) or simply by maintaining the general public in a state of (more) total ignorance. In a sense, I admire the consistency of a libertarian-individualist position, yet in practice I find libertarians woefully ignorant of these sorts of dystopian possibilities, as opposed to the all-too-obvious failures of authoritarian collectivism.

This world of individualism run amok, and not the dystopia of gulags or concentration camps, is the sort of frightening future I imagine when I think about the Tea Party or I watch Fox News for too long; this, I believe, is the sort of future that we ignore when drawing sweeping analogies with ‘fascism,’ and a possible future of which the teabaggers seem to be wholly ignorant. To be sure, I think that we must be on the lookout for direct and obvious lineages from these earlier forms of totalitarianism, as seen in the policies of Bush II and his neoconservative allies. But the Tea Party represents a very different sort of movement from the intellectual one called neoconservatism. Indeed, in many respects it formed as a reaction to that movement, and it comes with its own distinct set of problems. Pace von Hayek, there are many roads to serfdom, and we must not let the ease with which we can draw comparisons to one, particularly Fascist, road blind us to other possibilities.

But I came across this piece recently in the WSJ, and I wanted to link to it and comment, but it was simply too far removed from the other blog.

I think it speaks to the necessarily situational character of political commitments, and why it’s wrong to identify oneself univocally with a given party. (Not many of us know that many founders of many contemporary democractic states were deeply suspicious of political parties – but that’s somewhat beside the point.) Dorothy Rabinowitz writes quite critically in this piece of Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate who recently stood in the election for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, specifically questioning her judgment with regard to the case of Gerald Amirault. In 1984, Amirault was convicted in the famous Fells Acres Day Care Center trial and sentenced, along with his mother and sister, to a lengthy prison term for the sexual abuse of children. This may be regarded as of a piece with the various sexual abuse hysterias of the 1980s, wherein a wide array of bizarre accusations were made of vicious sex acts performed on children, orgies, devil-worship, animal mutilation, and so forth, all occurring at day care centers and all in the absence of any supporting physical evidence.

The difference between Amirault’s case and the many similar cases which were prosecuted around the same time, was that Amirault’s conviction was never really overturned. This in spite of the evident absurdity of the accusations against him, which Rabinowitz describes as follows:

Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet [his mother] had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with “a magic wand.” She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl [his sister] had cut the leg off a squirrel.

Now such cases of hysteria are fascinating enough in themselves, and as one example amongst many of North American culture’s peculiar, schizoid relationship with the sexuality of children. They are also testament to the suggestibility of children as witnesses. In many of these cases the process of getting testimony was described as “getting blood from a stone,” as interviewers would cajole children ’suspected’ of being abused, often over a period of months, to detail the sexual crimes committed against them.

Where Coakley comes in is at the very end, just as Amirault might have seen justice:

In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald’s sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the “extraordinary if not bizarre allegations” on which they had been convicted.

Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board’s findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board’s ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.

As a result, the governor rejected the Board’s findings, and Amirault remained in jail for two more years; now, released on parole, he is forced to wear an electronic tracking device and report his whereabouts. He is also restricted from entering certain areas – as apparently befits a so-called ’sex offender’ in our day – and, of course, his prospects of employment are effectively nil.

This story makes me think about a lot of things, but most immediately it makes me think that Coakley is a horrid bitch, and one whom the United States Senate is lucky not to have. The republican who beat her, Scott Brown, may be an awful human being for all I know, but he would have to really work at it to surpass Coakley in this regard. And though my political leanings are generally liberal, in many ways far to the left of the mainstream Left, I would almost certainly have voted Republican in this election. (Had I been an American, that is. And in this regard I also would have been trying to send a message to this ‘President Obama,’ who in spite of the world’s hopes has proven to be awfully well-spoken and telegenic but essentially just that: in other words a façade, one who is the inverse image of Bush, but who plays precisely the same role in the US political machine.) Then it makes me think the aforementioned and afore-alluded-to thoughts about how fucked up the contemporary treatment of children’s sexuality is: fucked up to the point that in even mentioning the topic in such a tone, I’ll probably convince many people that I’ve got pedophilic tendencies of my own. I’ve got no interest in children as sex objects per se, but I am academically interested in how various cultures have constructed and construed child sexuality: how did we get from the wackiness of Ancient Greece to the Puritanism of the nineteenth century and on to the confused secular morality of our day? (where, one hardly needs to mention, the hysteria over pedophiles exists alongside the insane world of Toddlers and Tiaras?) It’s obvious that children need to be protected from sexual exploitation by adults – and, we may note, the Greeks had their own social norms that served this function – but cases like Amirault’s show that there is often something pathological and downright evil at work in how the justice system deals with sexual offenses. Then, finally, I think how awful it must have been for the guy wrongly accused of abusing children, living for years in prison, and I think about how much, in his shoes, I would hate the whole apparatus responsible for putting me there, and continuing to prevent me from leading a normal life.

I can only imagine what I’d think. I can only imagine what I’d do.  But in any case, it wouldn’t be pleasant.

The officer, a seven-year veteran, recognized Mr. Clemmons “immediately,” Mr. Diaz said, and noticed that the suspect was trying to pull something from one of his pockets. He ordered Mr. Clemmons to put his hands up, but he refused and began to move away from the officer. The officer shot at least twice, Mr. Diaz said. Mr. Clemmons was pronounced dead at the scene.

I remember as soon as I read about those four policemen shot dead in Washington, I thought to myself – whoever the suspect turns out to be, they sure as hell aren’t going to be brought into the station in handcuffs. Ah well. Whatever noise we want to make about due process, this is more or less par for the course in any conflict between groups of armed thugs.

The first being that the Canadian government has passed not one, but two official resolutions concerning the inventor of the telephone. The first of these established the contributions of one Antonio Meiucci to the invention of telephony; the second responded to the previous bill, essentially stating that while Mr. Meiucci (an Italian), did contribute to the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell (a Canadian), was the official, federally-recognized inventor of the telephone. Gee, thanks, federal government.

The more interesting part is that the wiki page on the second resolution links to images of both Bell and Meiucci, which I reproduce here for your edification.

The first of these images is Graham Bell, the second is Meiucci. How similar can two men look? What is it about being a bearded, white-haired man that makes you want to speak to people across great distances? These are the questions presently occupying my mind.

What you think of as offensive is hilariously tame by the standards of the Internet. Your standards of decency are positively Victorian to the new generation of people who have grown up with and on the Internet.

What am I talking about?

If you’re like most average folks, you’ll say ‘fuck’ and ’shit’ from time to time. Perhaps if you’re in a real mood you’ll say ‘cunt’ or ‘motherfucker.’ Maybe you are open to watching a bit of pornography, and certainly you’ll joke about sex. You’re not racist, but you might laugh at racial humour – especially if you’ve had a few drinks and the person offering said humour is of the race being mocked, or otherwise distances themselves from the old-fashioned, scary kind of racism.

What this means is that you are fucking tame. By this I mean that there is a whole world behind the scenes online with a communal ethos that is positively disturbing, even if you consider yourself not-easily-offended. This world goes by many names – 4chan, ‘/b/tards,’ ‘Anonymous’ … the list goes on, and of course the polymorphous core of anonymous wackos that populate these sites has its tendrils spread out all the way across the Internet. Wherever you see a commenter on a website expressing bizarre, apparently contradictory opinions, denouncing ‘fags’ and ‘jews,’ or talking about ‘drama’ and ‘lulz,’ you have likely encountered one of these peculiar individuals. These are ‘trolls,’ of course, that subspecies of Internet denizen who lives off daily infusions of schadenfreude, taking the utmost pleasure in the irritation and anguish of others; but Anonymous takes this pursuit of ‘lulz’ to a whole new level.

The image macros that originated on this site have popped up all over the Internet since it (ie, the site) started up. But the communities themselves have popped into public awareness in a bigger way over the past few years –  starting perhaps in 2006 with Jason Fortuny’s posting of some 100+ men’s contact information and photographs obtained from Craigslist to Encyclopedia Dramatica. This led to a lengthy hand-wringing article in the New York Times about ‘trolling,’ where mega-douche Fortuny tries to justify his actions, and thereby proves himself to be a key part of the cancer; this article also detailed some of the movement’s defining moments, such as the drama they provoked by mocking a child who killed himself (allegedly after losing his iPod), first on his MySpace page, and then in an escalating series of confrontation with his family. The movement got still more press from its Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing protests of Scientology in 2008, when it first took up the mantle of ‘Anonymous.’ Then it showed up again when someone claiming affiliation with Anonymous hacked Sarah Palin’s email and posted some of its contents online; since then it’s been associated with ‘raids’ in Second Life and other virtual communities, the apprehension of alleged pedophiles, and any number of other bizarre scenarios. Of course, just as there’s no way to tell on 4chan between the ‘real’ possessor of a given nickname and impostors, there’s no real way to tell which of these claimants are ‘actually’ part of Anonymous, or which are part of a given subset of this group (ie, boards on 4chan, other -chan sites, ED, etc.). The whole movement is decentralized and deindividualized to the point that the question stops making sense. Sort of like the Bittorrent of social movements, I suppose.

Apart from the sheer fascination of paging through a site like Encyclopedia Dramatica, mouth agape at the depths of offensiveness plumbed therein – from ‘an hero‘ to ‘furfags‘  - Anonymous offers quite a bit of material for those interested in new technologies and their unpredictable effects. All of the most distinctive attributes of online culture collide here: the tendency of anonymity to induce extreme brands of antisocial speech; the capacity of bulletin-board sites to function as an ‘echo chamber,’ amplifying and retransmitting memes; and the fostering of idiosyncratic, unorthodox modes of linguistic and visual expression. Let’s go through these point by point:

1) It’s felicitous that they chose the name they did, because in the first place, Anonymous is a movement predicated upon anonymity. It started out on sites like 4chan, which simply offer no way to preserve a dedicated username and link it to one individual: all postings on this site are effectively anonymous, and those who aim to construct a distinctive persona for themselves can readily have it hijacked and taken for a joyride in pursuit of lulz. Lulz is the raison d’etre of the Anonymous community, and for the uninitiated, Schadenfreude works about as well. Lulz (a corrupted pluralization of LOL – see point #3) is the kind of laughter that overtakes you and you stifle immediately; Lulz – to cite a prime example I’ve already mentioned twice – is when you can’t help but laugh at the idea of a teenager killing themselves over a lost iPod. Except where you or I would snicker a bit and then feel bad, Anonymous would post 1500 messages to the dead teenager’s Myspace, and then start trying to find his parents’ phone number so they could torment them. This is the kind of behaviour that is typical of the community, and it’s inconceivable without the cloak of anonymity granted by the Internet.  And anonymity is also what makes Anonymous so polymorphous and contradictory: to ask who is really a member of Anon. and who isn’t, is fundamentally to miss the point. When considering anonymous texts from the nineteenth century, for instance, as I’ve been doing lately, it makes sense to think of their authors in terms of ’shallow’ and ‘deep’ anonymity. Some authors published anonymously, but those ‘in the know,’ who travelled in the right circles, all knew who they were; others were wholly anonymous, and took every precaution to ensure that only their closest friends and family could find out their identities. But in both cases, one was confronted with a text that could be ascribed to a single author, with – one could presume – a roughly consistent outlook. This certainly isn’t true of contemporary anonymity. Anonymous represents a new kind of anonymity: Anon. is legion. To some, the individuals who make up the community are well-known; to others, the identities of individuals are totally unknown, or so fluid as to be impenetrable. Thus Anon. is a many-in-one, a non-hierarchical unity in which any individual can presumably speak for the entire movement, and which in no way demands any kind of internal cohesion or external appearance of consistency. Essentially the only means by which Anon. polices its boundaries are its ridiculous, over-the-top offensiveness and its bizarre jargon. The offensiveness is simply a means to an end, like that of the 1970s Punk movement: the Sex Pistols didn’t wear swastikas because they were fascists, and Anon. doesn’t riff on ‘faggotry,’ ‘Nigras,’ or Zionist conspiracies because as a movement it is homophobic or racist (though its very nature means it can’t preclude those sorts of individuals from joining in). Like the vicious, disgusting pornography that is scattered around 4chan and ED, the antisocial speech is just a way of excluding all those who don’t ‘get the joke.’ If you’re the easily offended type, you click away to another page, clucking your tongue. That’s how Anon. wants it; that’s why their hangouts look the way they do. If, instead, you rise to the bait, then you quickly become a target. While Anon. is by no means a group of ‘hackers’ – as some mainstream media have absurdly described them, even though they often use publicly available information and tools – they will readily make use of technology to strip away the anonymity of their enemies, and to unleash all manner of communally-delivered hell upon them. So anonymity here is fundamentally asymmetrical.

2) The memetic amplification effect is responsible for the bizarre, spiralling character of sites like ED; ED and 4chan, in turn, are responsible for many of the memes which have since entered the Internet mainstream – Rickrolling and LOLCATs are only the most recent and well-known examples. This seems to be a way to build on the internal cohesion of the group (everybody loves sharing an in-joke!), and while the offensive character of its discussions seems to aim more at policing the entry of external elements, all three of these factors can probably be interpreted as strengthening the group in both directions, contributing both to internal cohesiveness and to the exclusion of external influences. The denigration of mainstream incarnations of these memes only serves to further strengthen the communal bond, and to preclude any kind of co-option. (Much could be said here about the economics behind this community’s preferred online hangouts, and how this has led them in large part to maintain a distributed web presence and co-opt other sites

3) As a constructed ‘minor language’ of sorts, the jargon the community fosters likewise works in both directions. For those ‘in the know,’ it’s both a creative outlet and a source of lulz – most all of us have experienced at one time or another the formation of a quasi-private language between oneself and a friend or group of friends – while for those on the outside it is a considerable impediment to participation in the community. To ask what someone means when they’re using one of these expressions is to invite mockery, or worse. (As in the paradigmatic ‘HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS‘). And rest assured that with phenomena like LOLcats and other image macros, they are indeed creating a new dialect and a new grammar of words and images, both of which will slowly but surely filter into the English language as spoken and written in more respectable quarters. Just as assuredly, though, the folks who originated these memes will claim total disgust for their more mainstream incarnations.

Those three factors seem to have contributed to the construction of a strangely enduring and influential, though fluid and inconsistent, online social formation. I don’t point out its existence purely out of a juvenile fascination, though I can’t entirely disavow a certain puerile element as part of my own interest in the group. I also don’t necessarily agree with their language, their viewpoint or their methods, though in general I appreciate the strategy of extreme offensiveness as a means of maintaining a ‘counterculture;’ but it’s silly to think of this group as having one unified ideology or methodology. Instead I just wanted to sketch out a few general ideas about this phenomenon and perhaps bring it to the attention of a wider and more detached audience, since I think it’s by far the most distinctive and interesting of the many social groupings fostered by the Internet.

if you liked the old one, you’ll dig this. if you didn’t, i may have addressed your objections to it – or you might have come up with some new ones. it’s worth taking a look anyway. pre-publication release! complete with some hilarious comments from me, trying to figure out how to fix some especially unwieldy passages. (i hope this is OK. dewaard, if you read this and it isn’t, you should prolly let me know. haha) oh, and if you notice any glaring mistakes or omissions, please do let me know. (or if you can answer any of the questions in my comments!!!)
here it is: ‘dramatizing individuation: insitutions, assemblages, and the Wire.’

Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).

While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.

What can we call the affective state of this fictive Homo Economicus but a state of disaffected misanthropy, in which a preexisting assemblage of desires (BwO) recognizing the inadequacy of bourgeois sentimentality seeks to channel all of its drives according to the imperatives laid out by capital? On this interpretation (perhaps more in line with the sentiments of Shaviro than LB), Plainview is neither wholly unsentimental, nor an unfortunate victim of the curse of capital. To decisively propose either reading seems foolish. There is something strange about DD-L’s calculated affect, but a ‘non-psychological’ subject or pure homo economicus is simply a convenient fiction, and I credit Paul Thomas Anderson’s characterization with a bit more verisimilitude than that.

The quote Shaviro provides from American Stranger’s blog seems particularly perceptive, especially in the light of Deleuze & Guattari’s thoughts on masks and faciality (visagéite) in Mille plateaux. Plainview adopts the mask of the tycoon in order to achieve his desires for fortune: this is a mask which (as we all should know from our own experiences with an increasingly media-friendly batch of tycoons) demands far more calculation than sincerity. And so DD-L’s extremely calculated affect, his ‘heavy cloak’ of technique is very appropriate here. Following the formula of D&G (which in its original context rather tellingly refers to the ‘despot-god’), Plainview’s mask “does not hide the face, it is the face” (MP 115). The mask of the disaffected and calculating tycoon does not simply conceal a hidden reserve of sentimentality, nor does it define Plainview’s character in its entirety. Instead, the film clearly dramatizes the mechanisms by which the mask of the tycoon gradually supplants the naive and uncalculating sentimentality of Plainview-the-father (more apparent in the early portions of the film) and replaces it with the calculating, amoral emptiness of Plainview-the-tycoon. Neither the tycoon-mask nor the familial mask is Plainview’s ‘real’ face, but rather each mask corresponds with certain possibilities and impossibilities for Plainview-the-individual. The familial mask is warmer and more impassioned, while the tycoon mask is colder and more calculating; likewise, it seems that both masks correspond with certain movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, with family carving out a territory which is constantly deterritorialized by capital. Nevertheless, neither mask, it seems, corresponds with “Plainview himself” (insofar as this term has any referent at all).

It seems that Shaviro is quite right to question the rather staid critiques put forth by Salon: Day-Lewis’ calculated, ‘obvious’ acting is not a deficiency, but precisely what his character demands. But I’m not sure why he would claim that “even Plainview’s rashest and most impulsive acts, like the murders he commits, are crimes of calculation, or at least of mechanism, rather than crimes of passion.” Plainview’s murders are clearly not ‘just’ crimes of calculation; indeed, I’m not so sure that a murder can ever be purely calculating or mechanistic. (NB: I’m about to spoil the ending for you, if you haven’t seen it.) His first murder corresponds with a resurgence of the tycoon-mask after a period in which it gets tentatively replaced with a brother-mask: Plainview seems to let his guard down somewhat when he meets his ‘brother,’ slipping into a familial mask which was apparently discarded once he sends away his now-’useless’ deaf son. But when he finds out that this brother is an impostor, the disaffected tycoon-mask (not without its own cold and sadistic passions), demands that he slay this witness to the less-guarded fraternal mask.

Likewise, it seems that if Plainview were really as calculating and cold as the visage his tycoon-mask presents, he would not be so threatened by Eli Sunday the impassioned preacher. The dialectic of these two characters turns on the question of passion, and it shows up the inadequacy of any reading in which one character is purely ‘calculating’ and the other purely ‘passionate.’ On the surface, this reading works just fine: Eli seeks salvation for his people through charismatic religion; Plainview seeks only to work out a calculated bargain with these same people, trading their rights to the land for the right to a (tiny) share of the capital sequestered beneath it. Eli is therefore the impassioned foil to the calculating Plainview. But it’s not even close to this simple: both characters must ultimately compromise their values, and their masks are decisively shattered by the end of film. Perhaps this even happens at the beginning: either Eli leads Plainview to the oil on his family’s farm (hiding behind a pseudonym, the identical mask of his ‘twin’), or it’s the work of a real twin brother. In either case, it is someone who shares Eli’s face, someone who hides behind an identical mask, that brings Plainview to the Sunday ranch in search of oil.

More significantly, however, the two most compelling scenes of the film are the scenes in which Plainview and Sunday’s masks are shown for what they are. In the scene where Plainview is baptized and humiliated by Sunday, we can see the depth of Plainview’s passion straining against the tycoon-mask he has adopted for himself as he is forced to shout again and again: “I have abandoned my boy!” In the comfort of his own calculating world of capital, Plainview can sustain the mask of the tycoon without contradiction: he sent his son away simply because the oilfield was no place for a deaf child, because a boarding school could offer him far better care than he, etc. etc. But when he is forcibly dragged out of this world and placed in the charismatic sphere of the church, the essentially non-calculating thought at the basis of his calculating mask is laid bare. Without his impassioned, irrational desire for wealth, Plainview could never sustain this calculating visage: he would have given it up for the sake of his child. Plainview-the-tycoon is in no way ‘purely’ calculating, but is sustained by an underlying passion for calculation. This is what Eli hopes to lay bare in his baptismal ceremony, but although he draws out the passions which underly Plainview’s calculating nature, the tycoon-mask is too firmly entrenched: Plainview-the-tycoon returns as soon as the ceremony is finished, and he sees the entire drama as simply a means to an end.

But this is not the only resurgence of the passions of Plainview, the drives of his body-without-organs which forever transgress the limits set out by one mask or another. Somewhere, subconsciously, this character ‘knows’ exactly what happened in the church, and will never forgive Eli for subverting his mask in this way. The last scene of the film only makes sense in this context. In the baptismal sequence, Eli, finding himself in a position of power over Plainview, attempted to lay bare the passions which sustain Plainview’s calculating mask; in the final sequence, Plainview, finding himself in a position of power over Eli, seeks to lay out the fundamentally calculating quality of Eli’s passions. While Plainview was forced to admit the essentially irrational quality of his calculating greediness, Eli is forced to admit the essentially calculating quality of his faith by admitting that his God is nothing more than a useful fiction. This is of course an essentially Hegelian contest, in the master-slave sense of a struggle for identity: the impassioned, pious thinker seeks to exert mastery over the calculating one by showing that his mode of thought is more fundamental, and vice versa. The contest, however, makes clear that neither term of this opposition is wholly separate from the other, but in fact contains the germ of the other within itself, as its vital or animating force. Plainview, alone in his mansion, desperately seeks to prove the value of his own mask by showing up Eli’s disguise. And he’s far from wrong about Eli: why else would Eli have sought to publicly humiliate Plainview in front of his congregation, except as a calculated move to undermine (in the eyes of the people) Plainview’s mode of thought and buttress his own? Eli clearly has no qualms about supporting his faith through calculation (which makes me think that Eli and his ‘twin’ are one and the same character). But Plainview’s calculating qualities are clearly only made possible by an underlying passion. After all, the last scene presents is no public humiliation for Eli, but simply Plainview’s irrational desire to prove to himself the superiority of his own way of thinking. This scene shows Plainview desperate to sustain the calculating mask of the tycoon, but his desperation is anything but calculating. Eli proves his fundamentally calculating nature by his willingness to admit that God is nothing more than a fiction; but in this epic struggle for recognition, this admission is profoundly unsatisfying to the impassioned Plainview. As in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave dialectic, the recognition of mastery is attained by the forced submission of the slave: Plainview’s mastery, the mastery of capital and calculation, is at long last recognized by Eli. But this recognition can bring no satisfaction to the master, since it depends upon the recognition of the slave: the mastery of capital demands the submission of the passions, but it is nothing without these passions and their submissiveness. And so, in a final act of desperation, Plainview seeks to decisively abolish the passions, to affirm the joint dominance of capital and calculation once and for all by murdering the man of faith.

But bludgeoning a man of God to death with a bowling pin has to be about the furthest thing from calculated: the vicious bludgeoning with whatever heavy object is ready-to-hand is perhaps the archetypal crime of passion (cf. of course Cain and Abel). The last scene dramatizes the fact that calculation is always sustained by passion. We might, like Shaviro, be quite uncertain as to whether Plainview will ever be punished for his misdeeds. But Plainview-the-tycoon is far from victorious in this combat. In the submerged violence of his face-to-face encounters with Eli, and in the accomplishment of this violence in murder, Plainview’s existence is revealed to himself as absurd. (I would love to expand more on these connections with Levinas, but this is getting far too long already.) Plainview has long confused the disaffected and calculating mask of the tycoon with his own reflection, and even come to accept it as his true face: archetypal méconnaissance. With the death of the impassioned Eli, he finally comprehends the truth that ought always to have been in plain view. Behind the rationalizing mask of the tycoon, there is no rational subject, no unified ground of economic calculation, but only an assemblage of irrational passions. And so Plainview’s ambiguous final words are his most profound, and his most sincere. In shattering Eli’s mask and his face, he has finally slain his specular double, his passionate foil, and so he might finally considered homo economicus, a being of pure calculation without passion: so he says, “I’m finished,” implying that his project is finally accomplished. This accomplishment, however, can only be attained at the expense of his subjectivity (cf. Levinas’ reading of murder), in a combat which subverts the very mask it seeks to support. These last words might therefore also be read as an implication that Plainview has finally metamorphosed into a pure mask of capital, or the homo economicus referred to by Shaviro. Thus, at the end of the film, Plainview has become a space of dissimulation bereft of any independent subjectivity: a mask which conceals no face, but only an infinite regress of disguises. And so Plainview’s last line of dialogue is to be interpreted as the unutterable “je suis fini” in opposition to the possessive finitude of the subjective “j’ai fini.” These are not the words of a subject of enunciation – “I have finished!” – but the utterance of a mask which conceals no subject, a mask whose ‘I’ is itself ‘finished.’

Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.

I bet that last paragraph sounded like the diatribe of a seasoned smoker, irritated that he’s having more and more trouble getting his fix. Wrong. I haven’t smoked (tobacco) in years, after a fortunate incident in which I had half a Marlboro and puked violently for about twenty minutes, giving me an entrenched hostility to the scent and flavour of this acrid smoke. So, I hate smoking just as much as the vitriolic anti-smoking crowd. It’s smelly and idiotic: everyone who’s not in denial about their addiction knows this. It’s supposedly twice as addictive as heroin, and certainly only a fraction as interesting. Smoking cigarettes alone does not a Kurt Cobain produce. And the pitiful arguments that smokers use to rationalize their addiction are the worst. “It keeps me thin.” Yeah, well, so does eating less and exercising. “It relieves stress.” Yeah, well, so does pot and beer, not to mention simply not being an uptight idiot. Moreover, it seems that finding time for another smoke is the principal cause of stress among smokers. Smoking is really the perfect addiction for our capitalist society. Not only is it a hilariously expensive habit, it’s impossible to figure out why people acquire the habit in the first place. Smokers start smoking because they want to be cool (or, in my case, because that nicotine headrush in the early years is a great addition to being stoned and drunk out of your mind). But eventually all coolness and pleasant headrushing fades, and you’re just straight-up addicted to something for no good reason. Smoking a cigarette is indeed incredibly satisfying for a smoker, simply because it relieves them of the desire to smoke a cigarette for a little while. In this, it’s just like any number of other consumer goods, producing a desire which it then temporarily satisfies. At least when you’re a habitual drinker or pot smoker, you still get a little buzzed while you’re slowly killing yourself. So once again, we can see that cigarette smoking is a perfect fit for the capitalist lifestyle: its psychotropic effects are so mild that you can be incredibly addicted and still functional and productive. It’s not the kind of addiction that makes you miss work, it’s the kind that you can bring with you to work.

Anti-capitalist musings aside, it should be clear that I don’t think there’s any rational argument for cigarette smoking. It’s something that you start doing and continue doing for profoundly irrational reasons, reasons which lie in the addictive processes of the unconscious. Conversely, there are rational arguments for banning smoking in certain places, particularly in places where people might be exposed to carcinogenic smoke against their will. This is doubly so when one thinks about the rights of employees: customers can always choose a different location if they don’t like the smoking, but employees who might like to save their lungs don’t generally have that privilege. There is no rational argument for why smokers should be allowed to foist their preferred means of amortized suicide upon an unwilling group of people, whether it’s founded in a business logic or a libertarian one. (And never mind the multiplicity of equally carcinogenic industrial pollutants already in the air: there’s still no need to make a bad situation worse.) Even the strictest libertarian ought to recognize that their rights end where my nose begins. So I think it’s great that society has taken up a more enlightened stance on smoking in these contexts, and abandoned the old paternalistic attitude (a pater who smoked, obviously) which demanded that non-smoking customers and employees simply suffer in silence. Likewise, I would also say that I recognize the need for a punitive tax rate on tobacco products, not only to discourage potential new smokers, but to recoup some health care costs (especially in a country with socialized medicine – but I’ll come back to this health-care question shortly).
Where the anti-smoking crowd and myself diverge is when this enlightened attitude toward smoking law turns into a new paternalism, the same paternalism which has always been deployed to justify prohibition. Weak-kneed anti-smoking lobbyists won’t usually claim that the practice ought to be completely illegal, instead falling back on an increasingly complex system of restrictions and quasi-prohibitions with the intention of making it more and more difficult not only to become a smoker, but to remain one. Economic disincentives and other market-based measures are one thing; to think of every smoker converted to a non-smoker as some sort of victory for humanity is another thing entirely. I got my very hostile attitude toward the concept of smoking from my father. Nevertheless, said father, a good liberal to the end, can be incredibly irritating once he gets on to the topic of smokers and their vanishing rights. Like most anti-smokers, he seems to positively revel in trashing the concept of smoking, in his deep ressentiment that other people continue getting away with what he believes himself morally compelled not to do. Vigorous campaigners for anti-smoking regulations, like most dogmatic liberals, are always wallowing in this kind of ressentiment, and attempting to entrench their own moral principles in law. Like I said, some anti-smoking laws are reasonable. But such resentful and dogmatic liberals always seem to think that if a little bit of legislation is a good thing, then a lot of legislation will be a great thing. (Not incidentally, we might observe that this will never be a credible belief, and it will always give ammunition to conservatives, whether principled or otherwise.) The drive to institute an effective prohibition on all smoking is based upon a fundamental misapprehension of the function of anti-smoking legislation. Justifiable anti-smoking laws are the ones which prevent non-smokers from being unwillingly or unwittingly exposed to carcinogenic smoke. Paternalistic anti-smoking laws are the ones which seek to prevent smokers themselves from enjoying their vice, even when they aren’t harming anybody but themselves. These sorts of paternalistic laws can only have outright prohibition as their ultimate aim, which is not only unjustifiable from the perspective of individual liberties, but profoundly ineffectual as a disciplinary method.

Paternalism is always ultimately based on economic necessity. Daddy wants you, more than anything, to be productive. As long as smokers seem just as productive (or more so) than non-smokers, smoking will remain a non-issue. (Likewise, if overpopulation ever becomes a serious drain on the economy, you can bet that the institutionalization of ‘healthfulness’ will fall by the wayside). As the Cancer Society reminds us, “For each pack of cigarettes sold in 1999, $3.45 was spent on medical care caused by smoking, and $3.73 lost in productivity, for a total cost to society of $7.18 per pack.” Apart from the incredibly spurious nature of these sorts of ’statistics,’ we can clearly see their paternalistic appeal: smokers need to be stopped from smoking, not just for their own health, but for the greater good. This has, of course, been the argument deployed by all authoritarian regimes in order to justify the unjustifiable, abrogating individual rights for the perceived good of the collective. I’m not going to scapegoat the Russians, Italians or Germans in this respect: every government that enforces a prohibition on an act which harms only the individual actor (or nobody at all) is in this sense authoritarian and paternalistic. And thanks to Harry Anslinger’s remarkably successful (albeit poorly-named) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, this list includes approximately every nation-state currently in existence.
Here, a good-ole-fashioned libertarian would be ready to end his or her discourse on smoking: smokers, like all individuals, have liberties, and they oughtn’t be hindered from enjoying them unless they are themselves hindering someone else from enjoying theirs. This seems like a pretty solid moral foundation for legislation, and in most respects it is. But I’m no ole-fashion libertarian, and I’m not really happy just appealing to the liberties of smokers as a value in and of themselves. After all, they’re stupid enough to continue being smokers, so I don’t see why we really ought to respect their liberties all that much. This is more or less the implicit claim of paternalistic legislation, after all: those unfit to govern themselves must be governed by law. So I’d like to take up this paternal claim on its own terms, and demonstrate its essential absurdity. Essentially, what’s at least a bit ‘radical’ about my take on smoking law is that I wholly agree that smokers aren’t really fit to govern themselves, and for this precise reason they ought to be allowed to continue doing so. Smoking, far from being a practice which needs to be prohibited for the greater good, in fact contributes to this ‘greater good,’ however it may be defined.
Let’s start this section with a little thought experiment that’ll hopefully get your hackles up again. (What are hackles, anyway?) In your head, I want you to rank-order the following four hypothetical individuals in terms of how much they deserve to die. If you’re uncomfortable with this formulation, then just rank them in order of how upset you would be to hear they’ve died:

1) A 25-year, pack-a-day smoker.

2) A morbidly obese individual who simply overeats.

3) A morbidly obese individual with a hereditary thyroid condition.

4) A healthy baby in Central Africa.

I’ll give you a second.

All done?

I’m willing to bet that, once you got over your initial distaste at the premises of this thought-experiment, 95% of all you hypothetical readers didn’t change the order, and not just because you’re very suggestible.

Why? Because there’s a huge difference between the first two hypothetical individuals and the second two. The first two are individuals who, whether or not they know it, have made life choices which are almost certainly going to entail a shorter lifespan. The second two are individuals who, through no fault of their own, are likely going to have a shorter lifespan. In setting up your ordering, you’ve relied on an implicit ethical principle: people who die because of choices they’ve made are more deserving of their death than people who die because of an accident of birth.

What does the death of a pack-a-day smoker have to do with the life of a baby in Ethiopia? Simply put: Everything.

Everyone knows it, but nobody is willing to come right out and say it: the human race is multiplying out of control. Malthus recognized this as far back as the eighteenth century, while in our own century Paul Ehrlich derived some rather silly predictions from this underlying principle. What does ‘out of control’ really mean in this context? (NB, for those of a very philosophical bent, my thoughts on these issues are strongly influenced by the late Garrett Hardin and his always-irreverent take on ethics) It simply means what it says: populations of animals are generally controlled by a variety of natural factors, including food supply, predation, and climactic catastrophe. We human animals, however, have placed ourselves not simply ‘atop’ but outside the natural food chain by constructing our own artificial food chains (wheat-truck-mouth/hay-cow-mouth/etc.), while our technologies have made us incredibly resilient in the face of natural catastrophes. This not only allows our population to grow and grow, uncoupled from any natural control factors; this growing population and its increasingly complex techno-society are in themselves an apparently inexhaustible resource for solving future population problems (as outlined by Julian Simon). And so, as humanity continues to push the carrying capacity of its planet to the maximum, it also continues to find new ways of expanding this global capacity.

It seems to me that the debate between Simon and Ehrlich over whether and when humanity will one day run up against some fixed carrying capacity and simply collapse, is not only a bit overblown, but profoundly misses the point, especially in terms of what we might call ‘population ethics.’ If we look at the various means by which capitalist society has been able to expand the global carrying capacity of the human race, one thing should be clear: from a local perspective, these mechanisms are often profoundly unequal (and therefore unjust). Farmers in America get subsidized to grow corn nobody wants to buy, while on the other side of the world, millions starve to death. The fastest-growing problem in the developed world is obesity, while the developing world is still stuck on the same old problem of malnutrition. If this doesn’t strike you as the most evil irony of the contemporary world, then you are not only lacking a sense of irony, but a moral sense.

What the hell does this have to do with smoking, and the thought experiment above?

It’s simple. All the noble efforts to feed the starving masses of the world can only go so far. The only sustainable solution to the problem of overpopulation is simply population control. We need to overcome our selfish instinct to be fruitful and multiply as much as Nature will allow, because we don’t live in Nature anymore: we live in an accelerating industrial culture that has latched onto an unsustainable spiral of growth. The particular time is irrelevant: we need to solve this problem of growth for ourselves, or Nature will reassert her power and solve it for us. Not only do we need to rethink our lust for growth, but we need to rethink the incredibly unequal distribution of this growth: individuals born in developing countries are more likely to die simply by the accident of their birth.

And so, paternalistic legislation against smoking is not only an affront to liberty and a colossal waste of time, but grotesquely misguided to the point of becoming immoral. Why the hell should we fight to save the lives of individuals who are ready to pay for a chance to throw theirs away, when millions of individuals starve to death every year, even as they desperately fight to survive? Even the economic arguments ‘for the greater good’ are a bit silly. In a study with wonderfully contrarian conclusions, the Danish Institute of Health concluded that the lifetime “health-related costs of smoking are balanced by smaller expenditure due to shorter life expectancy.” When you think about it, smoking is in fact a wonderfully democratic system of population control. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, less and less people (in developed countries) die each day, but just as many people get born. This progressive elimination of natural selection from human existence can only exacerbate the problems of overpopulation and their concomitant inequalities.
Population control is the only solution to overpopulation, but it’s an extremely problematic one in almost any form. After all, everybody wants to live, and they at least want their families to live (beyond that, it seems, many people don’t really care that much). So how does the ‘controller’ of population decide who gets to live and who is allowed to die? Essentially this is the problem of deciding who deserves to live, and who deserves to die: this is a problem suitable for a god, not a man. The solutions proposed by ‘eugenics’ are so profoundly repugnant that they barely deserve a mention. Controlling the birth rate through legislation is another option, but there remains the ethical problem of what to do with babies in excess of the limit. Garrett Hardin’s solution – ‘don’t help the poor!’ – is equally problematic, insofar as it assumes that those who are born into poverty have less right to life than those born into wealth. The moral quandaries of population control by legislative fiat have led most liberals to cast the idea aside, to proclaim that all life is sacred and that we have a sacred right to protect life: in this respect they’re not far from ‘right-to-lifers.’

But liberals still support abortion rights, for good reason, and for the same good reason as they ought to allow smokers to keep on smoking. Abortion and smoking are passive, ‘democratic’ modes of population control, modes of control which in fact reintroduce some semblance of natural selection into the sphere of human existence. People who choose an unhealthy life get sick and die; embryos whose mothers don’t want them and so won’t raise them well, simply don’t get born. (The net effect of this second fact seems to be, on the whole, positive.) These notions might be repugnant to the liberal mind. If so, fuck the liberal mind. I think liberals should learn to stand up for principles, even when it means they have to tolerate a few repugnant conclusions and cast aside their paternalistic impulses. Save paternalism for the familial sphere, where it belongs: if you’ve got a child who smokes, you can and should go right ahead and pressure them in whatever fashion you’d like to stop doing so. But in the legal sphere, we need to bow to a higher principle of liberty, whereby others are free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t directly affect us. This doesn’t even demand that we liberals give up the desire for a better world, or the hope to improve humanity. Quite the contrary: I should say that if smokers are dumb enough to continue smoking, while fully aware of the consequences, then their deaths ought to be continually improving humanity’s aggregate intelligence. If they’re wealthy and irrational enough to sustain a smoking habit, then their share of the earth’s carrying capacity should go to somebody more deserving, like the starving Ethiopian from the thought experiment above. Maybe as we start to think about smoking in this context, we’ll even start to reconsider the disproportionate investments that are made in lung cancer research, and start to think about simpler (and less profitable) things, like malaria and malnutrition.
So, as non-smokers, let’s forget the pipe dream of a non-smoking society and say to smokers: light up! Be proud of the sacrifice you’re making for the greater good!

Just don’t blow that shit in my face.

Excited yet?

I hope not. This should be about the least exciting thing imaginable, and in a more rational time it would be indeed. And yet I, in absence of any attempt to do so, have somehow come upon this woman’s blog. Most disconcerting is the fact that, as Nick Denton of Gawker claims, Emily has “been barraged by interview requests from, among others, the New York Observer.”

Let’s think about this for a second. Vaguely rich girl loses weight/gets surgery/was always vaguely telegenic, and starts a blog/stars in a widely-circulated pornographic film/crashes cars/goes insane/etc/etc/etc… A flurry of well-managed media attention now seems to be the logical consequence of this situation. Thanks, Paris Hilton. I think there is a really deep reason for the profound loathing everyone really feels for Paris Hilton, which goes far beyond the simple fact of her relatively pointless existence. This stems from the fact that she really represents the watershed, from an era in which all of our ‘celebrated’ individuals had some sort of distinctive talent (however much our supply might dwindle), into a time when, as Denton says, “it is indeed enough to be a rich man’s daughter to gain public attention.”

Think about this! What does this actually mean? Really, it’s just another step down the long and tortuous road to oligarchy. To put it maybe a bit less polemically, Paris was simply a concrete manifestation of the ephemeral quality of the barrier between wealth and celebrity. Face it, we’ve always venerated people who did more to exude the image of wealth than to actually have or earn said wealth. And so, Paris really just inherits the mantle of Donald Trump: vaguely wealthy but largely unsuccessful realtor is decidedly less photogenic than ‘heiress’ to, well, really little more than a name. Donald was, for most of his so-called ‘career,’ however, largely just a figure of fun, a go-to rich idiot for late-night talk show hosts to mock. Paris, however, showed that there was a business model underneath all this nonsense: she managed to transmute her status as unknown somewhat-rich man’s daughter into some concrete earnings. (Who actually buys her shit?!) This is not a new trend – there is of course a long history of people who are ‘famous for being famous,’ who seem to have climbed into the public consciousness for no good reason and then fought tooth and nail to stay there. (Speaking of which: Why the fuck does Carmen Electra exist!?) But in any case, Paris took this bizarre postmodern phenomenon to a very new level, both in terms of her ’success’ and susbsequent pervasiveness, and so she has inaugurated the era of the ‘celebutante,’ the internet ‘it girl,’ the moronic ’socialite’ who attempts to breathlessly chronicle her drunken whirlwind of a life for people (that is to say, idiots) who suck it up in a little perverted American Dream love-fest. Paris hilton truly inaugurated the era in which attractive rich people are inherently famous: no longer must they pretend halfheartedly to have a talent!
Why do rich people get this sort of attention for their eminently subpar everything? The media outlets which perpetuate these phenomena (including, implicitly my own, right now, and Gawker as well, no matter how much we might like to think otherwise) are just proceeding to further and further distort the American ideal of ‘meritocracy:’ once upon a time, there was a distinct belief and an institutional practice, that if one had merit, one would attain a level of compensation and renown commensurate with one’s talents. Think of it what you will, this was a fundamentally democratic ideal; we ought not, however, congratulate ourselves that democracy is the first to develop the ideal. Power has always congratulated itself that it was obtained by merit. Undemocratic political ideals all have their corresponding notions of meritocracy, they simply feel that merit is the exclusive province of a certain caste of society. This is what happens today, as the implicitly democratic structure of a culture which celebrates talent is subverted by the increasingly cultlike celebration of celebrity. And who has the means to hire a PR agent and spend their days shopping and blog about parties? Rich spoiled girls! (Because let’s face it, in the conservative world of rich folk, these girls are not going to be pressured into getting a serious education or taking the reins of the business as often as their male kin.) Thus every rich spoiled girl gets the idea that they can get richer and more spoiled and girly by making themselves famous, just like Paris! And they succeed at an alarming rate! This awful gossip machine that is taking over a large swath of ‘informational’ media simply accepts whatever it’s fed, whatever is easiest to obtain and least offensive to anyone with the will and means to complain. Therefore, we can see that the once somewhat ‘democratic’ cultural meritocracy is being progressively supplanted by an oligarchic conception of merit: rich people inherently merit attention, no matter how talentless they may be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this is a phenomenon which is just going to disappear, although we can hope that as enough people express their fervent loathing for this inane gossip which infiltrates their media, the bureaucrats running these corporations might get it through their thick heads that their business model is flawed. As much as these bitches might want to gussy it up by pretending to sing/write/act/etc., let’s just not lose sight of what their celebrity really ‘is:’ fodder for a profit-minded media machine without any critical standards, which thereby manufactures an enormous cult of celebrity composed of consumers too dull to construct any individual tastes extending beyond what’s within reach at the checkout counter. Yech. I can’t write about this crap anymore.