When I'm Outraged and When I'm Not

The Huffington Post declared Day Above Ground’s video for “Asian Girlz” to be “ridiculously offensive” and “quite possibly the most racist thing to happen to music since ‘Accidental Racist.’” (article) Apparently a lot of people agreed, because after intense condemnation, the band was forced to do some talking (if not exactly apologize) and make an effort to get the video off the internet. This got me to thinking about outrage--when I’m outraged and when I’m not.

I should be clear that even apart from the offensive content, it seems obvious to me that the song and video are shockingly bad, and apparently Day Above Ground is the name for a bunch of dipshits. As for the lyrical content, it consists of a stream of stereotypical references to Asians and Asian culture mixed in with how much the band members want to do it to Asian “girlz.” I find it distasteful, but I don’t find myself outraged.

Why is that? After thinking about it, I realized my outrage increases the bigger, more brazen, and more harmful the offense. I’m outraged when the U.S. government spies on its citizens and the president goes on television and lies about it, when the killing of an innocent black person by a white cop or vigilante is turned into an occasion for whites to complain about how persecuted they are, when politicians want to legislate who you can fall in love with, who you can marry, and what you can do with that person in bed. These are egregious offenses carried out systemically and openly and to the very real suffering of real people. The release of a music video clearly intended (however ill-conceivedly) to be humorous by a relatively unknown group is a small thing by comparison.

That isn’t to say that a music video can’t be wrong, offensive or even cause real hurt--it can and should be condemned accordingly--but emotionally, it’s not going to get me waving my arms and ranting. I remember a few years ago when I noticed that most of the stand-up comedy on The Comedy Channel used stereotypes to poke fun at a wide variety of ethnicities. I don’t like it, so I’ll change the channel, and maybe blog about it later, but I’ll save blowing my top for something worse, say, the GOP’s next voter suppression effort.

My criteria, however, are clearly not others’. Liberals have a reputation for freaking out over every offense, but during a Democratic presidency, the conservatives are the new liberals with their freaking out. I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon on Facebook. Every now and then, I will run across a conservative’s laundry list of beefs against Obama (example) posted by someone usually described as having great courage, and then reposted by others, who encourage others to have the guts to Share or Like it. They’re mostly full of junk, often incoherent, and always full of outrage.

Yet most of the accusations in these posts don’t amount to much. Despite trying really hard to list as many offenses as possible, there’s a curious sparseness of things that actually hurt real people. They’re outraged about what they see as disrespect to the military, apologies to foreign nations, and not giving enough props to the Christian god, but show little concern for policies that have actually done real damage. If Obama bows to the king of Saudia Arabia this is an outrage, but killing innocent Pakistanis in drone strikes elicits no mention.

I hope nobody buys Day Above Ground’s stupid song, but I hope even more strongly that we could work up some widespread outrage over a lot of the worse things going on.

Critical Theory, Emo Music and the Struggle for Transcendence

Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s The One Dimensional Man discusses the way modern-day society and the way it is administered limits human beings, reducing what they are capable of doing and even thinking. There is an established order, an enforced order, and having grown up within that order, we are incapable of seeing outside it, do not even want to, and do not even consider the possibility of other orders.

A quote:

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal 'to go along' appear neurotic and impotent.”

I am reminded of the reaction against emo music. When emo became a designated genre, I lived in Japan, mostly unplugged from American popular culture. After some years back in the U.S., I began to run across the term, always used disparagingly, and I gradually came to realize that some bands I liked were considered emo--My Chemical Romance, Saosin, Paramore, Thirty Seconds to Mars--even though the bands themselves often reject this label and declare emo to be crap.

What’s so bad about emo that even emo bands hate it?

Part of what stirs revulsion is the emotional displays from which the genre has received its label. The bands wear their hearts on their chests and accentuate this with their own style, a mix of Goth, punk, neon pop and teenage bric-a-brac, making a spectacle of and confronting us with their disaffection with the world. They care too much, show it openly, often with fatalism, while ours is a society that prefers to confess caring only in measured tones and hidden behind success and aloofness. But how much do you really care if you’re aloof?

Emos are despised as a defense mechanism against the reproach their refusal casts at the status quo--the people who have it together that we fancy ourselves to be or be on the way toward becoming. Identifying real problems and sincerely bemoaning them is so gauche.

Another quote from The One-Dimensional Man:

“‘Romantic’ is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term ‘decadent’ far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth.”

Replace “Romantics” with “emos” and the passage above is perfectly applicable to the sneering attitude many have toward emo music and its fans. Yet it is the emos and Goths and punks and what have you--the subcultures, the counterculture--who, finding themselves deeply out of place in society, struggle most viscerally for a critique, for a measure of transcendence beyond the pressures forcing them into a single acceptable mold.

No doubt, however, their endeavor is a confused one from the get-go and largely doomed to failure. They too, like those who turn their noses up at them, will one day be working stiffs, whether as slaves in a cubicle, slaves behind the broad desk of a CEO, or a slave scrounging away in the margins of society.

A final quote:

“They [the Romantics/emos] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. . . . What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content--their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture?”

No effective means of protest is open to most of the disaffected but what finds approval in the mass market. Think of image makeovers effected through trips to Hot Topic. Their means of resistance against the system, our means of resistance, are all part of the system. It will take a much more massive and painful effort, and a more coherent message than recent countercultural movements have provided, to open up multiple dimensions for humankind.

Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial

Continuing a series of somewhat light blogs, I have a few things to say about the 2012 movie Total Recall, a reimagining of the 1990 film of the same name, itself based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

The basic premise of the movie is that memories can be artificially inserted into the human mind. Douglas Quaid (played by Colin Farrell) goes to a company named Rekall to spice up his humdrum existence as a common factory worker by gaining memories of being a double agent. Something goes wrong, however, and he finds himself caught in the center of a struggle between the only two inhabitable places left on Earth after chemical welfare has ravaged the planet: the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and the Colony (Australia).

Most of what I heard about the film when it came out was negative, but I can’t see what’s wrong with it. Sure it’s pulp, but it’s pulp done well. What stood out most to me--besides the hilarious and brutal crotch smack Kate Beckinsale delivers to Colin Farrell’s face (video)--is the socio-political drama.

It’s a cliché one, to be sure. The richer UFB exploits the poor Colony for cheap labor, and the UFB’s chancellor colludes with a manufacturer of robotic soldiers for a full-scale invasion of the Colony. Class warfare coupled with a military-industrial complex--an old story we are familiar with in works of fiction since at least World War II.

What amazes me is that while anyone saturated in Hollywood can easily identify the villainous forces in these movies, a great number of those same people leap to the defense of the government, the military, and giant corporations when they behave similarly in real life, and they are eager to attack those who resist those forces.

We are all familiar with the scene at the end of the movie when a document or video or voice-recording is uploaded to the internet, broadcast on television, or simply revealed to a room full of people, providing proof of the dastardly deeds of those in power and setting off a firestorm among the people. The movie usually ends there, with the certainty that the mighty and corrupt will fall and justice will be served. Audiences of all stripes are moved by this.

In real life, however, the people can barely stir themselves off the couch even when provided with hundreds of thousands of pieces of damning evidence--such as through WikiLeaks. We now live in an age when everyone knows that the military-industrial complex exists, that corporations buy votes in Congress, that the government is spying on us, that our leaders take us to war on false pretenses, that we hold innocent men prisoner and torture them for years without trial or even pressing charges, and that our soldiers gun down civilians. None of that is a radical accusation--everyone knows these things are fact.

When it comes to the NSA scandal, no one questions the authenticity of the documents leaked by Tony Snowden, no one questions the veracity of Glenn Greenwald’s reporting for the The Guardian. Yet many Americans think Snowden did the wrong thing in blowing the whistle. We all know our government is committing the crime, but some look for excuses to sweep it under the rug.

I suppose I shouldn’t be amazed at this. Psychoanalysis would suggest that repression is at work. Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud touches upon what he calls the cultural superego--prevailing mores in civilization. America’s cultural superego insists that America the Beautiful does not do such things as unleash airstrikes on Reuters reporters, yet we all know it does. Threatened, some egos cave, and the truth is squelched.

The objection will immediately be raised that fiction and reality are two separate things. I agree. Only the crimes committed in reality are often much worse--and all too often we care less than we do when they’re committed in fiction.