Malarkynews

By CARLO SVANKMAJER

(Note: Near as I can tell, the bulk of the following article was written sometime in mid July. I don’t always keep very rigorous track of these things.)

So last week, sitting in my parents’ suburban home (I’ve been in some manner of seclusion in the suburbs for about a month now – this need not be explained in detail – suffice to say I’m a little bit busy reorganizing my brain out here), I was glancing through the front section of the previous day’s St. Paul Pioneer Press. I happened upon a headline that had something to do with Bob Dylan, and, as I’ve got something of an obsession with the guy (or at least the particular manifestation of Dylan that existed prior to about the 80s, or, more accurately, what media representation record of that manifestation is still floating around on the youtube and elsewhere for me to investigate), I decided to give the article a read. For my purposes here, its really quite unimportant what the article was about, but I’ll throw you the gist, just in case you’re curious: Bob Dylan’s son, a member of the Wallflowers, backed out of some kind of gig for some agriculture industry organization that will be taking place during the weekend of the Republican National Convention, and people are speculating that his father convinced him to do so for political reasons (read: speculation – there’s seemingly no hard evidence to even support this – perhaps a rigorous examination of speculation as a mechanism of the corporate media spectacle is imperative here, but I’ll leave that aside for now, because this thing’s gonna’ be digressive enough without it). Late in the article, I came upon the following quote by Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman:

“Minnesota native Bob Dylan said, ‘Times they are a-changin’.’ They are changing in Minnesota, with our great young Republican governor Tim Pawlenty, half of our Washington delegation being Republican…”

After a brief silence, a strange grin came across my face. I burst into a deep belly chuckle that gradually developed into a high-pitched laughter, and proceeded to blow my brains out with the Uzi I always keep ready for situations like this (Irrelevant digression: Uzi was the name of one of the more entertaining gangsters in the classic black comedy Meteor Man). The next thing I did was walk over to my computer, log onto my facebook, and enter the quote as one of my new favorite quotes. I credited the quote to: “Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, demonstrating that almost anything can be passed over on some considerable percentage of the American people, that meaning no longer has any meaning whatever, and that we’re now living in Nietzsche’s definition of a decadent society marked by the transvaluation of all values.” The fact that my instantaneous reaction to this quote was to want to file it into my facebook is probably quite significant, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do any thorough analysis about that right now (like I said before, this thing’s digressive enough).

I’ve been meaning to write something up for this malarkynews website for about a month now, as I believe it will be a platform allowing me to transfigure my narcissistic ramblings and half-cocked radical leftist thoughts into something a bit more substantial and worthwhile (and hey, there’s even a remote chance my thoughts might now in some way affect the thinking of others – some might accuse this impulse of stemming from some kind of fascistic desire to control and manipulate the thoughts of others, and yes, it is true that, in some general sense, the construction of discourse is the source of all Ideological power relations, but if you and I don’t get to work reframing politics, well funded right wing think tanks will do it for us (see George Lakoff)). Extended sets of double parentheses containing complex (and hopefully not grammatically flawed) diction aside, the point here is that when I’m not running around in the night building sea creatures at the beach or lighting fires or just generally enjoying the contrast and play of light and sound or trying to understand people better or botching the inklings of some kind of nascent and promising relationship with a woman, I’m generally reading things influenced by radical leftist thought, or thinking little undeveloped leftist thoughts of my own, so, I might as well be sharing them with whoever the hell deems them worth reading.

If you’re still reading right now, you probably have quite a tolerance for narcissism (or maybe you even enjoy the narcissism of others in some masochistic fashion). But lets get back on point:

The following article intends to examine Norm Coleman’s misappropriation of a Bob Dylan quote from the 1960s in order to: 1. point out and examine the degree to which this missapopriation is obviously fucking preposterous and 2. discuss the implications of the fact that a statement so preposterous can go unnoticed (and in fact be accepted as valid?) in a society such as ours. I imagine I don’t have to explain in too detailed a fashion why it is absurd for Republican Senator Norm Coleman to appropriate the title of a song about the progressive cultural revolution of the 1960s in order to promote a new Republican governor who has very little to say and likes hockey a lot and makes ridiculously unwitty jokes about how his wife won’t have sex with him. Dylan is the guy who wrote protest songs like “Masters of War” and “With God on our Side,” and while he has generally distanced himself from direct political involvement (outside of his music) for the past several decades, he has absolutely jack-shit to do with the Republican agenda, and clearly constitutes some form of poetic opposition to it and the general constellation of banality and (what I’ll here in my youthful exuberance and wanton abandon go so far as to call) latent psuedo-fascism that underlies its ideology. Of course Jesus was a cultural revolutionary as well, but we need not discuss his appropriation by the American religious right (Jesus, even as historical residue (assuming he in fact existed), really only exists anymore as a messianic figure to be appropriated anyways, a legitimization tool for average people and shame-driven demagogues alike). As opposed to Christ though, Dylan is an actual living man that we know exists, and there is a thorough record of his public existence, and we can examine the majority of it for free on the internet (assuming we’re speaking from the perspective of someone who has access to the internet, and its important to note that this is an assumption), and this is why the misappropriation of Bob Dylan’s quote by the Republican Party, in a world that made any sense at all, would be completely inexcusable to anyone of sound mind and probably even to most crazy people.

So, as I made reference to in my facebook entry, we’re seemingly entering an era in American culture in which, to some extent, meaning ceases to mean, because it can mean just about absolutely anything. Poststructuralist notions about examining the symbolic archeology of truth have been hijacked and bastardized into the abandonment of the notion of truth altogether. Thinking about this earlier, I got to remembering a particular conversation I had with a University of Minnesota Professor who will remain anonymous here (you’ll see why in a moment), while walking across campus following an interesting little event involving Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. The comments this Professor made that are specifically relevant here happen to do with Nietsche’s theory of the decadent society which is marked by “the transvaluation of all values.” In short (and as I understand it), Nietzche defines a decadent society as one in which anything can quite literally mean anything. A true meaning can be completely reversed to mean its opposite, and no one will notice. Truth itself ceases to matter, and in fact, exist. The aforementioned Professor cited as example the fact that TCF bank was paying for some percentage of the construction of the University’s new stadium (30% maybe?), and in exchange the stadium will upon completion bear the name of the bank. People had received this news as evidence that TCF bank was doing something good for the University and cared about the community. But the opposite was in fact true, as what the new stadium (built three blocks away from where the old Memorial stadium - torn down in 1992 when University sporting events were moved to the Metrodome under pressure from local business interests - once stood), amounts to is in fact an ‘enormous fucking advertisement for TCF bank,’ a majority of which is now being paid for by students and taxpayers. He went on to compare the new stadium to big empty shell buildings the mob constructed amidst the confusion of bombed-out post-war Italy, and he went on to compare that particular power scam to Haliburton’s rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure. Then the conversation veered off in other, equally interesting, though perhaps less relevant, directions (and I’m paraphrasing the guy from memory here, alright?):

“You know what I want to do every time I see a cop on a horse? First I want to suck the cop’s dick…then I want to suck off the horse.”

“What the fuck are birds for?! Why hasn’t someone installed cameras in these little fuckers yet? Why aren’t they watching our every move?! Seriously, they serve no fucking function! All they do is fly around and make weird fucking little chirping noises and shit everywhere.”

Yeah, I’ve really been meaning to take a class with this guy ever since. They say sometimes, during a lecture, he’ll take his shoe off and bang it against a wall, or lay on the floor and just teach class from there. The man’s the stuff of eccentric academic legend. Nuff’ said.

Senator Coleman’s quote has led me to a few conclusions (some of which have certainly been bandied about before by other thinkers and writers):

1. At least in some sense, people are getting stupider. This is largely the result of a bad cultural-intellectual diet determined and cooked up by the handful of corporations that own this country’s mass media, and hence, own our national culture (inasmuch as we can claim we still have one), because the mass media is really the only means by which our national culture is distributed (of course, the internet complicates matters a bit here, but we’ll leave that aside for now). The only criticisms of the mass media we ever get are accusations about there being too much violence on TV or about the media being “too sexy.” Both of these accusations completely miss the point. The portrayal of violence in the media is not so important as the Ideological violence the media spectacle enacts upon the psyche of the spectator and the cultural unconscious of the global society - the limiting of the spectator’s horizon of expectations for his existence and his ideological subjectification into particular discourses and modes of thought that serve particular power interests (primarily the interests of those corporations distributing the media products). Television and movies aren’t “too sexy” (a retreat to prudery is an easy answer amidst complex sexual politics); in reality, media conglomerates have colonized our sexual drives and shaped our desires, channeling them into the Capitalist economy that benefits them.

2. As part of this techno-economic transition into global Capitalist totality (and arguably, into a hyper-postmodern simulacral culture in which all media signifiers merely relate to others, as opposed to any objective basis), truth gradually ceases to exist. On a purely technological level, it’s becoming more and more possible to falsify the truth. Photography, video, sound - all media can be doctored to a great extent. On a cultural level, people care less about the truth, and more about what can fit into their particular, largely predetermined, ideological paradigms. So conservatives carry out their role of subjecting the masses to historically unprecedented violence and banality, while liberals continue to propound a Neo-Liberal Capitalist Globalization paradigm under which little if anything changes. (At the end of the day the unsustanability of the system threatens both these unspoken (and arguably unconscious) agendas.) Over and above these interactions, the corporate media spectacle determines the general character of the dominant discourses distributed throughout the English speaking world, delineating our consciousness and determining our horizons of expectations for reality, which itself is constantly re-posited as natural (or as second nature) by just about every cultural product we consume. Enough people are effectively enough subjectified for this paradigm to reproduce itself and its means of reproduction ad-infinitum.

And so, to end rather abruptly, I find myself coming to the tentative conclusion that at the very moment the human race approaches the capabilities necessary to ascertain truth, it may also come close to abandoning the endeavor altogether.

…Stay tuned for a more timely article about my experiences at the end of summer outside the RNC.

Yours truly,

Carlo Svankmajer