Press Action ::: The Left and Popular Culture

Thursday, October 28, 2004

The Left and Popular Culture

By Jordy Cummings

Bruce and Little Steven If there is anything that the American intelligentsia, including the far left, does not understand, it is popular culture. While “culture” was in many ways an invention of the Neapolitan philosophical left of the Renaissance, the left, ignoring the battlefield of pop culture, leaves it wide open to the increasing popularity of a sort-of hipster reactionary apathy among youth, not to mention a genuinely right-wing aesthetic that is emerging in the racist behaviour of so-called comedians like the modern Blackface and Judeophobia of Sasha “Ali G” Cohen and the reactionary Dennis Miller.

Mickey Z. has written—and I take it that he means to many people who don’t live and breathe politics, not just to the political right—that the capital “L” Left encompasses anyone from Ward Churchill and Chomsky to the New York Times and Bill Clinton. It is entirely true that within this sort of culturally defined “popular front” that there is some problematics. If Al Franken is pretty damned funny and a good communicator and has a bigger audience to pose as a member of this amorphous coalition in order to have Al Dershowitz make the case for Israel, then it is a problem. Likewise for many the opportunist. Likewise, witness the fast imitation of corporate presses to publish books by middling NPR hosts and former CIA cultural front chiefs like Art Schlesinger in the famous “mini-hardback” Verso design.

At the same time, this can allow for the kind of crossover appeal, if you will, from truly radical ideas to the mainstream liberal zeitgeist. Robert Jensen has written extensively on how to bring radical ideas to the mainstream, and his work is highly recommended. Jensen, on the other hand, in his didactic critique of Fahrenheit 911, unfortunately does exactly what I’m talking about, engaging in pure subjectivity, as it were as opposed to understanding the broad cultural effects. Jensen’s review received some argument, but I still talk to many people who think of their radical psyche as lefter-than-thou who insist that Moore is a sellout, which he may well be, but we are not talking of the man but of his production.

Likewise many on the left condemn Bruce Springsteen for touring on behalf of Kerry, forgetting that Springsteen himself has been saying from the stage things well to the left of the DLC, things like “voting is only the beginning.” He and especially bandmate Steve Van Zandt, who is on the board of FAIR and Covert Action, have been active on the left for thirty years, and written genuinely progressive music. I can say that I am not a fanatic, but the most politically inspiring rock concert I have ever seen was Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band in December 2002 in Toronto, precisely transcendent because of its intimate connection to politics as such.

That is not to say that “The Boss” is going to lead a revolution (though his aesthetic is admittedly partially based on Guevara), but that whether he says to vote for Kerry or Nader or Cobb is secondary to someone who writes songs like “41 shots” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Likewise, even teen-star Justin Timberlake and the Black Eyed Peas had a huge hit song last year, “Where’s the Love,” in which they outright referred to the CIA as terrorists, and plaintively asked “where’s the love.” The song was heard all over top 40 radio.

The value of having even passive listeners intake these messages is lost to the left. Take the knee-jerk condemnation from the otherwise valiant Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 killers, of “Team America World Police.” While embraced and thought of as libertarians or reactionaries, the filmmakers are self-proclaimed “radicals who read The Nation and Counterpunch but don ‘t go talking about it on Larry King” (interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN.) Trey Parker and Matt Stone make a film like “Team America-World Police” which portrays America as a bumbling Jerry Bruckheimer fantasy world, a sort of past the brink of sanity portrayal of what may well be Rumsfeld’s fantasy view of America. It is not only a brilliant film, it is profoundly misunderstood, and is being embraced by those who don’t get it, and slammed by those who should. Of course, its aesthetic is disgusting, depraved and somewhat gross to the point that I had to look away from the screen during an extended vomit scene.

In the first five minutes of “Team America,” (done entirely in a cheap “Mr. Rogers” King Friday type puppets,) a team of American “special ops” people destroy the city of Paris, including the Louvre. Later on in the film, they destroy the Great Pyramids, and follow up Napoleon’s nose-chipping with the wholesale explosion of the Sphinx. The terrorists, are after all, with the help of Kim Jong Il, planning something that is “911 times 911” and in specific response to destruction of Egypt, they commit a horrifying attack on the Panama Canal. Later on, discovering the hideout of the special operatives of Team America, Michael Moore suicide-bombs and destroys their headquarters. It turns out the the left, led by Alec Baldwin and the film actors guild (F.A.G.), is in league with Kim Jong Il and the terrorists, but America must save the day, after all, they may be dicks, but they’re not assholes.

It seems that many leftists—and reactionary writers determined to embrace pop culture—took this film at face value, not realizing that it is eminently a satire. If Dr. Strangelove were to come out right now, perhaps the Glorious Revolutionary Federation would slam it for being in favor of nuclear war. In terms of the clearly homophobic, Islamophobic, Sexist, Judeophobic, racist and other stuff that comes from Parker and Stone, these are meant, like Lenny Bruce’s coarse use of stereotypes, to deflate the very stereotypes that are part of the public imagination by inflating them to unrealistic degrees. And the PC crowd would probably never give Lenny Bruce the respect he deserved. The left and liberals came rallying to his side, yet in the early ’90s, many leftists had no problem with the censorship of Two Live Crew.

It should be remembered in the case of “Team America” that it is, though clearly inferior, like Strangelove, a sort of fantasy of a fantasy of neoconservative America. To show the left in league with terrorism shows the notion to be an absolute joke, not a “dangerous move” no matter how many idiots misinterpret that. And likewise, even acts of terrorism are clearly portrayed to be retaliatory, not the “Satan’s dance” written about by fiends like Tom Friedman. As noted, there are no specific acts of terrorism except in response to America’s destruction of the Pyramids and virtually all of Egypt. By inflating the Bruckheimer fantasy of America to profane satire, they deflate that very fantasy, and as such, it is an important film, brilliant beyond itself.

Now all this is arguable when it comes to subjectivity. You or I may like or dislike various kinds of film, music, writers, even television. And often, as Zizek has noted, art becomes a sort of Rorschach test. Yet, whether or not one likes a television show like the Sopranos, as I do, the show is objectively about the contradiction of haute-bourgeois American life, using the Mafia as a sort of symbol for participation in the managerial strata of capitalism. Whether one enjoys what is done with these objective criteria is often dependent on a personal aesthetic, as Hegel put it, the only thing worth inquiry besides politics, and intimately connected. Yet in failing to see the crucial battle of popular culture, the left replaces analysis with subjectivity, and at worst, repeats the mistake of many before them in thinking that its better to reach 1,000 people with the unadulterated truth than a million people with a few hints.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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