States of Emergency , livre ebook

States of Emergency
STATES OF EMERGENCY
Essays on Culture and Politics
PATRICK BRANTLINGER
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
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2013 by Patrick M. Brantlinger
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Brantlinger, Patrick, [date]
States of emergency : essays on culture and politics / Patrick Brantlinger.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01015-5 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01019-3 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01196-1 (ebook) 1. United States-Social conditions-21st century. 2. United States-Social life and customs-21st century. 3. Social history-21st century. I. Title.
HN59.2.B73 2013
306.0973-dc23
2013008539
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
TO THE MEMORY OF
Ellen Anderson Brantlinger (1940-2012),
Brave Crusader for Equality and Social Justice for Children with Disabilities and for Everyone Else on the Planet
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
- WALTER BENJAMIN , Theses on the Philosophy of History
But we continue sailing on our Titanic as it tilts slowly into the darkened sea. The deckhands panic. Those with cheaper tickets have begun to be washed away. But in the banquet halls, the music plays on. The only signs of trouble are slightly slanting waiters, the kabobs and canap s sliding to one side of their silver trays, the somewhat exaggerated sloshing of the wine in the crystal wineglasses. The rich are comforted by the knowledge that the lifeboats on the deck are reserved for club-class passengers. The tragedy is that they are probably right.
- ARUNDHATI ROY , An Ordinary Person s Guide to Empire
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Class Conflicts

1 Class Warfare and Cultural Studies
2 It s the Economy, Stupid!
3 Tea Party Brewhaha
4 Shooters: Cultural Contexts of the Virginia Tech Tragedy
5 What Is the Matter with Mexico?
6 Waste and Value: Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells (coauthored with Richard Higgins)
Part 2. Postmodern Conditions

7 Shopping on Red Alert: The Rhetorical Normalization of Terror
8 The State of Iraq
9 On the Postmodernity of Being Aboriginal-and Australian
10 McLuhan, Crash Theory, and the Invasion of the Nanobots
11 Army Surplus: Notes on Exterminism
12 World Social Forum: Multitude versus Empire?
Notes
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
In his big book of the Apocalypse, Living in the End Times (2010), Slavoj i ek, dubbed by The New Republic the most dangerous philosopher in the West, declares that his underlying premise . . . is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. 1 I agree with that premise. i ek adds that the four riders of the apocalypse are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food, and water), and the explosive growth of social exclusions and divisions (19). The essays in States of Emergency deal with these and other related crises.
Of the four riders named by i ek, the one that I mention only in passing-the ecological crisis-may well be the leading factor that causes the ultimate collapse of the global capitalist system. Last year was the hottest on record for planet earth. In February and March 2012, much of the United States, including Indiana where I live, experienced nearly a month of 80-degree temperatures, over 30 degrees above normal. Heat waves and drought have afflicted large swathes of the nation, causing record-setting forest fires in Colorado and Utah. The year 2012 also witnessed a record number of tornados, including the outbreak that demolished most of as Joplin, Missouri. And then there was Hurricane Sandy. Extreme weather events, as the expression has it, will only get worse as the heating of the planet accelerates.
The two sections of States of Emergency, Class Conflicts and Postmodern Conditions, are meant to suggest some of the connections among the diverse themes of the essays that may not otherwise be apparent. Five of the essays were invited contributions for anthologies and journals and have been published in earlier forms, now revised to bring them up to date. The other seven appear here for the first time. The essays vary in approach from journalistic to theoretical to satiric, but all fit my conception of cultural studies: interdisciplinary analysis combining humanistic and social science approaches and open to many theories and influences. Several of my earlier books and articles deal with the history and practice of cultural studies, including Crusoe s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990) and Who Killed Shakespeare? What s Happened to English since the Radical Sixties (2001).
The first chapter of States of Emergency stresses that the cultural studies movement, developing out of labor history and the culture and society tradition in Britain, has served as a counter-discourse to orthodox (capitalist) economics. Cultural studies focused at first on issues of social justice, especially class struggle; I hope that will continue to be its main emphasis, although media studies and cultural populism 2 are leading cultural studies in other, less political and perhaps less polemical directions. I also examine today s top-down class warfare in the United States and around the world. The second chapter offers a critique of neoliberal economics and the ideology of free markets. Among other issues, I note the inability of orthodox economists such as Alan Greenspan and N. Gregory Mankiw either to predict or to explain the 2007-8 crash. Along with Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Frank, and many others, I stress the obvious: markets are not perfect mechanisms: they often fail. I follow this chapter with a partly satiric and theatrical examination of the Tea Party movement. Its adherents worship at the altar of free markets and of everything else they identify with freedom, like the freedom to carry concealed weapons. I note the inaccuracies and lies of several Tea Party gurus, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin. I also glance at the Republican presidential primary of 2011 and the likely impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision on the November 2012 election.
Chapter 4 , on the Virginia Tech tragedy, analyzes the writings and videos that Seung-hui Cho left. These express rage about the social, racial, and gender exclusions Seung experienced. U.S. gun culture also made it easy for Seung to commit his massacre, as it did for the Columbine High killers and for Jared Lee Loughner, who on January 8, 2011, shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and eighteen others in Tucson, Arizona. I was asked by the editors of South Korean online journal Situations to write about the Virginia Tech massacre for its inaugural issue. Chapter 5 , What Is the Matter with Mexico? turns to the history of U.S. military and economic involvement in Mexico, and to the current immigration crisis. I review John Kenneth Turner s reasons, in his 1910 expos Barbarous Mexico, for calling Mexico a slave colony of the United States. Today s advocates of deporting all illegals and militarizing the border fail to understand that Mexico is still enslaved to the U.S. economy. The sixth essay in this section, coauthored by Dr. Richard Higgins, analyzes how capitalism has caused waste and value to become increasingly interchangeable in modern and now postmodern societies. Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells are our main examples, but we deal with ideas about waste and value from John Locke to Don DeLillo. Because this essay suggests that capitalism produces superfluous or waste people, it points ahead to Army Surplus in section two.
In the second section, Postmodern Conditions, the chapters on the rhetoric of the war on terror and on the state of Iraq are twins. Apart from that, the essays take up seemingly unrelated topics. All of them, however, stress aspects of postmodernity that suggest possible futures. The war on terror, we have often been told, may be endless. The Bushites liked to call it a war against evil. And state building in Iraq is likely to mean that American involvement in that unfortunate country will last well into the future. Geographically, at least, the chapter on Aboriginal authors and postmodern Australia could not be farther removed from Iraq. Yet inauthenticity is often said to be a defining characteristic of postmodernity, while nothing seems more antithetical to copies, fakes, and simulacra than authentic Aboriginality. Frequent hoaxes and revelations of inauthenticity, combined with the emergence of Aboriginal arts and literature, have given Australian culture an exemplary postmodern status. The futures of indigenous peoples everywhere, moreover, seem to depend on their ability to preserve Aboriginality (read: traditional lifestyles) while also adapting to (post)modernization. The chapter on Marshall McLuhan, crash theory, and nanobots focuses on science and technology, which obviously affect noti