The NeoCon Depravity

That’s all essentially correct, John. A cogent summary of our situation. Today Bush thumbs his nose at the Global Warming conference. The environmental effect of our gluttony is, actually, what has screwed up the long term strategy of Big Oil, which, in league with the defense contractors, now dictate American policy via their political arm, the GOP. Big Oil’s days are numbered, and not only because of global warming. There’s also the little problem that we are running out of petroleum deposits. Peak Oil is a dire, dire situation in and of itself, there being no real replacement for that source of cheap energy. But in the short term the corporate plutocracy is looking for a political system that offers stability without the many inconveniences of democracy. Fascism is appealing, but the aggression required to sustain that kind of central control is difficult to manage. Hard to know exactly what to do, but one thing is certain: America can not afford to have a lot of trouble on the geo-political front while confronting these very real problems. Hence the itch to drop a couple tactical nukes on Iran. A little megatonnage lighting up the night sky above Tehran would remind everyone who’s boss, and not a moment too soon.

You’re correct to link the current cultural mode to Reagan, whose famous optimism was really a form of preemptive aggression. Yes, we’re greedy…but greed is good! Yes, we’re destroying the eco-sphere…but we can drive even bigger cars! Yes, our culture is superficial and infantalizing…but we can be infinitely more moronic! Yes, Vietnam was a colossal blunder and a moral catastrophe…but just wait to see what we cook up next! All they needed was someone emptier than Reagan. Someone in whom the very lowest human urges had relatively free reign. Someone who could have all that inner rot but also manage to wrap himself in a package that would seduce the increasingly beleaguered and bewildered American voter. This is all familiar terrain, of course. The sad history of the last decade.

This past week saw the big propaganda assault on Move-On for their Petraeus ad. The campaign reminded me again how sophisticated the right is, comparatively speaking, in their understanding of framing and messaging. I don’t know if the Neo-cons have read Lacan (though they’ve certainly read their Chomsky), but it wouldn’t surprise me because their skill at the dark arts of “perception management” reveals a command of Lacanian concepts such as metonymy and the polarized discourse as well as an underlying nihilism. George Lakoff had a piece on Huffington Post about how the Petraeus pageant was a huge metonymic conjuring act whereby one man (Petraeus) was made into an emblem for the entire US military. The fact this man was following a script carefully crafted by one political party for its own benefit, and that in so doing undermining (indeed, betraying) bedrock American traditions, was conjured away with a deft shift of meaning. Up until the 1980s intellectual sophistication was to be found on the left hand side of the political spectrum, and I personally can’t wait until that’s again the case. It’s so depressing to see opponents of the GOP so consistently outclassed in the competition for how issues are to be framed.

But Neo-Cons don’t dominate because they understand the mind better. They dominate because they embrace the ego, ego-ism, the reified self, without apology, and the embrace is endlessly seductive. Greed is good. Aggression is good. Ignore whatever you need to ignore, the ego is good and whatever it does is good too. Richard Perle puts it best while speaking to journalist John Pilger: “If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war… our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” This little gem of intellectual pornography could have been lifted directly from Mein Kampf.

I happened upon Perle’s statement the same week that the NY Times published, on its front page, an old BW photograph of officers in uniform socializing with each other and with their wives…a woman in a dress dances while someone else plays the accordion…the small crowd gnoshing hors d’oeuvres…flirting and chatting…These light-hearted scenes took place at Auschwitz in 1943, the officers depicted had just left the arena of genocide. They had spent the previous day slaughtering innocent men and women by the tens of thousands, and they needed to kick back after hours and unwind. I wondered on what ground Perle would criticize these people, who so fully “embraced their own vision of the world” “letting their vision go forth” in the form of “total war.” No doubt he’d have a glib response (the Neo Cons always do), but the issue could not be more serious. The moral vacuousness of the right knows no limits, and yet these people are steering our collective destiny. One waits for calamity to arrive.

Guy Zimmerman