Stephen Colbert and the Economics of Fake

When the Super PAC earnings were released at the end of January, the world learned that Stephen Colbert’s PAC, which he really has “nothing” to do with and is “run” by Jon Stewart, had raised enough cash to tip over into seven figures. Pause to ponder: a million dollars of real money raised for a fake political action committee.

I had to really consider the implications. As a true believer in the power of fiction to be more-real-than-real, particularly when reality becomes preposterous, this fiction felt big-sweater-cozy. And as a person with an interest in the history of American humor, particularly the use of satire to lampoon political stupidity, I am well-aware that Colbert’s efforts — though updated through the use of contemporary media — find their great-times-many-grandparentage in the likes of Irving, Lowell, and even Ben Franklin. And, certainly, it’s no surprise that discussions have raged about the impact of Colbert’s PAC, but it’s the money that struck me as significant.

In a toilet-bowl economy and election year — where people have less money to spend and more reason, in theory, to spend it on their political beliefs — people are investing in satire. Real money for a fake message.

But the message — clear as a bell, really — isn’t fake at all, and that’s why I find this investment to be so fascinating and brilliant. By funding this PAC, American voices have funded the role that satire plays in drawing attention to the ridiculous, like the Citizens United decision and the outright lies pedaled in “real” Super PAC ads. By purloining the medium, Colbert has, on multiple fronts and to great affect, influenced the message.

Of course there are questions about over-saturation or a joke-gone-too-far, but I’m not particularly worried about that. The political theater of last year and this is a joke-gone-too-far, and it’s only January. The more Colbert’s PAC rages on, the more fundamentally ridiculous it becomes, the more in line with the level of Theatre perpetrated by the “real” political army marching toward what promises to be the most Fox News-worthy election ever, the more historically significant Colbert’s scheme becomes.

Some suggest that the overall efforts of Colbert and Stewart, while significant in the grand historical context of American satire and humor, do not promote a change in the political discussion. In short, their viewers have already drank the Kool Aid, and these comedians’ shows merely become part of a discussion that is already happening — they are not a value-add. However, I am anecdotally unconvinced. If the Fox News heads and radio hawks are giving Colbert’s “political agenda” real time, and they are, we know he is onto something culturally significant in the now. He, like his friend Stewart, has tapped into that magical moment where the question is asked, “Should we take this guy seriously?” Once the question is asked, it’s clear that the answer is already “yes.”

So despite the reality that there are real people-serving organizations that could be served by the donations going to Colbert’s Super PAC, there is an alternate reality that is of perhaps headier importance: investment in Colbert’s PAC is an investment in a conversation that absolutely needs to happen. It’s a way of participating in a joke-that-is-deadly-serious. Our country is on a screwy path where the investments of a few cloud the conversation, and investment in this satire is well-placed: 100% of the proceeds go to keep the dominant rhetoricians in check, to force them to engage in the surreal in order to peel back the layers and expose what is real.

What Colbert Will Do With the Money

Remember, Remember the 17th of September

For some indescribable reason (my reasons for these things often defy description), I was immediately bummed out by the visage, pants, and lankiness of this morning’s substitute yoga instructor. Since Dana, with whom I practiced too briefly, returned to the east coast, I’ve been adrift, looking for the flow yoga instructor who inspires me to get over my uncomfortableness with the idea of even having a practice to speak of and, well, go with the flow. I suspected this guy would not be him.

He spoke with an inscrutable accent that I guessed to be mere affectation or the product of life as a military brat, dragged from post to post, picking up a lilt here and a dropped consonant there. I found it to be a little annoying. When he off-handedly mentioned that, on his first visit to Occupy LA, he had expected to see a bunch of strangers but instead found only familiar faces, I appreciated the connection to something I respect but doubted his motives: is he trying to impress us?

I can be pretty judgmental of individuals–sizing up motives and weaknesses like a lioness deciding whether to mate with a male or sic her pride upon him. So its surprising–even to me–that I have never shared the skepticism many on both the left and right harbor about the Occupy Wall Street movement. While I have identified with it from the beginning, I’ve never felt an overwhelming desire to pitch my yellow North Face tent (a prized possession) on the lawn of Los Angeles’s City Hall. I’ve visited a number of times, wandering through the maze of tents and signs, peering into the library and kitchen tents; one weekend, I even served granola to a line of Occupiers, all sleepy-eyed and grungy and spirited and hungry. I’d call myself vaguely connected to the movement. I follow along on Twitter and think about it daily and occasionally donate a box of granola and carton of soy milk. I’m certainly no expert.

Which I suppose makes me an expert, given the spirit of the movement.

I’ve scrutinized the efforts–both earnest and contemptuous and always quixotic–to define this movement and discuss its shortcomings and attributes. The constant clamoring chorus desiring a single, clear, articulable goal or single leader to emerge from Occupy have missed the point completely. And so my effort here is not to add to that particular chorus, though I’m inevitably doing so simply through the very act of writing about it. I suppose I only wish to add another voice to the rhythmic beat of individual voices, to discover what this movement has meant to me and how I can participate in a chorus of a different kind–one that encourages all ideas to have a voice, one that can drown out the cacophony of talking heads that wish to add more noise to the same old paradigms.

I see the Occupy movement as an effort to bust through binaries, the oversimplifying of nearly every aspect of American life into black/white, either/or. Some of the most idiotic attacks on the Occupiers have gone after those involved in it as hypocrites, claiming that mere consumption of corporate goods somehow undermines any questions one might raise about any corporate behavior, no matter how insidious. These people claim: you can’t have it both ways.

The Occupiers gleefully retort, with chants and drums and signs and the People’s Mike: Why not?

It is the People’s Mike, in fact, that I regard as the fundamental characteristic of this movement. Traditional lefty protest–which this both is and is not–tends to be identifiable by its leaders–those who hold the megaphone, which, by virtue of its being the property of someone lends to a hierarchy of ownership and signifies a sort of bureaucracy that mirrors the bureaucracies these movements so often push against. But early on in the Occupy Wall Street movement, an effort to silence the protest–to strip it of the megaphone–strengthened its core principal: everyone has his or her own voice, and everyone has the right to be heard. This perfectly responds to the confusion about a singular message: there is, through this device, a singular voice, but this voice has an endless number of speakers. There is no ownership of this voice, no ability to turn it off, and no dominant rhetoric nor ideology. It is the voice of the individual and the voice of the group. It is not neither nor both.

This exploding of binaries helps to explain the conundrum of consumption. Another popular image of the Occupy movement has been the Guy Fawkes mask. Of course, the history of Fawkes himself dates back 400+ years; however, the mask’s roots lie in the pages of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. But the image adopted by hundreds of protesters, who are fed up with the monolithic control forced upon them by a government and corporatocracy that are an intertwined massive symbol of oppression, is most readily tied to the film version of the graphic novel, released in 2006 by mega-super-conglomerate Warner Brothers and written/produced by the duo then known as the Wachowski Brothers–a monicker that is no longer used, as Lana (then Larry) Wachowski is a transgender woman. The layers of this historical/written/drawn/filmed image are so vast and tricky that peeling them back is like counting grains of quicksand while standing in it. So if the People’s Mike provides the character of this movement, this mask is its perfect symbol. It’s not necessary to go into the history of Guy Fawkes or the general symbology of masks as a tool–these things are understood easily enough. It’s the mediated layering of experience that is most compelling.

The adoption of undeniably Big Media iconography as the “face” for so many largely anti-establishmentarian protesters provides a glimpse into why one can both be and not be a consumer of corporate content and goods. The perceived dichotomy between corporations and anti-corporate sentiment is one of the many ways in which we can underestimate the complexities of our lives. While the talking heads of news show hosts/guests and politicians consistently strive to stand firmly on black and white talking points, we all know this dichotomy of ideas to be a canard. Nothing is black and white. Nothing is simple. Things are complicated and messy–the gray spaces are where real insight occurs. And so a generation that has been brought up on media imagery cannot simply reject that imagery as a form of protest. This movement co-opts from everything and everywhere: the placards and signs of previous movements, the images of the political protests of imagination–like the one staged in V, the philosophies of those who came before, recycling the ideas (as young people always do) of Marx and Bakunin and Nietzsche and Rawls. But there are new things too–the incessant drumming, the universal leadership (such a brilliant way to avoid scapegoating and martyrdom), the tents.

The tents.

From early October, when tents only sparsely occupied the City Hall lawn.

If Guy Fawkes masks provide the perfect symbol–all layered with the medium and the message and the metaphor and the moment–the tents provide the movement’s central imagery. They are the physical embodiment of Occupation. Tents provide a sense of place–they are stable and constant if not permanent nor impenetrable. They both are and are not a home. With tents, the Occupiers have solidified what is perhaps the single most cohesive message of the Occupation: public space, public access, and public ideas are essential in a democracy.

To dig deeper into these ideas, I think we need to consider geography, space, and some heady French dudes–most notably Lefebvre and Foucault and Baudrillard. I’ll leave the latter two alone in this piece, though within their (often nearly impenetrable) works lie clues to the bones of this movement’s anatomy, if not the sinew and muscle. Lefebvre, however, will get his moment. In a discussion of class hegemony, he writes:

Hegemony implies more than an influence, more even than the permanent use of repressive violence. It is exercised over society as a whole, culture and knowledge included, and generally via human mediation: policies, political leaders, parties, as also a good many intellectuals and experts. It is exercised, therefore, over both institutions and ideas. The ruling class seeks to maintain its hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. (10)

If we replace “ruling class” with “The 1%,” something begins to take shape. And I don’t think The 1% is merely defined by financial wealth. Many who fall into the quantifiable distinction of the 99% balk at the idea that economic inequality has led to a corporatocracy in which ideas are divided into binaries of To and Not To or Buy or Not Buy, and there are those who are of the economic 1% who understand that these binaries help to limit choice, opportunity, and freedom. But the symbolic 1%–as practiced by a far larger segment of the population than that mere 1/100th–is this hegemony that wishes to control both space and conversation–both “institutions and ideas.” In recent weeks, for example, we’ve seen institutional power exercised through the use of police who attempt to divide Occupiers from the spaces they occupy (cops function as a form of mediation–the medium through which the hegemony, both political and corporate, sends a clear message). The Occupation, on the other hand, succeeds most as a completely new model–a society in which the free exchange of goods and ideas are marked by the ownership of things (iPhones for Twittering and tents for sleeping in) and the not-ownership of anything (a donated library, donated food, the People’s Mike). And the embodiment of these various ideals–as vast and diverse as those who espouse them–is seen in the embodiment of public spaces all over the country and the world. Zuccotti Park, myriad city halls, parks and campuses–these are merely places, no more singularly significant than one person’s voice or ideas. It is not the place that matters–it is the space and the people who occupy it.

And I think this movement has impacted the way many Americans understand space. Edward Soja, jumping off the insights of Lefebvre, identifies a Third Space–the breaking down of binaries to create a space that is both inhabitable and conceptual, “an ‘in between’ position along some all-inclusive continuum” (60). This Third Space produces an open alternative that is “both similar and strikingly different” (61). In the language of the Occupation as I understand it, this is where the tattoos of movements past layer over and under the inking of a new conceptualizing of the meaning of a movement. If there is a dominant hegemony (is this even an “if”?) that wishes to bifurcate all of our experiences into easily digested either/or poles, then the only way to re-imagine our lives in a completely different way is to live inside our paradoxes–we are consumers and revolutionaries and media whores and adbusters. In order to survive the complexities of a world that is constantly–and wrongly–being whittled down into easy-to-market pieces, we have to embrace the confusion and revel in a lack of understanding in order to truly understand. Or, to draw again from Soja, the Third Space occupied by this movement is perhaps “distinguishable from other spaces (physical and mental…) and a transcending composite of all spaces” (62). If some of us–through conversations about tents and parks and public spaces and what they represent–begin to even conceptualize this sort of non-binary understanding of ourselves and our place in the worlds of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, media, and poetry, then this movement has already succeeded in altering the dominant conversation in some fairly profound ways.

As it always is, today’s yoga class was a journey, one I’m always happy to be on, in spite of legs that shake in the warrior poses and spaghetti arms that battle through each chaturanga. But I have my strengths, too–the ability to lay my belly on the ground when my legs are splayed wide to the sides or to fold into an odd pretzel, arms clasped behind my back, legs creating a helix in front of my head, which is firmly implanted near my crotch. Like all yogis this new guy encouraged us to venture as far into the poses as we could, or desired to, listening to our bodies and adjusting for the particularities of the day. There’s a clear line from this sort of yogic thinking to the Occupy movement–there is no one size fits all, and the search for enlightenment is individualized and shared, singular and universal. And, despite my own penchant for applying theories and philosophies in order to comprehend ideas in a measurable way, perhaps it’s often best that some ideas defy the ability to reason with them, forcing the thinker to dig deeper and deeper (…breathe into the pose to take you deeper…), revealing and refuting and re-imagining and renewing. Some things are best left inscrutable because scrutiny leads to being “pinned and wriggling on the wall” like the existentially doomed Prufrock, measuring life with coffee spoons. Or with price tags. Not everything should be so easily quantified.

By the end of my yoga class, I had somewhat warmed up to my new instructor. Despite his unplaceable accent (I knew Dana was from Maine the first time I met him, having gone to graduate school with a man who had the same strange accent, marked by a sort of geographically-specific speech impediment) and impossibly pointy elbows, shoulders, and knees, he kicked my ass a little bit, and I respect that. After class, a fellow practitioner, clearly as curious as I, asked the yogi where he comes from. He chuckled, obviously having been asked before, and responded, “I’m from Cleveland.” Now that was not the answer I expected.

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Why My Hillary Distaste Has Grown, and How It’s the Media’s Fault

I’m so over Hillary Clinton.  Okay, I was never really under her, but now I’m over her for real. 

First of all, the rhetoric is pathetic. Her convoluted reasoning–which has infected her friends and any talking head on the news–sounds distinctly Republican in nature. Keep hammering away at a lie and maybe it will get you what you want.

Like, for instance, the insistence that winning “key states” will give her an edge in the election. Because without her, the Dems are sure to lose such “on the bubble” states as California, New York, and Massachusetts. And with her, we may just take Texas. So the only state the really matters so far is Ohio. Because the Kerry-wild Ohio Dems really made a difference for him.

But most significantly, whether she can get a larger slice of the Democrat pie in any state is the most irrelevant thing I’ve ever heard. In raw numbers, she’s losing. The number of people who support her are fewer than those that support Obama. And the Republicans want her to win because she’s easier to attack and she has a very hard time getting people to like her once they actually see her. She knows all of this, and yet she trudges on like some whacked out robot, spewing the same garble of “me want president” and ignoring a constituency that would benefit if she just went away.

And the news media, those bastions of ethical journalism hell-bent on ratings at the expense of information, just keep spinning this rhetoric into the ground. Pundits talk day and night about whether this non-logic really matters, as if it’s actual logic (when, as non-logic, it should just be left to the crazy people). For them, the long road to the White House means a larger slice of the viewer pie.

And you may think I’m a conspiracy nut, but it also makes room for McCain, a guy likely to be supported by the boys upstairs at every one of the media companies.

What’s more, there’s room for conservatives to whine about McCain not getting enough attention, adding fuel to the “liberal media” fire, allowing room for the news to swing even further to the right, which is something a few of the big seven (ahem News Corp and GE’s NBC Universal, though they aren’t alone) are itching for.

So you go Hillary. Nora Ephron nailed it in a recent Huffington Post blog: now you’re a liar just like Bill. Problem is, he was a much more convincing and likable one (somehow, even the bloom has come off his rose during this campaign).

The Disneyfication of Incarceration

Nowadays, if you visit Disneyland, you can pay more money to bypass the long lines. When we went to a show at Universal City Walk a few weeks ago, we could have paid $20 (instead of the usual $10) to park in a special area closer to the venue. Perhaps if we had double that amount, we might have been allowed to park in our seats. It’s no surprise that money has its priveleges.

Yesterday’s New York Times offered this delightful tale of California county jails. Basically, if you can pay around 100 bucks a day and you’ve committed a minor crime (like drinking and driving), you might get to stay in a cell with a door, maybe a cell phone, and certainly away from the general population. So while poor kids are getting tossed in jail for carrying an ounce of pot and leaving months later hardened criminals, those who can pony up the fee can remain a safe distance from the gang violence, rape, and myriad other joys of normal prison.

Of course, this system is in California. Where else? And the system here, like pretty much everything else on this bizarro side of the world, reinforces the idea that people with money can get away with more. Sure, if you drink and drive again, you’ll end up in rape-jail, but your first time out, you get to take it easy. This system goes hand-in-hand with white collar prisons where billionaires lounge around, I don’t know, playing golf and eating crumpets, for ripping off thousands–tens of thousands–of trusting people; the kid who stole to eat gets tossed in with the murderers.

What I say here is obvious. We saw this system at play during Katrina, when Black New Orleans residents were shown as looters and white ones were survivalists. We see it at play daily in our schools, particularly here in LA where we have one of the most dysfunctional school districts in the country.

And this same racial inequity has always been in our jails–because what is pay-to-stay but racially unequal? While the politicians swear equality for all, we live in a system that not only overtly undermines that but that reinforces those differences, those fears of “otherness.” The truth is, people with less money, less education, less opportunity should be given more priveleges, not fewer. They should be given the room to learn, to have higher expectations of themselves, to imagine a world other than what they believe to be “it.” People with more have imagined that world and have, oftentimes, taken it for granted. Perhaps what they need is a little time to reflect on what privelege really is–that it’s not merely being able to pay one’s way out of a jam. But our country doesn’t run on ethics; it runs on money. And once again, as I’ve mentioned here before, we have certainly forgotten that the meaning of democracy is not “the freedom to buy stuff.”

It Really Is a Beautiful Day…

So it’s cheesy that the Dems are using this already cheesy U2 song as a theme. I’m going with it. I’m feeling it.

I’m working to the sounds of CNN. Just now:

Dem Senator in Montana, one to go (if stupid Lieberman had dropped out of the race, it’d be all sewn up. I want to smack him with a rubber fish)

But even bigger:

Donald Rumsfeld just stepped down.

I know we haven’t ditched Bush yet; I know the Democrats have to grow some serious balls, but now the tide has turned. There’s a REASON for those balls. There’s room for progressive voices.

And, for the first time in six years, I can breathe.