McCain to Cheney: "You're wrong, asshole."

In response to the simple-minded attempt of Richard B. "Dick" Cheney to defend himself by claiming that torture is good for America, the former Republican presidential candidate and former P.O.W., Senator John McCain replies that Cheney's torture programs made the United States less safe and also that the programs were and are criminal.

I like the fact that John McCain and other Republicans -- perhaps a majority of them veterans -- speak out against Cheney's bullshit. The fact is that torture is so patently immoral that it really needs to be seen as the kind of thing, as Slavoj Zizek has stated, that nobody should ever have to point out, much less debate on its merits.

But the fact that McCain is willing to demur publicly and categorically is good for reasons pertaining to what maybe could be called public discourse. Let me explain: The present reader and I agree that, of course, legally sanctioned torture is beyond the pale. That the notion of legally sanctioned torture has so much as appeared in the public conversation (and it has) is itself a nauseating and Orwellian phenomenon.
So: When such a specter is unleashed upon 'civilization', how can it be made obvious to all of our ovine fellow citizens that it is, of course, beyond the pale and self-undermining for our ostensibly free, democratic society to engage in legally-sanctioned torture?

It isn't a matter of convincing people, because anybody who's able to think it through is of course going to oppose it. The problem is those people who don't think but feel. Or, more specifically, who feel in the place of thinking. These are the people for whom Dick Cheney's propaganda proved so effective in mobilizing the bovine United States population into supporting his Hundred Years Oil War.

How do you influence them if you can't convince them? Counter-propaganda? No. That merely serves to further radicalize the terms of the 'debate'. No, you make sure that the discourse is framed in such a way as to oppose clear-thinking, historically minded and morality-based against Cheney's wing-nut fringe.

If the emerging framework -- the one that casts Cheney as the wing-nut/liar that he is -- is to prove durable, we need the John McCains to continue speaking out. The long-term effect of this, I hope, is that during the next Presidential election, we will no longer have candidates of either major party issuing pledges to emulate Jack Bauer in their national security policies.

Slavoj Žižek on authoritarian capitalism, other horrors.

In an interview, broadcast on Icelandic television (the date is unknown to me), Slavoj Žižek argues that the Left needs to take notice of the decoupling of capitalism and democracy, and--in the example of China, whose lead smaller states have begun to follow--the disturbing advance of authoritarian capitalism. Also discussed is biotechnology, the implications of which, he argues, traditional and current ethical discourses are ill-equipped to handle.

Some Hates/Loves (ala Westwood & McLaren)

Sex was the name of the boutique owned and operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, located at 430 King's Road, London. McLaren, of course, became the manager of the Sex Pistols before his megalomania, incompetence and clashes of ego with John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon precipitated the band's disintegration.

Although Westwood and McLaren were in the business of selling clothes -- designed by Westwood, who appropriated period and street fashions -- the couple's real stock in trade was anti-establishmentarianism. They set out to tap into a growing and restless market of misfits; unemployed kids from the projects, as well as refugees of lower-middle-class suburbs, occupying condemned buildings in the economic and cultural wasteland of inner-city London. Westwood and McLaren attracted a clientèle whose sense of fashion was united its contempt for the hypocrisy, excess and bourgeois myopia of anything related to hippie culture.

Neither McLaren nor Westwood has ever been noted primarily for possessing business acumen. They frequently remodeled their store and changed its inventory out of boredom rather than to capitalize on sales. Initially calling their shop Let It Rock, which peddled Teddy Boy regalia, they moved on to edgier and funnier pastures with the advent of Sex, which specialized in rubber clothing, assorted accoutrements and paraphernalia, and -- most importantly -- tee-shirts emblazoned with snarky or confrontational slogans.

One such tee-shirt declared: "You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on!" Beneath this manifesto appeared a list of pop culture and political references under the headings Hates and Loves. It is in the spirit of that pioneering tee-shirt that I shall undertake to improvise some Hates and Loves of my own. Or, rather, some Nos and Yeses. And since negation is an act of creation, let us begin with the former:

No!
audiophilia
blinders
blogs
Brooklyn
cant
ear fatigue
determinism as despair
Jim Derogatis
'expertise' as a stand-in for persuasiveness
Sasha Frere-Jones
Nancy Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
the herd
the hive
Sam Harris
Hilary
Christopher Hitchens (soused fatso, turncoat, fascist)
Peter Hitchens (bigot & mouth-breather)
Marx, mis- and shallow readings of
meritocracy, the concept of
NPR
.mp3s
'objectivists', from The Unabomber to Alan Greenspan
Peter, Bjorn and John (or whatever it's called)
scientism
Spiritualized
standardized tests (& all other forms of eugenics)
Stereolab after Sound-Dust
Sid Vicious
David Foster Wallace since 1999

Yes!
Anthony Braxton
Lester Bangs
Barack
cigarettes
cigarettes, jazz-
John Coltrane
daydreaming
eloquence
Brian Eno
Thomas Frank
good luck, not underestimating the importance of
historicism
the Hohner Pianet, model T
jazz
Mark Kozelek
Herbert Marcuse
Marx
Sean O'Hagan
Jim O'Rourke
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Last Metro
Lewis H. Lapham
John Lydon
Spacemen 3
thought
vinyl
.wav files
Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Zizek on why debates about the legitimacy of torture are terrifying in and of themselves.

Knight of the Living Dead (NYT, 3/24/07)

This op-ed, by philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek--and amazingly, among other things, onetime presidential candidate in Slovenia, his country of origin--was published one year ago in The New York Times. Zizek's argument may be summarized as follows: 1) under our current political regime, a discourse concerning the moral legitimacy of torture has been opened, 2) this opening is irreversible structurally, and 3) the disturbing consequences will linger far beyond current political contingencies.

"In a way,” writes Zizek, “those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it.” He argues that although accepting this discourse as legitimate might leave untarnished the “individual conscience” of the enlightened, Western torture-opponent, this is at the expense of transforming irrevocably our public morality, which he locates in Hegel’s “‘objective spirit,’ the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individual’s activity.”

Let's say you're a libertarian--in the American sense: you know, people like Alan Greenspan and the Unabomber--and you're thinking that the whole idea of public morality is for the birds. And so why should you care what this slobbering old Marxist has to say about torture? Well, then. Zizek presents a persuasive case (for the fact that you're an asshole):

For example, a clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify himself from any further consideration. And the same should hold for torture.

I'm not alone in my frustration with the insufficiently critical stance of most everyone in positions of authority--particularly people who are at least vaguely left of center, who really should know better--toward the Bush Administration’s policies and conduct. (I won't bore us with the list, which includes the undermining of the rule of law and due process, lying to prosecute immoral wars, the expansion of unchecked Executive Branch powers...) In my outrage, I'm often quick to attribute this silence and complicity to mere economic standing: you know, everyone--particularly the Baby Boomers, who have all the money and votes--is too fat and happy to give a shit, etc.

It would be more productive for me to think of it this way: perhaps people--on the Left included--are used to taking stock of ‘where they stand’ on most moral issues. How might we redirect our attention to the matter of: where are these questions taking us?