AIG, Barack Obama, and other Spectacles of Stability

As we watch the “strong fundamentals” of the American economy collapse around us, it’s been striking to watch how carefully and reliably the powers that be have, to wax Orwellian, demonstrated the “special connexion between politics and the debasement of language.” It is, after all, pretty difficult for non-economists to make sense of what’s going on; as Matt Yglesias noted yesterday, we are seeing the delightfully absurd spectacle of George Bush carrying out a Leninist economic program, an out-and-out nationalization of a wholly private corporation that would, if it happened in Bolivia, be evidence that the ghost of Karl Marx had actually taken over the body of Evo Morales, and needed to be exorcized via cruise missles. What makes this weird is that, unlike Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which were sort of semi-public, semi-private), AIG is just a straight-up no-frills private insurance corporation, the 18^th largest in the world, and the Federal Reserve (a public entity) has, with no apparent precedent for their actions, just assumed controlling interest in it. It’s not clear that what they did was legal; it’s not even clear how you would determine if it was legal.

But what has struck me, as a person hoping to one day have a secure income who is troubled by the sight of the stock market in free-fall, is the way all the various failing insurance corporations get called vague terms like “giant,” irregardless of where they sit along the private/public spectrum, how the answer to the “how big?” question seems to trump the “what is it?” question. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about David Simon and The Wire, and the ways Simon’s use of the word “institution” lets him usefully misunderstand what a thing like a police department, a executive political office, a school, and a marriage don’t have in common, and I see something similar here when NPR commentators refer to Fannie, Freddy, Bear Stearns, AIG the same way, as some variation on “troubled giant.”

But actually, these troubled giants are very different from each other, which should (if you acknowledge it) lead you to expect the ways our government would respond to their distress to be quite different: while a public institution should be bailed out, a private corporation is a private gamble, right? But as someone recently noted, you don’t find atheists in foxholes, and you don’t find true free marketeers during a financial crisis. And so, to obscure the fact that–as Karl Polonyi long ago pointed out–a “free” market has never existed without massive state intervention (and the idea of a free market is really just a polemic attack on the government’s responsibility to ordinary people during economic downturns), we must, in times like this, carefully obscure the difference between private and public, since observing the difference would mean observing that free marketers in theory do not believe in a free market in practice.

I am not an economist, but I do have a special interest in the use of language “as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” And even more than that, as someone who’s trying to figure out what “modernism” is all about, I’m interested in how incredibly important it is, in this case, to produce the superficial appearance of solidity. This is a modernist trope par excellence, but seeing it play out not in a literary text but in an AIG advertisement or the New York Times gives us a unique perspective on the way “modernism” works in real life, how important it is for a particular class of people to utter transparent falsehoods like “the fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” As Eric Rauchway and Paul Krugman noted, Herbert Hoover’s words are emerging these days from John McCain’s mouth (even if their origin was probably in Phil Gramm’s brain), and there’s something very interesting about the fact that the capitalist class’ reaction to an economic crisis in the heyday of the Fordist modern economy and the now in the postmodern, post-fordist, post dot.com Enron economy are so amazingly similar. More than that, it is telling that this spectacle, as people like Hoover and McCain conjure it forth, is so utterly disconnected from what the facts actually are about the situation: George Bush’s Federal Reserve chair, the man who succeeded Ayn Rand in the position, is taking direct control of the American economy, and wielding great power over it.

I have several thoughts about this. The first is that, as I’ve been arguing in the past few days, we need to better understand political spectacle, and the reasons why fantastic fictional representations of solidity have the power they do. If they didn’t have that power, John McCain and the NY Times wouldn’t be so hard at work trying to convince us that, however troubled, these pillars of the system are “giants,” nor would Marshall Berman be working so hard to convince us that All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Whether or not these things are actually true-and without necessary reference to that empirical question-there is something terribly important at stake in that problem of representation, which might be a way into understanding how “modernism” is, as a literary genre, different than simply a reflection of the “predicament of modernity.” After all, modernization as a process is a system of incorporation; those who are modern and those who are not are equally part of the system; it is, in fact, precisely their incorporation within it that gives them that privileged or dis-privileged status. And as Frederick Cooper notes with reference to a book like Peter Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft, the problem with a “modernism” defined as an engagement with the modern world is that it is not clear how anything in the world could be other than modern. As he puts it, “Trying to escape from the false dichotomy of modern and traditional, we find ourselves with a concept whose main value is to correct past misuses of the word.”

To put this another way, “modernism” feels to me like the particular, contingent, and politically interested instrumentalizations of the predicament of modernity; the ways that your McCains talk about stability and your Bermans talk about flux would then be different parts of a singular discourse, just coming from opposite sides of the argument. And if it makes sense to connect Marx to neo-liberal economic doctrine, and say that it’s part of the same predicament of modernity, just different responses to it, then I get there through an interesting divergance: both through my frustration with for wrongly seeing modernism everywhere he looks (because he ignores all those who are submerged in modernity without being modern) and yet also through his insight that the predicament of modernization is a unifying factor, that it is the processes of imperial incorporation which have made the world into a “globe” (though I have to read him through Bayart to get to that). As David Harvey put it, a long time ago, post-modernism is just a particular crisis within modernity, and there have been many more (and different) versions of it across the globe.

But while the specter of my unwritten dissertation make me obsess about such spectacles of modernity, and the ways we see the world through them, I also find that this line of thinking points at the best reason to be optimistic about the election. As Jasper pointed out a couple days ago, Barack Obama is an unlikely person to come in and change the system: a longtime centrist, he’s appealed to the left because that’s the ways the political winds are blowing, and he’s an adept meteorologist. But that’s the power of spectacle, isn’t it? And when it’s the dance drawing the dancer through his steps, Auden’s question of which is which isn’t really relevent: the important thing is that, for whatever reason, something good can come out of an unlikely source. This was the case with the New Deal, which came from an unlikely source; FDR, despite what his enemies said of him, was no leftist, and the reform of capitalism came about as a means of saving it, directed by a branch of that capitalist class itself. But, you know what? I kind of like the New Deal. I’d like more of it. And if I can get it from a conservative democrat who adheres to a chicago school economic doctrine, well, I’ll take it, gratefully. After all, who would expect George Bush’s Federal Reserve to preside over the most radical expansion of regulation you can imagine in a financial market, the nationalization of a private corporation like AIG? Which has, if you think about, promising potental for what a less horrible government than his might do with it. As Yglesias put it “if the government directly controls major financial institutions, that would give the new administration extraordinary leverage over the national economy. Suppose the new CEO of AIG decided he didn’t want to insure assets of companies whose executives make unseemly multiples of the national median income? There are all kinds of crazy things you could do. And of course not all of them would be good ideas. But some of them would!”

Death and American Spectacles, take three

In case you’re interested in what the Bush Doctrine actually is (instead of my argument for what it practically amounts to) you can go here for a fine discussion. A key quotation:

“Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot permit our enemies to strike first.”

The phrase “given the goals,” seems key to me (as is the fact that it specifically notes “rogue states” ahead of stateless terrorism), the idea being that our understanding of our enemies’ ontological essence (as enemies) makes unnecessary any soul searching over the question of whether they have yet incriminated themselves or whether there is the equivalent of probable cause. They are killable because of who and what they are–with their enemy status needing neither to be explained nor questioned–and the fact that they have not yet been killed is only a sign of our graceful mercy. To put it another way, this is not just a formation of identity for those who are being imagined as bare life; this is a project to re-make the United States’ identity in terms of its privileged position within just such violent transaction.

Along these lines, Abdul JonMohamed’s recent book places Richard Wright in dialogue with (and about) a social reality shaped by this kind of omnipresence of death, specifically, the American south where lynching was a normal part of the social contract. As Jeffrey Atteberry puts it in a review, “The central conceit of The Death-Bound-Subject is that with each successive work of fiction and autobiography Richard Wright excavates another layer in the psyche of a subject forged through a dialectic of death,” and this seems right to me; also right is Atteberry’s description of how (if only implicitly) he is alluding to John Locke’s “description of slavery as a coercive institution sketches the basic structural outlines for a ‘death contract’ theory of slavery that would rest upon the passive consent of the enslaved,” which is to say, how “death” becomes a socially structuring metaphor not against but with the (coerced) consent of the involved population.

I find that profound, and only partly because I’m more familiar with a Lockean discourse than the Heideggerian idiom JanMohamed uses for most of the book. There is much to say about that; part of the impetus for such a re-reading, I think, is the desire to neither ennoble the figure of the slave by presuming his or her ontological lack of agency (thereby absolving him and her of any responsibility for the society in which he or she lived), nor to admit the kind of agency to that slave figure (which the historical record shows) without acknowledging the imbrication of that social agency within the structures of oppression that we now find repugnant. In other words, internalized coercion is inseparable from agency, and again, I go back to my favorite Weber quote: “the enigma of a servitude to which one voluntarily consents, and which is integrated by the subject as a component of its personal will.” Identity is a transaction with authority, not a zero-sum struggle with it.

Another part of this is the desire to think about how the centrality of “frontier justice” to Southern society was experienced by those who were on the receiving end of it, and the ways which this social reality was the cloth out of which identity and agency were constructed (for good or ill), just as French fashion is the material through which Diouana (tragically) reaches towards self-actualization. Or, to steal from John’s post on David Foster Wallace talking about Kafka, the way our identities and agencies are formed by a vicious transaction with the violent forces that oppress us:

…it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get–the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

I feel a need to connect this already rambling and circumloquatious missive to Berman’s Baudelairian fascination with the flaneur who makes his home in the streets, but I’ll let it go at that. The point is that the world we all live in (however differently) is defined by the normalization of arbitrary violence, and the Bush doctrine’s collossal and Strangeloveian desire to stop worrying and love the bomb is more than a reflection of that reality, it’s an instrumentalization of it, an attempt to capitalize on their privileged status within it. This is why JonMohamed went from writing about African writers under colonialism to Richard Wright, why he uses Steve Biko as the interpretive key into an artistic oevre focused on the American South in the thirties and forties, and why this work is so closely linked to the big foreign policy issues of right now. And why, if it isn’t clear by now, I think “lynching” is the necessary metaphor we need to employ in thinking about what it means to inhabit a world still yet structured by America’s arbitrary violence. “The surge,” “shock and awe,” and everything our government has done from Grenada to Kosovo just testify to the extent to which America’s ego-image as lynch mob is still in the drivers seat.

As an academic who sometimes self-identifies as an “Americanist,” I’m interested in how our national identity gets formed out of this reality. As an American, I’m horrified by it. And as an American academic who sometimes self-identifies as an “Africanist,” I’m struck by how often (and how clearly) this reality gets articulated by people who don’t self-identify as American, and who are therefore able to see and say things about my country that I have studiously learned to be blind to. It makes me read Tutuola (with help from Keguro) with a different understanding about what that skull might signify, and how “death” becomes a means of subject formation.

But you don’t Tutuola (or Heidegegger) to make the connection between how “the West” is thinkable and the practical ways it exerts itself in the world. In Blake’s post from Sudan, we get it from the mouths of babes:

“So,” I said at length. “I hesitate to ask this question, but what is America famous for?”

“Killing people,” said one young lad sitting at the back, without hesitation.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this is a far more common and truthful understanding of what the United States is than most Americans are willing or able to imagine, and for every American idealism about racial harmony and universal human rights, there is the counter-reality of an internalized and self-legitimizing discourse about violence against the weak. My own time in TZ only added fuel to that fire, to my suspicion that what I have to struggle to make myself see, the spectacle I have learned to close my eyes to, is an open secret to billions of this globe’s inhabitants. And it makes me imbue this upcoming election with a symbolism that raises the stakes so far above and beyond their already frighteningly high level that it makes me wonder if the gods are just fucking with us. Seriously, are we living in a didactic morality play? Are we really presented with the choice between a person whose identity is defined by his time as a bomber in an American war of imperial aggression and a guy with a “Muslim” name who wears centuries of America’s violent racial oppression on his skin? Are you fucking serious?

You Know Who I Blame? The System!: The Wire, Barack Obama, and Omar for President

Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation opens with the figure of John F. Kennedy being nominated to run for president and invoking the “New Frontier” as his vision for the country. As Slotkin observes, it might seem odd for a candidate so heavily identified with the Eastern seaboard to invoke the Wild West, but then, of course, this is exactly why Kennedy did it: by tapping into what Slotkin calls “a vein of latent ideological power,” Kennedy managed to be “intelligible to the widest possible audience–to Brooklyn and Cambridge as well as Abilene and Los Angeles,” by employing a set of symbols that were also an “appropriate language for explaining and justifying political power.” In Slotkin’s words, “The ‘frontier’ was for them a complexly resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales–each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict.”

There’s a lot going on here, but I want to flag two things. First of all, the “cowboy” as national cultural form allowed Kennedy to transcend the regionally particular image he was otherwise saddled with, getting away from the idea that he was “merely” a North-Eastern Liberal Irish-Catholic. This was well worn piece of cold war politicking: to use the Soviet threat to reconcile the bellicose and militaristic traditions of American nationalism (regionally strong in the South and the West) with an Eastern establishment traditionally oriented towards Europe. But perhaps more importantly, the cowboy metaphor also isn’t just an empty signifier; as Slotkin puts it, Kennedy’s frontier rhetoric:

“entailed more than simple affiliation with the campaign or administration”; it summoned the nation as a whole “to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against Communism and the social and economic injustices that foster it…thereby set[ting] the terms in which the administration would seek public consent to an participation in its counterinsurgency ‘mission’ in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. And it shaped the language through which the resultant wars would be understood by those who commanded and fought them. Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination, American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’”

To understand the American mission through reference to frontier mythology, in other words, is to call upon a very specific set of symbolic tropes and to imply not merely a specifically racialized manifest destiny, but also a particular kind of self-legitimating use of violence. In the cowboy Western, not only is the only good Indian a dead Indian, but the killing of an Indian is also a precisely a productive act: as in Ambassador Taylor‘s quote, violently relocating native peoples is the same thing as creating space for “corn” to grow, a self-evidently good thing.

All this, then, is to ask the following question: what should we make of the fact that Barrack Obama, the now presumptive democratic nominee for president, who both explicitly identifies with Kennedy and faces the same type of problem as Kennedy did (the problem of being identified as “merely” a minority and elitist candidate), said that Omar was his favorite character on The Wire? What kind of latent ideological power is he tapping?

I ask this question, of course, not to try to answer it (as these folks have) but because I have a thesis that sets it up: Omar is a cowboy. This should be obvious even if you didn’t know that the show’s creators looted old cowboy movies in blocking, shooting, and editing Omar’s various train-robberies and high-noon gun battles in the street (and you know this because Michael Kenneth Williams, who plays Omar, said so on the DVD commentary in season two). After Brokeback Mountain, it even seems fairly normal for him to be a gay cowboy. But in some ways his sexuality is a red herring: Omar is a cowboy not because he’s gay; he’s gay because he’s a cowboy. He’s the only character on The Wire who lives free on the range, who doesn’t cow-tow to society, who lives according to his own code. And most importantly, he makes his own law by a self-justifying use of force: he violently robs drug-dealers.

In a key conversation between Omar and Bunk (one of the show’s many symbolic doubles), Omar acknowledges that “I do some dirt, too, but I never put my gun on nobody who wasn’t in the game.” Bunk replies, with a certain bitterness, “A man must have a code,” but not only is Bunk’s irony lost on Omar, it’s lost on us as well: it is precisely to the point that Omar doesn’t bother citizens, only other players in the game. While the show’s own morality places an incredibly high premium on the distinction between drug crime and homicide (condemning resources spent on the former that should be spent on the latter both in the show and out), Omar manages to be a killer and the show’s most popular character the same way so many of John Wayne’s characters did: by killing only those who are “naked life” in Arendt’s terms or “bare life” in Agamben’s, acts of killing which thereby integrate the killer into the work of the state. After all, Omar’s immediate alliance with McNulty and the detail would be completely implausible were it not for this convergence between his code and theirs: as with the “savages” of cowboy legend, drug dealers in The Wire make it impossible for “citizens” to live and produce in peace, so the only good drug dealer, also, is a dead drug dealer. And Omar’s war against the Barksdale crew is ultimately reducible to a revenge that is carefully staged as the justice no police could give him: they torture his lover and they shoot off his grandmother’s hat on the way to church.

Omar is not exactly The Virginian, of course, but there is a great deal of precedent for the gangster-cowboy figure, as Slotkin (and many others) have noted: the underlying narrative, the good man who must use violence to survive in an amoral world, is present in everything from My Darling Clementine to Scarface to The Big Sleep and their more contemporary equivalents. And just as the cowboy had to kill or be killed, surviving and opening space for civilization only by becoming increasingly more savage (exactly as Frederick Jackson Turner “theorized”), so too can Vito Corleone create space for his family, and the family’s business, only by turning to the kinds of violence that society condemns in theory but condones in practice. It was this kind of hypocrisy that the classic era of Hollywood thrived by exploiting, turning the failure of the state (and of social institutions more generally) to use their monopoly on violence correctly into an argument for individualism: since American society has become corrupt and oppressive, in other words, a true American is someone who makes his own justice.

In this sense, Indians are never the real villains of cowboy movies (and The Wire is not innovative in encouraging us to sympathize with the state‘s enemies); exactly because of the inevitability of their deaths, Indians could even become a figure of romantic attachment, valued almost precisely because every death seems to signify a step forward for progress. No, the real villain in Westerns, gangster movies, noir, and Mafia films is the same villain as in The Wire: “institutions” or an even more amorphous “the system.” And you don’t have to dig very deep into The Wire’s dvd commentaries or interviews with the creators to discover a very basic and overriding cynicism about the possibility of positive reform; as David Simon put it (in a quote I got here), The Wire “overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” These failures are, again and again and again, attributed to “institutions.”

But what the heck–and this is the point–is an “institution?” You’ve got to give the show credit for being incredibly savvy about tracing out the dynamic power relationships between low level employees, middle management, and upper corporate leadership, and I think Marc Bousquet is right on when he notes:

“What the show grasps is that private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian register in which a “quality process” is one of continuously increasing workload and continuously eroding salary and benefits, with a single, doltish mantra employed everywhere-in police departments, in social services, and school systems, just as on college campuses: the perpetual command to “Do More With Less.”

But there’s also a certain danger in imprecise hyperbole, and this kind of insight can be pushed too far. For example–and I’m stealing from Bousquet’s post again–James Poniewozik claims that, “All The Wire’s characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation, or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they’re all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for.”

So I ask, again, “are they really all the same? Are these really all exactly the same forces?” I don’t think they are, but–to put it another way–I would suggest that the particular mystification by which a particular kind of difference is elided is not incidental. As Ed White notes, in his excellent The Backcountry and the City, Americans tend to be extremely bad at talking about the social space between “Self” and “System”; in his words:

“to give an obvious example, we today use the term “institution” to refer to voting and marriage, legislative government or the House of Representatives, the marketplace or the Bank of North America. Our impoverished vocabulary for collectives slides carelessly from the precise acts and attitudes of the here and now to the general systems of history.”

It’s like Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia. If “marriage,” “B&B enterprises,” and the Baltimore PD are all “institutions,” is the word still doing any real work as a signifier? Illustrating exactly that point, there’s a moment in the DVD commentary for episode 3:11 that made light bulbs go off in my mind. As the writer of that show takes note of the various ways that the main street standoff between Omar and Brother Mouzone is patterned after Westerns (he mentions Leone, Ford, and Hawkes, and particularly cites the professional respect they show as they discuss each other’s guns), he goes on to draw a larger comparison with the use that the Western (and Samurai film) makes of the “outsider” figure. As in The Magnificent Seven (or, rather, Seven Samurai), the community must be protected by outsiders who fit in nowhere. “Like McNulty,” he tosses off, “Who doesn’t fit anywhere, not even in the institution of marriage.”

This is exhibit A for the prosecution, and my case is that The Wire is very good at thinking about one particular kind of capitalist formation, the profit driven corporate structure that Bousquet is talking about, and is especially good at understanding the ways that ostensibly non-profit driven structures, like the police, can become restructured by a bottom-line logic of statistics and political benchmarks. But at the same time, The Wire is strikingly bad at understanding or even imagining any other form of social organization. And this myopia–the inability to see the fallacy of comparing the Baltimore Sun with marriage–is a blindness that produces a particular kind of insight. Simon and company are incapable of seeing any possible good coming out of structural forms because they’ve already closed their eyes to the possibility. The Wire therefore becomes an attack on a particular type of violent institution, but it interpellates all forms of social organization under that rubric, and concludes with an incredibly pessimistic vision of society as a result. This, in fact, is what makes it so curious that Obama would gesture towards The Wire when he did, as a few people have noted: the most basic premise of the show, that institutional reform is impossible, would seem to run directly contrary to Obama’s proposal to do exactly that.

In any case, the quote I gave from Ed White is in a book specifically interested in what he calls “feelings of structure” in colonial America–the ways that our modern day disinclination to think about social groupings blinds us to what was really going on in those days–and there’s something specifically post-industrial about this wholesale rejection of “institutional systems.” More specifically, it seems to me that the kinds of tropes that Omar channels are the kinds of “feelings of structure” that developed out of the widespread crisis in faith in public institutions and the American system during the great depression. Slotkin talks about the ways the Western and Noir dovetailed in their valorization of rugged individualists who could work outside the system, but it’s Lawrence Levine’s essay “Hollywood’s Washington: Film Images of National Politics During the Great Depression” that, for me, particularly brought out the connection between the failure of public institutions and a political faith in the extralegal. For Levine, for example, Frank Capra’s “Little Man” trilogy of 1939-1941 (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe) is a paradigmatic example: in each film, a single “little man”–thereby representative of the nameless masses, as Meet John Doe makes particularly clear–goes forward to do battle with the dark forces that bedevil America’s heartland, pitting the values of small town America against the systemic and institutional corruption of the press, the plutocracy, and the political establishment. And as Michael Rogin notes, these quixotic quests always seem to end in pointedly unrealistic endings, martyrdoms that either magically (or Christologically) convert the unbelievers but which seem to offer no real grounds for practical reform. This kind of pessimism may, in fact, run deeper than the superficiality of the happy endings. After all, Capra could never have ended his films without a happy ending; one possible conclusion to Meet John Doe, he later said, would have sent Gary Cooper plunging to his death on Christmas Eve, but as he put it in 1973, he didn’t dare to film it. “It’s a hell of a powerful ending,” he said, “but you just can’t kill Gary Cooper.” Instead, Capra went with the Hollywood ending every time: after staging unsolvable problems, he closed them down by changing the subject and foregrounding a romance plot.

The Wire can and does “kill Gary Cooper,” so to speak; the standards for what can and cannot be said in popular culture have changed to that extent. But the underlying frame of reference is not so different, the same dialectic of alternating faith and cynicism that asks whether a Quixote like McNulty or Major Colvin can make headway against the entrenched corruption of Baltimore’s powers that be, but finds itself capable of asking only that question. Within that dialectic, it is possible to imagine the cowboy against the system, the law and the outlawyer, but it pointedly isn’t possible to imagine anything in between. Instead, we are limited to a frame of reference that tracks from outsider to insider while pointedly unthinking the question of what the structural referent is. Omar’s homosexuality therefore makes him the ultimate outsider on the streets–he could never fit into a crew like Barksdale’s without giving himself up–and as such he becomes one of the show’s only possible sources of justice, the primary vehicle for the audience’s wish fulfillment. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Rawls, the closeted Deputy Commissioner, who serves as an example of what self-denial does to those who chose to conform and fit in: they become the world’s biggest prick, a source of pain and suffering for everyone around them, arbitrarily uniform in their production of suffering. It is hardly surprising, then, that Jimmie McNulty, the show’s annoyingly central crusading cowboy (come from outside to impose justice on the natives), is from the beginning partnered up with Omar and engaged on a vendetta against Rawls. Unlike them, though, he at least has the option of the Capra false ending, even if The Wire is a world in which marriage is structurally equivalent to a drug cartel.

“These Days”: conservative democrats then and now

From David Roediger’s 1991 Wages of Whiteness:

“When US elections are won or lost these days, the voting patterns of the ‘white worker’ receive considerable attention. In popular usage, the very term worker often presumes whiteness (and maleness), as in conservative Democrats’ call for abandoning ’special interests’ and returning the party to policies appealing to the ‘average worker’ — a line of argument that blissfully ignores the fact that the ‘average worker’ is increasingly Black, Latino, Asian and/or female. Most fascinating are sociologist David Halle’s recent observations on the self-identification of white workers. Halle writes that the New Jersey chemical workers he has studied prefer to call themselvese ‘working men’ (and ‘lower middle class’ or ‘middle class’ when describing their consumption patterns). The phrase working class speaks at once, Halle observes, of a class identity and of a gender identity. But its actual usage also suggests a racial identity, and identification of whiteness and work so strong that it need not even be spoken. That is, the white chemical workers do not describe as ‘working men’ Blacks who do similar jobs and who are more likely to be AFL-CIO members than are the white chemical workers’ neighbors. That category is instead seen as ‘naturally’ white, and Black workers become ‘intruders’ who are strongly suspected of being ‘loafers’ as well.”

From Hillary Clinton, circa a couple days ago:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Plus ca fucking change.

Fears of Regional Instability as Iowa explodes into Ethnic Violence

After record voter turnout in Iowa yesterday, angry supporters of Barrack Obama have taken to the streets in protest of the announcement that George Bush had won the state’s Democratic nomination by a wide margin. The announcement came hours before the polls had closed, sparking suspicion that the election’s integrity was compromised, though an independent election commission headed by Jeb Bush certified that the election was fair and balanced. There had been widespread anticipation that Barrack Obama or another Democrat would easily win in the polling.

Election observers from Wisconsin have testified to a wide range of faulty practices in the polling. “While some have called attention to the apparently unlikely fact that a sitting Nebraskuyu president could so convincingly win the nomination of so many Illinuo districts,” said Sven McSvenson, former Vice Commissar of the Peoples Republic of Wisconsin, “at this time, we do not wish to contribute baseless speculation that could imperil the legitimacy of the president.” The neutrality of Wisconsin has been called into question, however, since its economy is heavily based on cheese exports which must be transported to the West via Iowa. The “Packer-Viking” conflict of the late nineties closed off other transportation routes.

In a region known for political unrest, Iowa had been previously regarded as a model of stability. But widespread allegations of election rigging have now raised fears that ethnic tension will escalate towards the kind of violence usually associated with failed states like the District of Columbia, which has been occupied by the Federal government for decades. There is also particular concern that violence could spill across state borders into neighboring Illinois or Nebraska. Though Iowa’s tribal population has, until now, managed to co-exist peacefully, Obama’s tribal constituency (the Illinuo) has been for years forced to occupy the political sidelines, while the Nebraskuyu have dominated the civil service, the military, and centers of cultural capital like the Iowa Writers Program. Many see the violence as a reversion to the past, with mobs turning to street violence to settle old ethnic enmities.

Many Iowans are distressed that media coverage is making them look just like any other midwestern military state. “This is not Michigan,” said one voter, who wished not to be identified, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

Voters in Iowa select candidates according to a secretive ritual known as the “caucus,” a poorly understood convocation of village and tribal communities in which charisma and tribal reputation are believed to sway opinion in unpredictable ways. Efforts to modernize this process has run up against stubborn, ingrained attachment to the pre-modern ritual, though many have suggested that reforming the electoral process would do a great deal to bring a state largely populated by subsistence farmers into the international community.

In the United States of Africa, few have taken notice, though some pundits have issued calls for former colonial rulers to militarily intervene in the commonwealth of American states, most of whom are former colonies of Mexico and Brazil. “We’ve tried letting these people rule themselves,” declared Oginga Odinga, Prime Minister of the USA, “but all I ever see on TV is white people killing white people.”