Gut Politics

I have a dim memory of a 1980s street protest. It was part of a larger demonstration that had shut down several blocks of downtown. Four or five college students (they seemed older than I was) stood shoulder to shoulder in thrift store suits and ties. A carnival barker told the crowd what we were about to witness. Each one of our performers, he explained, had consumed mash potatoes colored with food dye and they would soon puke red, white, and blue. We stood in the rain as the suits jumped up and down and gagged themselves. It didn’t go as planned. Everything came up grey, but even that proved a good metaphor.

Their act has stayed with me in part because it felt like a form of social grace born from rot; a kind of fermented democracy.

I’m interested in what its long form might look like. Something infinitely better than speaking truth to power.

The puke protest coincided with Oliver North, Anita Hill, the birth of gentrification and Roger Ailes’ television. A cynical entertainer had ascended to the White House. Zombies from that administration patrol our current uncanny valley.

A few other things happened in the 80s like the feminist classic 9 to 5 and the phrase SILENCE=DEATH, which today, in the age of political chatter, sounds almost blessed. In 1985, the same year that the Philadelphia police bombed MOVE, the artist collective Group Material participated in the Whitney Biennial to the detriment of their outsider image. To redeem themselves, they launched a project on democracy that culminated in a town hall on the AIDS crisis. Critic David Deitcher said of the event that it had “a sense of participating in something token, in something staged and recorded, of partaking in a process that…played little or no part in the [participants'] daily lives” and that foregrounded the “nostalgic and mythic aspect of the ‘town hall’ currency.” He went on to say that it proved “how intractable are the obstacles in this society to widening the range of political debate, to opening lines of communication between constituencies with divergent interests” and “to effecting a sense of urgency in the midst of a culture that militates in so many sophisticated ways against change.”

I think the puking street performers had a good sense of those intractable obstacles. They responded from the gut. We’re all hosts to dirty politics and it takes some resolve not to flinch when that mishmash of speech doesn’t look at all what you expected once it hits the pavement.

In hindsight, part of the appeal of their performance was its nod toward big tent politics, the grimy rejoinder to the clean, composed town hall. The big tent—cramped, muggy, interminable; impossibly more vast inside than it appears and staked on the faith that layers of sticky social habits make worlds—a hot house for discursive germs.

We didn’t yet know in the 80s about the wonders of gut flora but the decade’s analog signals resembled a political practice built in its image. Time for a revival.

Wallis, Brian, Ed., Democracy: A Project by Group Material (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990).

Integrity in Motion

Rhetoric is not the key to controlling others that some believe it to be. Yes, it assists with subterfuge and it negotiates tight legal corners. But it lacks ambition. Its influence extends no further than the situation at hand. It captures ground like a bird in flight. If control is what you seek, fear works far better.

Rhetoric’s power stems from its structural integrity. Its fluidity guards against both opportunism and righteousness alike. Human communication is inventive, self-serving, and often fantastical, but the laws of physics still apply. Say anything to anyone and your own spin will topple you. Plant yourself in one place, refuse to budge, and you'll fall over from the slightest push. 

Rhetoric offers a plastic third option: maintain your axis; bend, turn from your core and move with integrity. It’s the only way to move in coordination with others without being carried away by external forces. It is also the only way to get anything done. Coordinated movement, for better or worse, drives social change, not sheer bravery. An ethical question illustrates:

Do you really serve your own values when you repeat arguments that you know will not compel others to change their minds? Uncompromising politics (which is different than caring about the fate of other living things) turns selfish when connection is no longer the goal. To be concerned above all else with where you stand is a form of moral narcissism. 

Consider, for instance, the argument against Arizona’s Tent City Jail made by the new sheriff of Maricopa County, Paul Penzone. Tent City first opened in the early 1990s. For almost thirty years it proved immune to the charge of cruel and inhumane treatment, perhaps because its supporters were not opposed to being cruel and inhumane to incarcerated people. Yet, less than a year after taking office, Sheriff Penzone succeeded in closing Tent City. His argument for closure?

"This facility is not a crime deterrent, it is not cost efficient, and it is not tough on criminals.”

Penzone characterized Tent City as a “circus” built for public amusement. "Starting today,” he said at a press conference announcing its closure, “that circus ends and these tents come down."

Opportunists underestimate the risk in borrowing other people's words: extend yourself too far and you will keel over. The righteous overvalue the familiar: stand firm and no one goes anywhere. Rhetoric’s third option invites you to keep moving.

File under "M" for Reagan International airport

A lesson in turning:

Irreverence is fun. Watch everyone exhaust themselves condemning you. Watch their outrage attract support for your claims. Stand back as everyone becomes entangled in their own arguments. Even when you lose, you win. After all, a statement must be true if so many people must spend so much time disputing it. Listing all the ways that Thomas Jefferson differed from Robert E. Lee is sure to raise more awkward questions than it answers.

Irreverence supposedly unmasks hypocrisy. Mostly it just repeats itself ad nauseam while our politics suffer from a serious lack of imagination. We have reduced the world to four categories—fact, fake, free speech, and fascism—and spend our days patrolling the borders of each on the look out for smugglers and itinerants. 

The question is, do we want open borders? More specifically, should Neo-Nazis have a political platform? We need a few more categories to answer that question, or at least some way of distinguishing between political organizations and organized murder.

For the record, no one excluded the Nazis from politics. They opted out all on their own. They used propaganda to aid their ascent and then they suspended the political process. In the social vacuum that they created, they got down to the business of murdering people. A political gathering in their name seems a strange tribute to that project. Like honoring Ronald Reagan by naming an airport after him. 

Hyperbole Shrugged

What makes mid-level villains like Ben Linus of Lost, or Shades of Luke Cage so captivating? They never resort to hyperbole. That alone makes them better role models, stylistically, than Glenn Greenwald.

Speech turns supervillain when people use hyperbole to express righteousness. An example is Greenwald describing Obama: “And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards with an impressively straight face.” Greenwald would demand that Batman take off the mask.

Peter Thiel is another fan of hyperbole. This is Thiel on higher education: “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” But Thiel is a study in hyperbolic traps. He specializes in baiting progressives, like Greenwald, who speak with moral certitude. The traps work because, unlike Greenwald, Thiel still uses hyperbole as a form of irony.

Hyperbole attracts exaggeration and nothing is easier to shrug off than a un-ironic exaggeration. Just try matching Thiel's ridiculous tone. Accuse him of luring high school graduates to Silicon Valley and training them to confuse greed for innovation and ruthlessness for merit. Then watch while Thiel associates you with old-fashioned social panics and floats away on his airship. 

Hyperbole is comic sans with impunity. It vibrates in the register of cartoon villain. It turns facts to plaque. Complexity collapses under its bloat.

Sometimes events are catastrophic. Sometimes people are corrupt. Sometimes we need extreme language because the things about which we speak are extreme. The world generates plenty of real reason for outrage. But, as any mid-level villain will tell you at just the moment you think you have exposed him, “this time, you have it wrong. This time, no one had a plan. No one meant harm. No one derived pleasure from your pain. This time, it looks like misfortune because it is misfortune. And it’s a shame that you called the police and the newspapers to this dusty warehouse thinking that “kitten box” was code for something sinister because when I said it, I meant an actual box full of kittens. Here. Hold one. I guarantee it will make you feel better.”