Who Will Challenge Rule By Spectacle?

”Television was a Baby Crawling Towards That Deathchamber. (“It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.”)

–William James, Talks to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899)

We have a genuine local newspaper in the Utica-Rome area, which should mean we’re lucky. It is painstakingly good on the local news –  although in the recent frontpage headline given to the closing of a Dunkin Donuts in Utica the neutral tone demonstrates they’re not as clear as I am as to the real threat to the local! The paper’s super-conscientious local focus keeps it deficient on the larger context, no challenge whatsoever to “the spectacle” that is our politics now at the manipulation of which Donald Trump so spectacularly excels.  No help at all in alerting us to the danger that’s been slouching toward Bethlehem at least since 1961, when  prescient Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem quoted in the epigraph.  With the arrival of Trump’s authoritarian presidency can we still comfort ourselves that we’re not yet arrived at the Deathchamber,  having been delivered into the hands of the billionaires and their hateful agenda that is ripping away all of our (white middle class people) illusions of safety?

“Get ready to take Grandma in your home and quit your job” reads the heading for one letter-to-the-editor.  As people face the threats to social security and medicaid, the possible closing of nursing homes from the Trump administration’s budget cuts, Grandma seems to be on their minds.   A 70-something Grandma myself,  I can concede the nursing home serves a purpose.  Like most of my friends, I don’t want to be a burden on my children and grandchildren.  Moreover, probably I’m not in line for the Hemlock Society option (though the sad story of Gene Hackman’s end makes one think twice), and given the grim possibilities of the later stages of decline, the distance the nursing home gives to family members could help preserve my memory as I want to be remembered.

But, I have to ask, why do we expect the government to treat people “humanely” when we’ve – many of us, that is, especially those of us who aren’t poor – no longer  live humanly/humanely, in-commonly, interdependently – in fact, have forgotten how?   Use of the word “humanely” is a stretch when talking about nursing homes, anyway, where, especially for those who can afford it,  care may be good, conscientious, even loving, but, equally, these places are ghettos for the aged, cutting society off from proximity to its elders and any possibility that the old might have a necessary function, their wisdom needed and valued in a real culture. And there’s much evidence to suggest the decline into senility is aided or abetted by the extreme isolation reserved for those of us slowed down by age.

Having given over so much of our capacity for moral decision-making, the basis for which is “down-home,” in bodies with their unruly sensuousness and imaginative vision intact,  raising fears about Grandma getting kicked out of the nursing home sounds less  like compassion, and more like the absence of any guiding vision beyond the “cloudbank of ancestral blindness” that, along with the social unraveling,  has made senior residences and nursing homes the norm.

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Likewise, the executive branch assault on trans people and “antisemitic” protestors with its echoes of 1930’s fascism is terrifying. But even so, another question can be asked of us, who perhaps have unwittingly provided the channels down(up?) which fascism can flow. Feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler ends her well-argued essay, (see epigraphs), opposing Trump’s recent Executive orders in a way that greatly interests me. Given the fears that Trump is so expertly exploiting, projecting them on immigrants, trans people, black people and “antisemites”(pro-Palestinians), she admits the need for a utopian vision!  And she adds: “Foolish and unrealistic no doubt.  But no less necessary for that.”

For her, such a vision would be “collectively wrought and inspired by democratic ideals.”  Does this mean, I wonder,  worked out in committee? But the collective approach wouldn’t work, being a leap over the only possible origin of genuine vision, which is individual and subjective. The vision she refers to is not only necessary, though it definitely is and for the very reason she says: People being driven and manipulated by their fears of darker, poorer or sexually liminal people will not heed all the carefully thought out and articulated left-brain arguments and do not care about them. The only response to these hate-driven executive orders that can mean something will have to “beat them at their own game,” so to speak.  The left has to find “God on their side,” or just continue to voice arguments that satisfy only themselves.  But this is a problem for liberals because the  authentic vision Butler calls for already exists in imagination, and  how can the necessary commanding vision have such humble, no-account beginning as in my personal soul or yours?

Well, this is a problem, but it is addressable if one sees another, hidden authoritarianism inside the liberal breast.  A person who will legitimately oppose authoritarianism Out There must first oppose the egoic authoritarianism that has ruled out the spiritual Reality present to the soul.  This reality,  cordoned off by monotheistic religious and atheistic certainty alike, and by the stubborn fact that truth is plain inconvenient when people have real life to attend to, is the gamechanger.  We can call the spiritual reality poetic, the reality of art, if that raises fewer red flags. Now this reality, we can agree,  is“contactable” for individuals who will serve it consciously with their creative work. But you’re not an artist, you say?  All the better, for we’re not interested in art that stays in its niche, art practiced by the lucky “called.” What must be regained is art’s antagonistic function to the dominant rationalist one, its intrinsic otherness, as Herbert Marcuse wrote about.  There is a way to do this that is not just being avant garde.  Picking up your art as an unauthorized artist, “stealing” that particular joy in creative expression, restores art to its otherness by making oneself an other.

To modestly refuse one’s art, therefore,  is neither neutral nor laudable. Emerson told us this: “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards!”  We no longer may accommodate to society’s hierarchical ordering that serves above all “one-dimensional”  bourgeois reality, the ultimate expression of which is Empire.  Thus far,  the bible fundamentalists have been allowed “ownership” of imaginative truth by claiming religion’s “immutable” kind of truth is theirs exclusively. This claim to immutable truth Trump now absurdly claims for himself.  But of course immutable truth cannot be owned, nor require a particular creed or act of atonement to receive it.  But this does not remove the demand upon the individual that she speak from her apprehension of truth!  Every religious faith is inspired by the existence of something immutable and unchanging that  individual prophets beholding it in their own imaginations, deemed to be Truth.  If there is to be opposition to the false claim of the Christian fascists, here is where it must come from; from at long last Americans willing to answer Emerson’s challenging call:  “We but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea that each of us represents.”

Embodiment, then is precisely  finding that imaginative reality,  defending it, and venerating it/giving it its voice –  the necessary inward encounter which by and large secular progressive liberals are too busy, vain, proud (and afraid) to do.  Indeed, embodiment isn’t a “safe” activity; it carries “intensity and danger,” the qualities William James deemed essential for an ideal to matter.   In the context of embodiment, the danger is met personally, on personal ground, not meted out by an authoritarian would-be dictator cruelly, upon the innocent and vulnerable.  Thus far, liberalism has failed to engage with that which is needed  to push aside “the great cloudbank of ancestral blindness”  as if the cruelties of unconscious racism and colonialism, the horrors embedded in our history were tolerable,  making us no threat at all to Donald Trump and the Spectacle.

I submit the fears being so expertly manipulated by Trump are at bottom fears of society’s growing incomprehensibility to all of us. Not only MAGA people experience existential unsafety but those of us for whom liberal economy works, and who scorn  MAGA – are ill-at-ease in the disembodied, increasingly digitally mediated reality to which we have adapted. Disembodiment is a terrifying place.  To  restore embodiment is not a turn-back-the-clock, return to biblical authority. It’s not going backward in consciousness, but forward.  “Self-culture” can be done (and actually has to be done) in and within the given circumstances of common, ordinary, “beset”  lives, staying in place where one finds oneself.  The call to embodiment is a completely personal call – as Emerson’s was –  to inwardness-as-relation-to-the-moral-absolute, the absolute a liberal can serve who hears in it the call that comes not from ego but the discounted soul, that tells her her own voice is precisely the one that is wanted.

The threats being made to our perceived guarantors of safety – i.e, to social security, to medicare, to human rights – are also terrifying.  Although many of my important life choices were made in defiance of  the rule of money, having just narrowly squeaked through a period of quite serious debt after selling our Cafe one year ago –  the protracted struggle left me feeling extremely vulnerable to a fear of poverty.  However, have we [liberals] not, for a very long time,  found acceptable “enough” a federal budget  that – just one example – has long supported the bloated military and  constant wars demanded by American Empire that bring suffering to so many people, supported as much by liberal government as conservatives? Have we found no way to put our lives in opposition to that which is morally intolerable?  Not that doing something about the military budget is a simple matter, but 120 years ago William James pointed out that “among us English-speaking peoples…we have grown literally afraid to be poor.” He suggested a vow of poverty might provide society with a way to live that is the “the moral equivalent of war.”  As extreme and unpleasant as it may sound, might not voluntarily accepted poverty, he asked,  be ”’the strenuous life,’without the need of crushing weaker peoples?” Might we not have suffered more, sacrificed more, had our guiding light been the Greater Good, and not the (for us)  more easily acquired goods of liberal economy?

Changes we generally consider progress, including the broad normalization of nursing homes for the elderly, a range of experts telling us how we should live our personal and social lives, the wonders of pharmacology and resolution of differences by litigation, global travel available to everyone, not to mention the wondrous changes wrought by technology, from the steam engine and cotton gin to cellphone technology and AI have come together to perfect a lifestyle of disembodiment.  Cell phones, in particular, which, even if one doesn’t hail them as an unalloyed benefit, most people now cannot imagine their lives without, have devastating social consequences for which we forgive them.  We must forgive them as well for being the perfect “megaphone” for Trump’s style, which is to speak not from above, in the way of past demagogues, but through the intimately personal handheld screen through which he gives voice to peoples’ “unconscious aggrievement.” (TJ Clark).

Liberal aggrievement – more hidden than the MAGA crowd’s but also largely unconscious – contributes to Trump’s rise as much as that of the anti-woke crowd. In the liberal case, maybe in all cases, a wounding exists below the aggrievement that is too painful to see or acknowledge (trauma); it is from this denial that aggrievement gets its power.In both cases, aggrievement drowns out the other inward voice that, bringing conscious awareness of the wound,  would also allow imagination to triumph over circumstance. Liberal aggrievement sets a limit on possible vision, limiting idealism such that “the lesser evil” becomes a valid choice.  If peoples’ highest allegiance, instead of to holding our places in liberal reality, were to making time in our lives for the “Thinker and Actor working” as if “that man or woman were the center of things,” (Emerson) as if this were the supreme response asked of us,  would we be so easily duped/distracted/lulled by the words and promises of DNC-approved liberal “leaders?”

Would we be so captive in the spell of aggrievement, as I submit we are now,  that we would have no lived, embodied alternative to ongoing fascism?

Taking an idea from Spinoza, William James wrote,“anything a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good.  He who habitually acts…under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza.  To him who acts continually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman.”  Being smarter than the red guys isn’t doing us a shred of good; it might be time to shift our orientation entirely to a reality beyond this one, beyond aggrievement, that realizes all the goods –  the summa of good we have relativized during civilization’s long reign.