elections 2004

a letter to a friend, written in the after hours of elections 2004. in some way these questions spurred the prestent trip…

10 november, 2004

all these letters from the US trying to think about how to think about this. the shock of encountering godly america, all this talk about a fundamentally divided country. the ur-american patriotic consensus challenged if not entirely broken: kerry lowers his head and calls for ‘healing’ but my friends keep writing about how they don’t find cowboys and country preachers funny anymore, how purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain now catch at the heart with fear rather than pride.

and all indicators show that the key thing was the mobilization of preachers and churches (with special karl rove distributed election kits). that the real burning issues for half the country are gay marriage and abortion and prayer in school other ‘moral’ questions (which do not include war). and my friends (whom i naturally consider the best of america) are wondering how the hell to intervene there: columns and radio shows and video-art and acoustic concerts all these other communicative efforts are obviously preaching to the converted. urban cosmopolitan america knows already, we have to keep ourselves alive and kicking, but we don’t have to convince ourselves. but the other side – because it seems more and more clear that there is an other side – is drawing on other codes, apparently inaccessable to us: the bible, the preachers, the radical selfdefense. on the one hand this is no surprise, this has been happening for a long time now, but suddenly in that vast swath of red we are confronted with what we should have seen before.

is it counterproductive to draw – or to accept – absolute lines between an implicit ‘us’ and an opaque ‘them’? is there a real antagonism here, a fundamental conflict of interests only to be resolved by the forceful domination of one by the other? or is this a phantasm of difference, identitarian demagoguery, a ferocious deployment of ‘victim consciousness’ which could be challenged – say, from a feminist position – as so many other nationalist projects have been? is there a difference? i am loathe to assume real antagonism too quickly (though i must admit that in the american case i find it so much easier and more seductive to do so than in contexts which are not ‘mine’). so suddenly it seems imperative to understand whats going on there, to know the codes and how this church-america is constructed, to speak that language somehow. this is militant understanding: at the moment at least i am not particularly interested in understanding-for-understanding but rather understanding-for-more-effectively-subverting.

i am disoriented by my own position in this, the position of the friends that write to me: i compare it to the tone, for example, of the iranians who thought the revolution they were making was a communist one and never saw the islamists coming, or of the arab left which so persistantly clutches a vision of the good old days (whether liberal or nasserist) that it cannot see or comprehend that politics is increasingly with the islamists. in their case i find the problem somewhat clearer. close to home it gets more difficult for me. so i want to think about this sudden outpouring of talk about fundamental antagonism (what simon schama has dubbed the godly america vs. the worldly america) in light of what we have learned about ‘fundamental antagonisms’ (from israel, from yugoslavia, from spain…) and the tremendous political power of religious discourses in light of what we have learned about that too (from israel, from iran, from egypt…) and not indulge american exceptionalism by treating the US as a case apart. and if an empathetic comprehension of the subjectivities and arguments and particular life stories which lead people to religious or identitarian politics seem important to me in all these other cases, then it must be imperative for me in the country where i grew up.

but at the moment a serious ethic of empathetic listening comes hard. infiltration, subversion and the jamming of their lines seems much more immediately compelling. and even more so, the fulfillment of needs by other means. again, this contradiction: when mernissi celebrates moroccan ‘civil society’ – by which she means non-religious organizations which have created networks of mutual support and community in direct competition with islamic organizations which are (more successfully and more visibly) doing the same – i sort of raise an eyebrow at her wilful exclusion of islamic projects. but maybe i have a lot to learn there. i don’t want a particular kind of bible-talk to become the ultimate signifier in my country, she doesn’t want the name ‘islam’ to become the ultimate signifier in hers. both of these ultimate signifiers seem to make a lot of headway out of the fact that people have real needs – material and subjective – and these religious groups are the ones that are answering them. So perhaps we have no choice but to enter into competition with them, as Mernissi seems to suggest.

The comparison has its limits. In Morocco, as in most of the ‘Islamic world’, these Islamic political movements are the opposition, are repressed and criminalized (to greater and lesser extents), and have the attractive halo of the excluded as they rightly denounce corrupt and authoritarian regimes. In the US, the religious movements are in power, they are triumphant, they run the most powerful political and military force on earth. Putting them in the same bag on the basis of their being ‘religious’ (whatever that means… do we know?) should not be taken for granted or obvious given their very different relationship to state power. (Perhaps it more relevant to talk about power and counter-power? or about fascism? or about empire? we have such blunt tools.) But just because the US Christian movements are in power (and busy launching global conquest) doesn’t mean that they haven’t maintained the attractive halo of the excluded. Well we know the persistance of legacies of victimhood. As far as I can tell, heartland Christian America has never figured itself as the power it is, it describes itself as a victim, attacked from one side by godless liberals (commies, faggots, jews) and from the other by a mysterious and millenial islamic menace. This image from the Bush campaigns: we are in a dark forest surrounded by wolves, predators give us no choice but to fight back. It is difficult for an identity imagined around victimhood to recognize that it is no longer a victim but rather is in a position to victimize others. More strategic – as Israel, Serbia, now Flanders and others have demonstrated – is to indefinitely maintain a myth of diffuse threat and self-defense.

What relationship this has to global policies, to what extent the New American Century guys are mobilizing this Christian movement to get their window of opportunity for an unrelated project and to what extent they actually share or are motivated by this Christian world view I don’t know. I wonder.

Anyway. I throw all this out – a bit haphazardly – to stir up this sudden and widespread debate about ‘the 2 americas’ which has emerged from the elections. please lets talk.