Thomas de Zengotita
This months Harpers has another feature from Thomas de Zengotita, American socio-cultural critic and NYU prof by day. You should rush right out and buy it, because I command you, and you have just been hypnotized, and Lewis Lapham needs cigarettes. Anyway you love buying magazines as they instantly make you more knowledgeable about “topics” and give you conversation starters for the bar. They also look good and you can pile them up unread for months, a pile of erudition is not just any old pile.
In “The Romance of Empire,” TdZ begins with evolution of the mass psychology that pondered, and ultimately demanded war, as politicians sold us 9/11 as proof of an explicitly asked for “Shock and Awe”. Who asked for it? They did. Who exactly they are is not important, and that needs to remain ambiguous, so that we can strike them at will. But this was sold with help, for sometimes even the madness of “revenge” isn’t good enough. Enter the seducing power of gear; weapons, uniforms, technologies and all the Hollywood action movie sentimentality that accompanies it. In war, gear makes us want to use it. Gear erases awkward decision making once we commit to it. Bush knows this, it’s why he dressed up in his “Top Gun” outfit to affect a landing as commander in chief, it’s why he publicly utters macho-militaristic threats (”Bring ‘em on!“). Commander of gear, commander of technology, of all that is intrinsically superior to the low-tech underhanded evil we vanquish around the world. Superior gear must triumph, as it’s existence is evidence of our own superiority.
“One literally derives purpose from the tool. And the purposes inherent in tools fuse with those of other tools and, through them, with objectives- with the mission. This is the essence of the glamour of gear, and the Romance of Empire depends on it…Prior to missions, tools are inert, their users at a loss in the realm of decision. People don’t like that. They like decisions to have been made. They yearn for missions. That is why, once war starts, everyone is relieved. In turning to tools, you renounce the burden of considering what to do in favor of deciding how best to do it.”
Later he describes the over-simplification of the ideas that necessitate winning public opinion, and going ahead with a unilateral foreign policy.
“It is sufficient to declare that ‘you have to take a stand at some point!’ in tones that thrill with conviction, because such bromides seem adequate to the tiny sphere of one’s own experience. Projecting such maxims onto the complexities of world affairs follows automatically, because representations of the world have been reduced to terms that invite just those projections. Performing those reductions is the whole business of journalism, and the whole business of politicians is to align their personalities and policies with them.”
Finally the narcissism of politicians and journalists, government and media, that continually makes war possible, plausible, and desirable.
“…the truth is they love it, they love every self-important minute of it. Suddenly they are at the forefront of what could be another greatest generation, no some blurry interregnum…and our leaders wonder how their speeches will be featured even as they edit them.”
Grab it up, it’s an interesting read.