[Reader-list] cowboy parody as political theatre

[Mimeticus]

First, this, from the news:
"Around 1,000 anti-war and anti-globalization demonstrators continued protesting after Bush departed for Moscow, but the mood was decidedly more relaxed. 
Playing off Bush's Texas roots, organizers called the action "Cattle Herders not Warmongers" with demonstrators dressed as cowboys and American Indians following a flat-bed truck laden with hay and speakers blaring country and western music. 
"We picked the western theme so when Americans see the photos they'll feel a bit ridiculed and maybe will think a bit more about what their Texan president is doing," said one man wearing a black cowboy hat with a silver sheriff star.""

End of quote. 

Seems to me that we are seeing here precisely the aporia of contemporary European attitudes towards the US, globalization, and the spectacular politics of a mediated age. As much as we may sympathize with the parodic energies on display here, as politics this is shadow-boxing. I say this not at all to suggest that there is some more 'fundamental' level of intervention that would be preferable. Rather, this little bit of street theatre misunderstands its own subject position - a subject position that in fact has allowed Hollywood cliches (outdated ones at that, dating from Europe's own period of immediate postwar love-hate engagement with a youthful American culture industry) to stand in place of a more nuanced inquiry into what America, and American power, might be about today.

To be sure, there is a tempting formal similarity between Baby Bush and ye olde cowboys and Indians scenarios. But perhaps the more important structural alignment is that Dubya stands to the rather more intelligent - and therefore more frighteningly reactionary - members of his administration as the cultural cliches of the culture industries of yore stand to the complex terrain of the contemporary global being of America.

The sheer absurdity of the suggestion that any "actually existing" Americans would feel even irritated, let alone troubled, by such 'activism!'

What I see in these demonstrations is not political acuity, but rather a nostalgic slumber. An entire generation of European leftists breathe a collective sigh of relief now that they have an American president that is as comfortingly close to their 'cool memories' of Hollywood as old Ronnie once was. 

This is not a domain of innocence. Its repercussions extend to the moral simplifications of responses outside of the US to the attacks of September 11 - when what much of the world saw as being attacked was not New York, but "New York." To be sure, we may wish to blame the signifying spider for the web it has spun. But to that extent, we will ourselves remain trapped in it. 

Mimeticus 



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