“In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling…. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.”
Parks then proceeds to frame a question that he aims squarely at satire: “Orwell treats Dickens as if he were a special case, but the question he raises here is whether all satire isn’t to some extent in connivance with the object of its attacks.” This is disturbing enough, except that I am left wondering if all forms of resistance (as we know them) aren’t to some extent in connivance with the objects of their attacks.
Slavoj Zizek suggests as much in the second essay encountered, “Resistance is Surrender,” (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/slavoj-zizek/resistance-is-surrender) written in 2007 before anyone had begun to forget that Bush the Younger’s Iraq War may well have been the single worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president. (The recent upward creep in Bush’s post-presidential approval ratings feels more like willful forgetting than forgiving, and like the worst kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay.”) Here is Zizek, in perhaps the definitive take on “I have met the enemy, and he is us”:
“The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of (the) strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’”
It seems that peaceful demonstrations and resistance are either co-opted by their target (as per Zizek), or, impotent and erasable. Case in point for the latter my own Baltimore City, where a week of peaceful protests and marches in response to the circumstances of the death of Freddie Gray were a) largely ignored, and then b) completely forgotten once the “real” response of rioting and looting began. (And that’s “real” as in really newsworthy; actual events are over the second the cable news trucks roll up.)
Where does this leave us? As one reader responding to Zizek puts it: “‘Sit at home and watch the barbarity on television’ seems to be Slavoj Žižek’s new slogan for fighting capitalism.” But even if we take Zizek with a grain of salt, it seems nevertheless that both he and Parks in re Dickens have put their finger on something rather frightening, something that recalls the inevitable scene from every TV show in my youth when the hero lands in quicksand only to quickly discover that frantic efforts to get out only make one sink faster. So, is the only possible response to “sit at home and watch the barbarity on television” in the hopes that we might sink to our deaths a little slower? Zizek’s own answer is one of the most condescending non-answers ever proffered: “So what are we to do? Everything possible (and impossible), just with a proper dose of modesty, avoiding moralising self-satisfaction.” Since Zizek’s “everything possible” is an obvious disguise for his real answer, “I don’t know,” the second half of his answer actually contains everything he has to say about the way forward, which boils down to “Whatever you do, just don’t make an ass of yourself, have some dignity please.” Except I have a feeling that saving the world is going to require an awful lot of us making complete asses of ourselves until somehow, some way we get past our collective “I don’t know.”
We “don’t know” because although Zizek has no cure, his diagnosis of our larger dilemma is, if not an exact bull’s eye, exceedingly close to the mark. In short, we’re damned if we do resist, and we’re damned if we don’t. One is left wondering if this catch-22 isn’t just the human condition, as if the Woody Allen joke about two old women dining together in a restaurant, with the first exclaiming “Oh my, this food is horrible,” to which her friend adds “Yes, and the portions are so small,” is both the beginning and the end of the story.
But perhaps our dilemma isn’t the human condition at all (maybe there is no such thing?), and civilization has just painted itself into a corner. Does making this distinction even matter if the end result is that there’s no way out? I would argue that the reason it does matter is that it is the difference between there being well and truly no way out (i.e. this is the human condition, and maybe we should retire to our televisions after all) and the possibility that we just haven’t thought of a way out; think a riddle in which we’re locked in a room with no exits and a can of paint in which the only way out is summoning our inner MacGyver. Note that, per Wikipedia, MacGyver “prefers non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle a gun.” Plus, if we’re fated to have yet another white guy as our symbol for saving the world, at least this white guy has a mullet.
And since we’re talking about white guys trying to save the world, we would be remiss not to mention Pope Francis’ release this week of a breathtaking encyclical on climate change in which he “advocates for a radical transformation of human society.” (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/15/pope_francis_in_leaked_climate_change_encyclical_we_re_on_a_path_to_destroy.html) Interestingly, the Pope cautions against my MacGyver imagery, warning against “a blind trust in technical solutions.” (ibid) Instead, among other proposals, the Pope argues for “the creation of a ‘true world political authority’ that would be tasked ‘to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis, to prevent deterioration of the present and subsequent imbalances; to achieve integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to ensure environmental protection and pursuant to the regulations for migratory flows.’” (ibid) But whether one agrees with the Pope’s top-down approach or prefers a world of anarchic individual MacGyver’s reassembling the earth even as they disassemble (dare I say deconstruct?)” true world political authority” altogether, one must admit that the Pope has outdone even Zizek with a timely, accurate diagnosis of what ails us, and a call to radical, seemingly unthinkable change.
Since I harangued Zizek for failing to propose any meaningful solutions, I will don MacGyver’s mullet and close with some of my own thoughts on how we might use the can of paint that got us here to get out of the locked room. Lately I have taken to going around and referring to myself as a socialist. More so than identifying as some kind of latter day Marxist, it is my way of announcing that I don’t in any way agree with this, this being what Pope Francis describes as “the spiral of self-destruction in which we are sinking.” (ibid) But if I am going to go around calling myself a socialist it is important that I acknowledge the many failures of really existing twentieth century socialism. Stalin’s murder of 50 million Russians, echoed by the further murder of millions more by Mao, Pol Pot, et al., is the obvious place to start. Strangely, this murderous madness was born as an attempt to undo the notion central to our own current (non-socialist) “spiral of self-destruction,” which is the simple notion that the world is neatly divided into two categories, winners and losers. I would submit that the origins of socialism’s murderous madness came in its effort to overcome the (equally mad ) split between winners and losers by declaring “Everyone’s a winner!”, as if the world could be saved not by MacGyver but by a carnival barker.
Socialism got it wrong, and in the process went completely mad, by espousing something that was both happy and false. Actually: Everyone’s a loser! All of history co-signs this as a true fact. But we would make an even bigger mistake than the socialists if we decided that this was both true and sad. Because it is actually funny, which is the key to everything, because the revolution will only succeed if it makes us laugh.
Everyone’s a loser. Put another way, the meek shall inherit the earth, and we’re all meek, i.e. we’re all losers. So let’s grow our loser mullets and save our world, MacGyver-style. After all, becoming a television character to save the world is better than watching the end of the world on television.
