Oh, Forget It!
Next Friday, Sony Pictures will release its latest feature film, "Anonymous," a drama exploring the theory that the Shakespearean canon was authored by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford and an Elizabethan courtier. Despite the film's contentions, however, Oxfordian authorship has been repeatedly rejected by Shakespeare scholars. On the one hand, up to ten of Skaespeare's plays are believed to have been written after the year 1604, de Vere's death date. On the other, comparisons of the Bard's style to that of de Vere's known poetry reveal linguistic and poetic discrepancies that are "light years apart," according to a statistical analysis performed by document scholars Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza. Yet, the movie's director, Roland Emmerich, persists in the belief that William Shakespeare, a commoner, couldn't simply couldn't have done it, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Evidence. Contrary. Notwithstanding. Wait, is this guy a Tea Partier?
Just asking, given their similarly historic, and historical, misconceptions and theatrics. After all, House Republicans, at the behest of the newly minted Tea Party Caucus, read the Constitution aloud, at the beginning of this year's congressional session, to remind elected officials of what the document says. Still, critics of the Tea Party complain that the movement paradoxically distorts constitutional law, while bemoaning the historical revisionism of the left. Case in point, wannabe-founder Glenn Beck, who once said, "They [progressives] knew they had to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God."
The charge has merit, no doubt (the critics', not Beck's). Everything from birthright citizenship to portions of the Civil Rights Act are unconstitutional in the worldview of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who doubles as the Tea Party's Mad Hatter. Additionally, tea-totalers have cited the minimum wage, income tax, direct election of senators, and Social Security as federal overreaches, typically naming the 10th Amendment's enumerated powers clause—which states that "powers not delegated" to the federal government are "reserved to the states"—for support. What is always, literally always, omitted by Tea Partiers is that James Madison prevented the placing of "expressly" before "delegated" because, in his words, "there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication."
I hear that Madison guy knew a thing or two about the Constitution. Scholars believe he may even have read the document, based on newly forgotten evidence. Twice, perhaps. Nonetheless, the historical inaccuracies perpetuated by the many of the Tea Party's most prominent voices, now including presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Tim Perry, beg an interesting, and important, question: Wtf? Oh, sorry, I meant: How can, or why does, a movement gain nationwide traction through a continual abuse of the movement's purportedly foundational thinkers? Does America have political Alzheimer's?
Yes, Alzhemer's, a disease affecting 5.3 million people in the United States, according to the Alzheimer's Association. More than memory loss is implied by the analogy. Try some of the illness's other common symptoms, such as an inability to acquire new memories, problems recalling recently observed facts, confusion, mood swings, and, eventually, long-term dissociation. To varying degrees, the Tea Party exhibits all of these attributes. Through slurs indicting President Obama's birth in Hawaii and a permanent revolutionary era gaze, the conservative insurgency's capacity to image the American present has been neutered. In denying the appropriation of their movement by corporate interests, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tea Partiers have demonstrated difficulty recalling recent information. When ralliers vehemently denounce entitlement programs, such as Medicare, from which they and their families benefit, they're clearly confused. Rebuke the establishment before embracing establishment candidates? Flip-flop, mood swing. Then there's long-term dissociation, manifested in the movement's abnegation of judicial precedent and documentary research.
Wordsmithing aside, a deeper understanding of the Tea Party can be unearthed via this medical excavation, as hinted by Susan Schultz, an English professor, poet, and editor of Tinfish Press. As Schultz notes on her blog, watching the declension of Alzheimer's mirrors the structure of a graphic novel, in whose pages microaesthetic snippets, called panels, simultaneously construct and deconstruct a narrative. She states:
But I'm taken by the word "graphic." Not only does it refer to the pictorial, the vivid, the distinctive, the lineated, but also to what hits the reader as disturbing, unforgettable. What is graphic cannot be easily forgotten. It seems an apt form for writing about old age, self-loss, Alzheimer's. The story works inside a form where moments are caught in boxes, panels, discrete pages, with beginnings and endings. For the witness of Alzheimer's, the victim's forgetting is memorable...(Schultz, Tinfish Editor's Blog, 2010).
Similarly, the Tea Party's regressive condition, from a position outside the movement's normative boundaries, is witnessed as a fragmented enunciation, a staccato vocalization encouraged by and reconfigured for videographic excess, another graphic medium. Driven by soundbytes and television spots, the Tea Party narrative is "caught in boxes," both literal and metaphoric, producing "vivid," if insubstantial, moments that percolate, like the memories of an Alzheimer's patient, within an indefinite temporality, a limitless deferral that only echoes the constituent finitude of incipit homo. Any wonder, then, that witnessing the Tea Party's actualization is rendered in terms of forgetting, of absence, rather than an ecstatic birth-to-presence that affirms political existence as present unto the memory of itself?
I wonder if the Tea Party can even think in panels. It's a nice analogy though. They're like the comic book version of American politics, complete with their superheroes like Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Bachmann swooping in to save the day. I like the critique of their news ticker style of politics. They really do speak in the media equivalent of boxes. Their whole ideological bent is geared toward that kind of activism, with lots of instant harangues and interpretations of moments in history, but no consistent throughline linking them all together.
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Another irony of the 'graphicality' of the Tea Party is their insistence on carefully cultivated aesthetic regime, one that dismisses subaltern aesthetic regimes as unintelligible. It's an irony, really: their graphic partitioning is socioculturally homogenized, such the graphics-cum-objects form their own disruptive sets of relations. Become rogue objects by necessity, to use Levi Bryant's terms. It's these rogue graphics that both grasp the media's attention and unmask that graphic partitioning evinced in the Tea Party's worldview, which you've beautifully elucidated.
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I think there's something to be said for recapturing Rawlsian principles in an effort to combat the theoretical illiteracy of the Tea Party. Rawls forces you to look forward and backward, disallowing the kind of "graphic" rendering you describe. For example, Rawls' distinction between 'rational' and 'reasonable' favors a conception of the latter, in which pursuit one's own self-interest is subsumed within an empathetic understanding of cooperative interest. To do that, you have to put yourself not just in the position of other political beings, but actively engage their entire histories and how those histories shape their current desires and proleptic fantasies. Ergo, from a Rawlsian perspective, a tycoon is never fully entitles to all of what he has produced, since what he has produced relies on the labors and toils of others. It's cooperative, to reiterate.
Another good example would be Rawls' veil of ignorance, which posits that we cannot know our privileges and abilities coming into the world, so we can't partition resources around anything other than present positioning. An economic system that reifies class, as ours does, redistributes wealth from the bottom to the top - the top 1 percent are getting wealthier, while the middle class and poor are getting poorer and seeing their purchasing power disappear - violates this principle because the appearance of systemic inequality doesn't fit Rawls' predication for the existence of inequality (which he accepts as a given), that inequality must only exist if it benefits all who are part of the economic system that creates and sustains it.
In our society, the poor are unable to thrive (despite the best efforts of Rand-inspired Tea Partiers), leading to situation wheretofore inequality becomes injustice. Equality of opportunity - something even Randians should ascribe to - has evaporated, as the structural protections for the wealthy have been coded into our tax system, electoral system, campaign finance system, and justice system. Maybe even our semiotic system.
So I ask: What type of policies or actions could Occupy prescribe as painkillers for structural injustice? I do think specific goals are necessary, or the movement risks becoming a haven for people protesting "just to protest," where negation and contrarianism become chic rather than purposive.
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