Rant Archives.

April 15, 2008

WWDD?

Detourned image, courtesy Misha.

bOING bOING sprinkled holy water on my blog (I Am Not Worthy), and now faithful and godless alike are weighing in, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio: a handful of closely reasoned, well-argued responses and a farrago of spittle-flecked invective, Alpha Mensa threat-posturing, and off-topic maunderings from the flying snark monkeys. Like Dawkins, I have a day job (albeit a far less exalted one!), so I'm going to address the points raised by the more substantive commenters---whose insightful critiques leave me very much in their debt---sometime in the next few days, perhaps as late as this weekend. Until then...
...watch this space.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:08 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 12, 2008

Devil's Advocacy

Image: Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick.

I heartily endorse the New Atheists' strategy of taking the firefight to the enemy's doorstep. As someone who is truly soul-sick of his fundie relatives' condescending, culturally arrogant prayers that he find The Light© before he's cast into the lake of everlasting fire, I'm thrilled by the new strain of what might be called "evangelical" atheism. Watching Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens hand Christian apologists their heads is my idea of fun for the whole secular-humanist family, a popcorn-friendly bloodsport that's as entertaining for the little ones as it is edifying. It's high time those proselytizing god-botherers who materialize on my doorstep every Sunday morning understand what it's like to have their beliefs treated as self-evidently absurd, the foundations of their world-view vigorously challenged by a devil's advocate who gives no quarter. Spread the love, I say.

But Dawkins and Hitchens (both of whom I admire immensely as vorpal swordsmen in the Enlightenment cause, Hitchens's intellectual glaucoma regarding the Iraq question notwithstanding) reveal an almost willful ignorance about religion as a social construction and American evangelical Christianity as a subculture.

Following cultural studies, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, I believe it's important to understand the radically utopian impulses, unspoken yearnings, and unconscious desires that flicker through contemporary evangelical Christianity. Dawkins and Hitchens make short work of Christianity and all its bigoted, irrational works and ways, for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. But their analysis lacks subtlety, and their understanding of why so many are seduced by religion, especially in America, is millimeter-deep. To say that Christianity is a Bronze Age fable, a holdover from the primitive childhood of the species, may be deeply satisfying to those of us tending the Enlightenment flame in these new dark ages, but it's also thumpingly obvious. Harris and Hitchens may be right, but they're not terribly enlightening, at least to anyone not living on a flat earth, in a pre-Copernican cosmos.

Then, too, there's the obvious problem that Dawkins is a humorless prig, as sanctimonious in his unbelief as true believers are in their faith. (I'm with Cartman on this one.) He's on a Mission From God when it comes to prosecuting the atheist case---a one-man crusade so obsessively all-consuming it runs the risk of elevating his unfaith to a sort of faith. He makes an ornament of power, as the postmodern Marxist McKenzie Wark would say. Meaning: he so fetishizes the object of his critique that he ends up exalting it, giving it more power than it actually has. As for Hitchens, he's blind to the situational irony of his own position, namely, our most mordant critic of religion is, at the same time, a fervent fundamentalist on the question of Iraq. Buried under an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, he insists that our little imperial adventure in Iraq is a Just Cause; that all the blood and treasure spilled there is just the price of "sewing democracy" in the Middle East. If that isn't the limit case in blind faith, I don't know what is.

Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick.

Yes, the Enlightenment tradition of reasoned debate and the scientific method's appeal to fact trump evangelical Christianity's "faith-based" obedience to scriptural "truth," its cowering fear of the Deeply Disapproving Daddy in the Sky. Those points being eagerly granted, how much more interesting to excavate the historical, class-based, and economic roots of American evangelical Christianity, to understand it in all its oxymoronic complexity as a conservative counterculture. There is a reductionistic, black-and-white binarism to Dawkins and Hitchens arguments that, irony of ironies, replicates the very same Manichean dualism beloved of American fundamentalism.

(And no, I'm not echoing the sophistic argument, made with her usual blunt-trauma subtlety by Ann Coulter and with somewhat more nuance, on the left, by Chris Hedges. I'm not arguing that a dogmatic atheism is a fundamentalism by any other name; rather, I'm arguing that using the sledgehammer of reason to smash to smithereens religion's preposterous epistemology and its hypocritical morality leaves half the job undone. Conservative Christianity has little to do with theology and everything to do with the culture wars; making sense of it requires not just a rationalist-materialist critique but an ethnographic/anthropological angle of attack.)

Both thinkers forget the (admittedly done-to-death) Fitzgerald adage that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Religion has been both the indefatigable enemy of our intellectual evolution, as a species, and an inspiration to the John the Baptists of social justice, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to the liberation theology proponents of the '60s. American Christianity has spread the thought-killing viruses of misogyny and homophobia and anti-empiricism/anti-rationalism and it has, in African-American culture, rewoven the social fabric and ministered to the material as well as the spiritual needs of a community under assault from without and within, often as the only institution left standing in economically decimated neighborhoods abandoned to their social pathologies by the institutions of white power (codeword: the government, whether local or federal).

American evangelical Christianity is a perverse thing, much of it demonstrably extrabiblical if not outright contradictory of scripture. Arguably, this is because it's not about God; rather, religion is simply the only philosophical (or, if you will, mythic) language available to some Americans to articulate their discontent and their visions of social change. The Dawkins/Hitchens question---What's wrong with religion?---is far less illuminating than the question they might have asked: What are American evangelicals really talking about when they talk about religion? Following Tom Frank's argument in What's the Matter with Kansas?, I believe that Christian fundamentalism, American style (like its Islamic counterpart in the extremist madrasahs of the East and the Middle East), uses religion to articulate the social, political, and economic discontent and utopian fantasies of a certain segment of American society. It does so because religion is the explanatory narrative and metaphoric language that segment has used, throughout American history, to make sense of the social changes taking place around it. As well, religion has been that class's primary mode of public address in American culture.

Christian tract, Jack T. Chick.

Posted by Mark Dery at 01:57 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

October 28, 2005

Axles of Evil

What with pound-of-flesh gas prices; Bush's tax incentive to stimulate SUV sales, unbelievably; an anti-terrorist driving school offering tips on high-impact ramming techniques and high-speed evasive maneuvers for dealing with death-racing terrorists (or just garden-variety road ragers); and the cheese monkeys' recent eco-vigilantism against our gas-slurping behemoths, my 2004 essay on the relationship between America's love affair with monster cars and its oil-dependent foreign policy seems more relevant than ever...

(This is the extended dance remix of an essay that appeared, in shorter, substantively different form, as "Axles of Evil" in the fall/winter '04-'05 issue of Vogues Hommes. I later revised and expanded it for a lecture I gave in Mexico City. This is yet another version of it. And why not? If Raymond Chandler didn't blush at "cannibalizing" his work, as he called it, why should we lesser mortals? — M.D.)

Go ahead, indulge yourself. Give in to the guilt-free nastiness of hating someone or something that richly deserves it. It's one of life's little pleasures. WordSpy.com calls it "hathos," the journalist Alex Heard's term for the giddy headrush we get—equal parts hate and happiness, laced with pathos and bathos—from hating things we love to hate.

For conservatives, that means Janeane Garofalo, PETA, Michael Moore, the ACLU, scent-free "womyn-friendly spaces," and group hugs. For liberals (whose godless legions include this writer), it means the Fratboy-in-Chief, "El Rushbo" (Limbaugh), the NRA, Anne Coulter, bible-belt troglodytes like the "10 Commandments Judge" Roy Moore (the Alabama Chief Justice who displayed God's Laws in his courthouse, in defiance of federal law), meatheads who do that fist-pumping U.S. Marine "Huah!" thing and, always and everywhere, the SUV and other so-called "light trucks." (The light-truck classification enables manufacturers to drive SUVs through a regulatory loophole, deftly evading fuel-economy regulations and many emissions rules).

Sure, fulminating against SUVs, Hummers, and other members of the Axles of Evil is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, for many, these four-wheeled behemoths are just too obvious a target to ignore. Satisfying, too: The pure, uncut hathos of a good Two Minutes Hate directed at SUVs and the people who love them is Crack Rock for the Liberal Soul. Tim Robbins, Earth First!, and the shoot-your-TV gang over at Adbusters magazine couldn't have dreamed up a better bull's-eye for greenie spleen.

And there's spleen to burn, in the post-9/11, post-New Orleans, mid-Iraq United States. The culture wars are threatening to escalate into a blood feud. Partisan rancor and ideological bitterness have given rise to what the Pew Research Center described, in a 2004 study, as a political landscape split by "rising political polarization and anger," a nation "almost evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values."

In such a supercharged atmosphere, people and things that catch the media eye often become semiotic attractors, accumulating meaning in the eyes of defenders and detractors alike. This is especially true of the car, a potent symbol in the American mind since the postwar economic boom of the '50s, when easy credit made the dream of car ownership a reality for middle-class consumers. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 helped midwife the birth of suburbia, giving us the Auto America we know and love.

Of course, our veneration of the car as a household deity and our eagerness to raze whole neighborhoods (provided they were poor) in our alabaster cities and pave our fruited plains to make way for its asphalt temple, the highway, has earned us the blessings of smog, deforestation, and the cultural kudzu known as sprawl.

Nonetheless, the American obsession with cars—the bigger and badder the better—continues, seemingly unchecked by soaring gas prices and a moribund economy. According to a May, 2004 USA Today story, SUVs accounted for 30 percent of the new vehicles sold in 2004, a 3 percent jump from 2003, and sales of the biggest SUVs climbed by more than 10 percent in the first four months of 2004. And why the hell not? Driving Detroit's answer to a Tyrant Lizard from the Late Cretaceous is every American's god-given right, goddamit, second only to the right to hunt deer with armor-piercing rounds or to make a mockery of Old Europe by repackaging her culture, American style. Triscuit® Bruschetta, anyone? Slim-Fast® Cappuccino Delight Shake? Now tell those cheese-eating surrender monkeys to get the hell out of the global fast lane, before they end up in The Road Kill Cookbook.

Then again, the daily death march that is each morning's news—the horror stories, live from Iraq, of Army humvees or civilian SUVs ripped apart by rocket-propelled grenades or improvised explosive devices—has ratcheted up the hostilities between the pro- and anti-SUV factions. When the family friendly light truck first lumbered onto the cultural landscape (the debut of the Jeep Cherokee, in 1983, is as good a starting point as any), critics saw them as muscle cars on steroids, the embodiment of yuppie materialism and hard-bodied masculinity in the age of Rambo, Robocop, and Reagan. To bomb-the-suburbs punks and slackers, soccer mom-mobiles such as the Chrysler minivan (which also rolled out in '83) were symbols of Stepfordian conformity: in his novel Snow Crash, the cyberpunk writer Neil Stephenson derided them as "bimbo boxes."

Now, in post-traumatic America, where we live our lives on orange alert, we take our big cars seriously. If we are what we drive, big cars such as SUVs and Hummers are the embodiment of all that is right or wrong with this country, in the mass imagination. To its devotees, the SUV is a "safe room" on wheels, a bunker with beverage holders. "Sometimes the road ahead is paved with anything but good intentions," warns an ad for the Jeep Grand Cherokee—a tagline with an unintentionally (?) ominous subtext at a time when grotesque images of four American military contractors, dragged from their burning SUV and torn to pieces by exultant Iraqis in Fallujah, replay themselves in American nightmares.

In his book High and Mighty—SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, Keith Bradsher quotes Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist whose work with car-owner focus groups has led him to believe that the American fear of violent crime is an important factor in the psychology of big-car appeal: "People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence." Marshall McLuhan's observation, in Understanding Media (1964), that "the car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man," is truer than ever in locked-down, wartime America. All phallic power on the outside, reassuringly womblike on the inside, SUVs are armored cocoons for an Age of Anxiety.

To some, though, the road ahead still looks like the "thoroughfare for freedom beat/ across the wilderness" evoked in "America the Beautiful." In this light, that Jeep Liberty or that Ford Escape you're driving is the incarnation of the pioneer spirit, the freethinking individualism that made this country great (or so the story goes). Screw the tree-huggers and their Al Gore-in-a-hairshirt jeremiads about hydrofluorocarbons! We're revving up our Chevy Trailblazers and our Ford Explorers and our Nissan Pathfinders and we're lighting out for the territories. And if we run out of road, we'll make our own.

"Refaced" billboard.

John Bruno, Jr., manager of Hummer of Manhattan, knows a bit about the mythic appeal of big cars. "People just love this truck; it's really uniquely American," he says, driving me around New York City in a hulking 2004 Hummer H2. He's sold it to all types, he notes, but "the target demographic was successful achievers, entrepreneurs, rugged individualists, outdoorsy people, executives who've made it for themselves and want to make a statement about it." Intriguingly, Bruno claims that some of his buyers are veterans of the war in Iraq who "want to buy [Hummers] just to keep identifying with the car."

For others, of course, monster trucks like the Hummer are rough beasts slouching, at 10 miles per gallon, toward Bethlehem—poster cars for American Empire at its most nasty, brutish, and supersized. Bruno knows this better than most: He's friends with the owner of Clippinger Chevrolet, the West Covina, California Hummer dealership that was fire-bombed in August, 2003 by the Earth Liberation Front, a decentralized group of guerrilla environmentalists who espouse guerrilla warfare. The inferno reduced 20 Hummer H2s to blackened carcasses and damaged another 20. Some of them flaunted mocking slogans, such as "I'm a greedy little pig" and "I love pollution" and "Fat lazy Americans." Ironically, says Bruno, the toxic fumes belched out by the burning Hummers "was some ridiculous amount of times more than any of those cars ever would have made if they'd burned gas for 200,000 miles every day for the next five years," an assertion more or less confirmed by West Covina Fire Chief Richard Greene, in an LA Weekly story about the attack.

Fire-bombed SUV, Clippinger Chevrolet. AP photo.

Obviously, torching 20 Hummers in defense of Mother Earth and unleashing 20 lifetimes' worth of toxic spew in the process wins the Homer Simpson Hole-in-the-Forehead Award. Even so, the ELF's ritual sacrifice of these battle-ready gas-guzzlers is just the Unabomber version of a riptide of rage that is churning beneath the surface of American society. A significant number of Americans is infuriated by what they see as the rogue-state lunacy of the war in Iraq and the crony capitalism and anti-environmentalism of an administration run, in their eyes, by draft-dodging hawks, corporate kleptocrats, and a president widely perceived to be dumb as a bag of hammers ("Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show," conceded David Frum, Dubya's former speechwriter).

These are the people who look at the big, black SUV, its tinted windows inscrutable as Darth Vader's faceplate, and see the hated symbol of an evil empire. They ponder its gas-hogging fuel inefficiency and reflect on the swinish selfishness of a nation that, as Bradsher notes in High and Mighty, "has 5 percent of the world's population, but produces nearly a third of all greenhouse gases from automobiles." They think about the my-way-or-the-highway arrogance inherent in SUV design—the way their Brontosaurian bulks cut off other drivers' sightlines; the way their Xenon headlights flood the cabins of smaller cars, turning rear-view mirrors into eye-frying spotlights; the way their drivers can't see the Camry they just forced off the road, exploding into a fireball, because they've got more blind spots than a glaucoma convention. To some, the SUV is a living parable about the menace to global society posed by our go-it-alone "exceptionalism," here in what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz likes to call the New American Century. They mull over the grim statistic that SUVs, because they ride high and typically have stiff fronts, without protective crumple zones, are nearly three times as likely as ordinary cars to kill the other driver in a crash, a fact that accounts for 1,000 needless deaths annually.

Thinking on these things, they divine in the SUV a bleak fable for our age. It's a fable about the apocalyptic threat of a rogue superpower that brakes for no one. Were the exploding Hummers in West Covina a harbinger of Days of Rage that will rip apart a nation "evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values"? None can say. But if every age has its emblematic artwork, ours is surely the Chinese-American artist Sarah Sze's stunning 2001 installation, an exploded SUV spilling its mechanical innards down a flight of stairs. Its title? "Things Fall Apart."

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:03 PM | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

Canon Fodder

Reading is FUN-damental! Everybody's talking about the Ann Coulter Great Books Program©, "Reading for Right-Wingers," a tastes-great, less-filling curriculum hand-picked by our favorite intellectual ectomorph.

Ann Coulter—She-Wolf of the Roger Ailes SS, Boswellian wit, and knobby-kneed hottie (in the fever dreams of hairy-palmed Young Republicans everywhere)—has done it again.

While I and my hopelessly literary fellow travelers—the effete-snob neo-Marxists sapping this great nation's precious bodily fluids—trudge joylessly through the canon, the Elizabeth Bathory of the Sound Bite is light years ahead of us, on the cultural curve. Hey! Immanuel Goldstein! Pull your head out of the scriptorium and read the writing on the wall: We're living in a postliterate age, Grammatology Man.

Maybe Coulter's Zen-like empty bookshelf was inspired by the new Kaiser study, which notes that kids 8 to 18 spend about 43 minutes a day reading for pleasure, on average, as opposed to roughly four hours a day watching TV, videos, DVDs, and Tivo'd programs; 1 and 3/4 hours a day listening to the radio or music; a little over one hour a day using computers for non-schoolwork activities; and about 50 minutes a day playing video games.

Or maybe Coulter knows, better than most, that digging into the historical record or excavating the facts from the public press is for the clueless Captain Earnests of the egghead left. Why bother, when spinning whole-cloth fabrications can land you on the bestseller list and make your invincible, vulpine smile a Fox News fixture? Facts, as Coulter crush Ronald Reagan famously observed, are stupid things. There were no lines upon the tranquil Reagan brow, happily uncreased by troubling ideas from weighty tomes. When an incredulous James Baker asked the president, in 1983, why he hadn't read the briefing book for a momentous economic summit, the Sage of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was philosophical: "Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night." These things happen. Besides, who needs Facts on File in a photo-op world? According to David Gergen, Bonzo was just "boffo" at the summit: "He stayed above the forest of facts we had provided and focused on the larger goals he wanted to pursue."

Clear-cutting the "forest of facts" is standard practice for Coulter and attacking heads like her, well-skilled in the Rove-ian art of chum-bucket realpolitik, whose first rule is never to let empirical truth or intellectual nuance stand in the way of sliming the enemy. These are people for whom winning is everything: they stoop to conquer, lower than a shitfaced Kissinger in a limbo contest. Not for them the op cits and ibids of the academic left, so concerned with covering its flanks with scrupulous research. Facticity—hell, even big words like "facticity"—went out with leather elbow-pads and those beard-pulling think pieces about the Social Responsibility of the Intellectual in back issues of Dissent magazine.

Coulter has learned to make the media's repetition compulsion work for her. She knows that no lie is too big to be transmuted, through the alchemy of Fox News quoting conservative pundits quoting right-wing radio cranks quoting right-wing bloggers quoting her, into Goebbels-ian truth. In such a climate, stuffing your head full of book-learning only muddles the mind with inconvenient facts, grit in the wind-up mind of a right-wing fembot. Just hit your mark, stay on message, and charm the toothless "dragons of the press," as Gergen called them, right out of their pants. And be sure to show plenty of leg. Besides, reading makes your lips numb.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:52 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 20, 2005

Dimed Out

Today is "Not One More Damn Dime Day," when conscientious objectors to four more years of our fratboy-in-chief's Excellent Adventure are supposed to rage, rage against the machine by participating in "a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending."

(As opposed to, like, non-consumer spending. You know, consuming without spending, like those supermarket shoppers who discreetly graze their body weight in grapes or those income-challenged art students who subsist entirely on gallery-opening canapés and Concha y Toro.)

By refusing to underwrite the permanent war economy, even for a day, NOMDD refuseniks hope to monkeywrench the machinery of consumer capitalism and give Dubya the malocchio, into the bargain.

"For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down," the boycott's website exhorts. Don't spend money on "toll/cab/bus or train ride money exchanges." (What, pray tell, is a "train ride money exchange"? Is this alt.-ese for subway fare?) Don't go to any big-box retailers ("please boycott Walmart, KMart and Target"), nor to "the mall or the local convenience store," and for chrissakes "please don't buy any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter)." Subsist, like the pious anorectics of medieval Christendom, on the manna of your moral superiority. Or, better yet, fast, in the time-honored tradition of self-flagellants everywhere. "The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it. [...] 'Not One Damn Dime Day' is about supporting the troops. The politicians put the troops in harm's way. [...] The politicians owe our troops a plan—a way to come home. [...] There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. [...] On 'Not One Damn Dime Day' you take action by doing nothing. You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed. For 24 hours, nothing gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious leaders and our politicians of their moral responsibility to end the war in Iraq and give America back to the people."

Why, as a fellow traveler who heartily agrees that our ill-conceived adventure in nation-building has become a slaughterbench for army reservists and a recruitment tool for jihadis, do I find myself so wildly irritated by this thing?

It being eagerly granted that War is Bad, Peace is Good, and the morbidly obese millions would be the better for a day away from the Arby's trough, what is there to argue with in this earnest attempt to Fight the Power by "doing nothing"?

Let me count the ways:

First, the whole business reeks of bobo sanctimony and cultural elitism. Any member of the Adbusters-reading, Supersize Me-watching leisure class who honestly believes she can Stick It to the Man by keeping her dimes firmly in her hand-knitted Guatemalan rucksack, right beside her manically underlined copy of Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, is unlikely to be seen rolling a 55-gallon drum of Miracle Whip out of Wal-Mart or rejoicing in fried offal at the local McDonald's. The NOMDD demographic consists largely, if not entirely, of inconspicuous consumers. It is axiomatic, at this late date, that the higher a certain sort of overeducated, deeply principled American climbs on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely he is to camouflage his status and laminate his common-man credentials with the appearance (at least) of a virtuous proletarianism. This, after all, is America, where none of the children are above average. Our deep-dyed populism demands that all poll respondents, whether homeless or richer than God or Gates, insist they are "middle class." Historians of consumer culture, such as Stuart Ewen, have traced the evolution of what were once called "overalls," mass-produced for the working class, into the designer jeans I saw recently in a boutique on New York's dizzily wealthy Upper East Side. Artfully distressed and fastidiously shredded, they bore a price tag in the high three figures. All of which is my usual digressive way of saying that the well-educated, well-rewarded class whose Volvo-driving, Fair Trade coffee-buying legions are most likely to support the NOMDD boycott don't shop at Wal-Mart or eat at McDonald's anyway. They're too busy fondling the heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's market or gnawing their cuticles to the quick over the question that continues to vex the ecologically correct: Cloth diapers or disposable?

Second, Not One More Damn Dime won't work, for the obvious reason that it has niche appeal, and niche appeal only. A dated, they've-got-the-guns-but-we've-got-the-numbers attempt to pour sugar in the gas tank of the road-hogging, gas-guzzling SUV of consumer capitalism by refusing to buy a new cruelty-free loofah or foregoing that appointment with the feng shui consultant, NOMDD needs mass support to get off the ground. But mass support implies mass appeal. If you're going to sell a holy war, you need rousing, to-the-ramparts rhetoric, not some flabbyassed assurance that the faithful can "do something by doing nothing." (Although I have to confess, right about now, that NOMDD's Zen koan speaks to my Inner Slackivist). If your shock troops are going to suffer on behalf of your sacred cause, you need to make palatable, even desirable, the world of pain they're about to enter. Appealing to their better angels is fine ("Ask not what your country can do for you..."). Subliminally seducing them by playing on their naked self-interest is even finer. As in: "Rise up, o ye faithful, against the Great Satan and his Zionist puppetmasters to prevent our sacred sands from being defiled by the boots of the infidels! (Did I mention that every martyr who straps on a suicide belt and blows himself to chum gets to spend eternity in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, boinking dark-eyed virgins?)" By contrast, the left (among whose endangered numbers I count myself, I should probably emphasize again) hasn't managed, in recent history, to make either its public persona or its ideas sexy to the masses. Ensuring that you're synonymous, in the public mind, with hair shirt-wearing self-denial and granitic humorlessness (think Kerry, Gore, Dukakis...) is not likely to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans, most of whom shrink from things like the NOMDD Day because they sound like the political equivalent of the gray, gluten-free, sugar-free, fun-free snack foods drearily gummed by vegans and other humorectomy sufferers. A mass boycott that mandates total self-denial and, by default, sentences the participant to house arrest in order to avoid spending a plugged nickel, let alone a thin dime, is a mass boycott doomed to failure.

As well it should be. Because if it did work, it would injure the very nickel-and-dimed working class whose members have so disproportionately suffered in this misbegotten war. As the editors of the Urban Legends Reference Pages write in their brilliant retort to NOMDD,
boycotts succeed by causing economic harm to their targets, thereby putting them out of business or at least requiring them to change their policies in order to remain in business. But the target of this boycott isn't an entity that has the power to bring about the desired resolution (i.e., the government)—those who will be economically harmed by it are innocent business operators and their employees. These people have no power to set U.S. foreign policy or recall troops from Iraq, but they're the ones who would have to pay the price for this form of protest, incurring all their usual overhead costs (e.g., lighting, heat, refrigeration) to keep their businesses open and paying employees' salaries, all the while taking in little or no income. (And no, it doesn't all even out in the end ? restaurants, for example, aren't going to recoup their lost business through boycott participants' eating twice as much the next day.)
Somebody say Amen. There is exactly negative zero connection between sticking it to Apu down at the Kwik-E-Mart and inflicting a mortal wound on Dick Cheney and the Masters of War over at Halliburton. (For that matter, can somebody please explain to me how "our religious leaders" are supposed to end the war in Iraq?)

Finally, there's one last reason NOMDD Day and the hole-in-the-forehead cultural logic it represents must die. Like Buy Nothing Day and Turn Off Your TV Day, it cedes too much cultural territory to the enemy. It's about denial, refusal, withdrawal. It's craven. It's feckless. It gives off the sour stink of defeatism, and self-defeatism at that. This way lies Ted Kaczynski's cabin, the Shaker community, the ascetic's cell. Masochistic at heart, faux protests such as NOMDD Day are the political equivalent of a pillow-biting hissy fit: I'll show them! I'll never leave my bedroom! If they're going to make me eat Brussels sprouts, I'll never eat again, as long as I live! Do NOMDD participants truly believe that the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland or the CEO of Wal-Mart is losing any sleep over the fact that they're not buying that Ani Difranco CD they've been jonesing for?

Too long have the censorious, humor-impaired wings of the left—the Dworkinite penis-is-a-weapon paleoconservative wing of feminism; the beige, Organization Man policy wonks; the excruciatingly earnest shoot-your-TV neo-Luddites—been the left's public face. We need an Xtreme Makeover. More profoundly, we need to stop embracing the politics of denial and withdrawal. Show me a left-wing call for social justice and economic democracy that nonetheless embraces the vulgarian pleasures of junk culture, and I'll show you a fanfare for the common man that is also a battleplan for handing the right's self-appointed morals czars their heads. In contrast, NOMDD's rearguard action is the thin bleat of a bugle blowing retreat: Forward, into the past!

Posted by Mark Dery at 03:33 PM | Comments (57) | TrackBack