Wednesday, March 15, 2006

How is power legitimated? How are the most brutal, routinized acts of mass repression normalized and naturalized? It never ceases to amaze me that a state which has over a half-century practised torture and genocide in the pursuit of imperial goals and profits, a state in which racial segregation was institutionalized till into the second half of the century, where there has been a history of witch-hunts, where elections have been rigged and most of the lower-income population votes with its feet, can be held up as an exemplar of democracy. How does this work?

This is not to claim any status of particular evil for the United States, just to point to the constitutive violations of democracy and human rights that its statecraft and politics, national and international, are composed of. Of course brutal regimes cannot be compared easily on a scale of ten. The postwar and post-colonial world teems with examples: Iran of the Ayatollahs, Pinochet's Chile, Fujimori's Peru, the Taliban's Afghanistan, apartheid South Africa, Suharto's Indonesia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. But the point is that if anyone were to get up and systematically argue that Pol Pot or Pinochet were benvolent democratic heads of state, they'd be hooted out of the hall. The same doesn't happen when Condoleeza Rice or Rumsfeld make speeches about the United States' role in making this a freer world. Or, to take another pertinent case, it doesn't happen when someone defends Israel's apartheid wall.

How does this really work? The crude answer is that power justifies all, but that still begs the question - how? 'Hegemony', in the Gramscian sense, describes the situation well, but there are micro-strategies still to be explained.

Take popular cinema. Take an example of a film that's actually much more sensitive and intelligent than one would have expected, Spielberg's Munich. The film is a tortured condemnation of Israel, a state with which Spielberg has often claimed solidarity. The Mossad agents who set out to avenge Munich and track down Palestinian terrorists are, most of them, men with a conscience, capable of moral complexity and self-doubt, and this comes through even as Spielberg peels away the layers behind which their pathologies, and their state's pathology, rest. The film ends with the central protagonist, used by his state to commit murders his conscience cannot rest with, refusing Israel, refusing to commit himself to it any more. It ends with the moving invocation of an alternative, cosmopolitan, hospitable Jewishness against the hardness and closure of Zionism. And none of this can be faulted - the fact that the Mossad agents are men with consciences and not depraved monsters only enriches the film and makes it more complex. (Though the idea of Mossad agents risking their security and agenda in a desperate rush to save a little Palestinian girl from dying accidentally in one of their assassination attempts is, frankly, laughable.) Spielberg, to his credit, tries not to demonize the Palestinian terrorists he shows either. But they are, clearly, fanatics and nothing more. Their grievances are real, their longing for a home movingly portrayed. But they are walk-ons, cardboard figures, they are not people with children and fears and self-doubt and psychological complexities. They want their justice, and nothing will deter them. They are single-minded, they suffer from none of the weaknesses the Mossad agents do. And so, despite Spielberg's major advance upon the simple Manicheanisms of Hollywood, and his attempts to pierce the human truths of the Israel-Palestine predicament, he cannot. The adversaries are not made of the same human flesh and hearts, though the discourse of much of the film tries to affirm that they are.

Constantly, in media much cruder than Hollywood, which on the whole is far more sophisticated than Fox News, the same discursive trajectory emerges. Who are the people you will allow doubt, guilt, self-revulsion, self-questioning, the richness and openness of divided selves? Which side are they on? And who will emerge, on the other side, as Manichean-minded, ruthless, single-minded, the embodiments of the simplicity and horror of undivided selves? The CIA agent can be a man with kids and mortgages and fear and guilt, he can be a victim too. Not so the suicide bomber, who must only be a suicide bomber and nothing beyond, who must be reduced to the one function that defines and delimits his humanity. Why is Vietnam, the one imperial war which can be subjected to any kind of generally acceptable internal critique in mainstream American media, the subject of a 'debate', while 9/11 is the act that defies understanding, the act that can justify the substitution of war for debate and argument? It's the same logic at work.

Which is why George Clooney's new film, Syriana, is such a welcome step. Within the giant web of the military-state-corporate entanglements that structure the politics of the Middle East and tie these to America, the film delves into four situations, in both the United States and the Middle East, and describes the ways in which these work themselves out both through the articulation of political power on a giant scale, and in the micro-physics of real people's lives and experiences. Clooney as the CIA assassin who emerges as a tragic figure dying in a failed attempt at self-redemption, is particularly striking, and unusual. The Pakistani migrant labourer who is sucked into the world of suicide terrorists is potentially the richest character in the film, though it's true to Hollywood in the sense that this is the most imperfectly realized of the four converging plot-lines. But he is a young migrant labourer with a fresh face whose father loves him dearly, who's been made redundant by a corporate oil merger affecting jobs in both the Middle East and the United States, and who fears his death. The kind of figure it is risky to flesh out in Hollywood in these terms. If Clooney is returning mainstream Hollywood to the possibilities of a progressive left-liberal politics that McCarthyism first, and the Reaganite 1980s second, had all but eroded, this is something to be excited about. I haven't seen Good Night and Good Luck yet, but from all accounts it works fantastically well. These are minor blows against the edifice of self-legitimation that American mainstream political culture is built on. But they do good and not harm, and in Bush and Haliburton's America, that's reason enough for celebration.

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