From an interview with energy policy expert Jörg Friedrichs on the shift from cheap oil to expensive oil:

When social glue and traditional lifestyles have eroded, they are not easily recovered. After several generations of individualism and affluence, Westerners will have a hard time accepting that they need to rely on communities and must revert to a sustainable lifestyle.

Nicely gels with McGirr's account of Sunbelt development in Orange County--individualism and affluence seem to be the drivers of paranoia; how will these take shape once wealth is threatened by expensive energy?

Suburban anticommunist thrills

In Suburban Warriors, Lisa McGirr describes the vivacious energy produced around anticommunism in 1960s Orange County. Ordinary residents, convinced of an “imminent communist takeover,” created social networks, screened anticommunist films, listened to speakers at the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, all in the fervored sense of an impending apocalypse. McGirr attributes the particular shape of the anticommunist agenda to Fred Schwartz, anticommunist orator given to statements about “communist plans for a flag of the U.S.S.R. flying above every American city by 1973” (quoted in McGirr 61). Doubtless, the people McGirr describes were genuinely worried about their children’s education being corrupted by Communists, and the threat of nuclear war certainly gave anticommunism heft. And as McGirr demonstrates, the atmosphere of anticommunism in Orange County was shaped by a defense industry that fed on anticommunist hysteria, as well as a disconnected social environment that lead residents to seek community wherever it was proffered, first in right-wing churches, and second, in right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society. Still, though, one gets the sense that for many of the people in McGirr's study, anticommunism provided a great deal of thrills. Inasmuch as the landscape of Southern California is disconnected and anticommunity, it's also simply boring, and the fiery rhetoric of anticommunism--the sense of being a "warrior"--had to offer a sense of adventure.

This is a brilliant book, which nicely articulates social fabric out of which political adventuring emerges. McGirr nicely delivers on the contradictions of her title; out of the sleepy, uneventful suburbs emerge Don Quixotes fighting Communist windmills that they see everywhere. This is the adventurous impulse I find operating in conspiracy theory, the bedroom transformed into a bunker, the garage transformed into a meeting place for rebel cells (literally, JB founder Welch modeled meetings after Communist cells). Communism certainly serves as the ultimate conspiracy for the residents McGirr describes, though of course when one reads David Bennett’s The Party of Fear, one recognizes that the pattern of thought which frames anticommunism—stealthy enemies at work everywhere—is similar to that which emerges around other shadowy enemies-Catholics, anti-abolitionists, the Illuminati, Masons—throughout American history. This sense of thrill is an aspect of conspiracy theory that I keep trying to draw out: that as much as conspiracy theory offers answers, as much as it offers its participants meaning, it also offers them a rush--the rush at seeing connections between the local ACLU and a Communist takeover, the rush of connecting events in China to one's backyard, the rush of being in the know, or at least of imagining oneself in the know.

Nostalgia for answers

Last night, I was reflecting on Breitbart article and its account of contemporary political truth-blurring, where every fact is subject to reinterpretation and manipulation by people like Breitbart. In the current media climate, where journalistic authority is undercut by blogs, tweets, and other forms of opinion, a relatively straightforward fact--black congressmen being called racial slurs--can be twisted into a conspiracy against the people making the slurs. Within this context, every truth claim is subordinated to the spin or effect of the truth claim in a political game. Every truth claim, then, is presumed to function as some sort of surface "play," with the real story endlessly receding--into, perhaps, the clandestine realm of conspirators, though the analogy is not exact. At the same time, though, some version of conspiracy theory also functions nostalgically, manifesting a cultural desire for a more stable symbolic order. Conspiracy thinking is both part of the muddling and a way out of the muddling.

This morning, the Times published this, in an article asserting the continued presence of the sixties in contemporary politics:

On a deeper level, though, [the Rand Paul controversy around civil rights and the Blumenthal controversy around Vietnam service] probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view [the sixties] as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26bai.html

I'm not sure that this claim holds up--one could argue equally that we're still working within the rhetorical framework established by Reagan and other conservatives in the eighties, a framework that explicitly responded to the sixties, and that the continued relevance of Vietnam results from the shadow it continues to cast over contemporary politics. But I do think that Bai is on to something in identifying a longing for clarity in the continual reemergence of sixties politics.

Spin, Frankfort School, conspiracy

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_mead#ixzz0oxqbhRCZ

The idea that critical theory is itself a conspiracy is too delicious to resist; I'm sure American studies departments would be surprised by the power they supposedly wield (Breitbart was exposed to the Frankfurt school at Tulane in the early 90s). It's remarkable, too, that someone who entered college approximately when the Berlin Wall fell can cling to the anti-communist legacy of the Cold War. But then, he also grew up in the 80s. Mead also identifies Breitbart as an ex-leftist, catches him imagining himself in a fistfight with a liberal, and hears him saying he'd take a bullet for Rush Limbaugh--but not a fatal bullet.

I'm not sure whether Breitbart is identifiable as a type, thought the paranoia nicely gels with Glenn Beck's fantasies about turn of the century populism. He, along with others, does demonstrate the wide recourse to conspiracy theory as a form of expression, at least on the Right. But because he's performing all this (the way Beck may be), clearly manipulating his image for kicks and profit, he's less easy to pin down then, say, an alienated militia sympathizer like John Pitner or Timothy McVeigh. For Breitbart, this all seems to be a game, or a business opportunity: “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said. There's a nice convergence of free-market ideology (in the sense of "the marketplace of ideas") and trad right paranoia here.

Mead also pokes at the malleability of truth accomplished by Breitbart and his ilk, along the lines of what Jodi Dean calls the decline of symbolic efficacy: "Breitbart had accomplished his goal: his alternative narrative had been established, and his Twittered dissent had evoked a response at the highest levels of the media establishment. The truth of what had really happened between the crowd and the congressmen had become almost immaterial, lost in Breitbart’s fog of words." All is spin, even if the Frankfurt school plot trumps this all.

The exclusions of heterosexual identification

In my chapter on Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, I'm arguing that Johnson's protagonist, Leonard English, forsakes the potentially liberatory world of gay Provincetown, a world that would seem to offer the lost English the possibility of forging a new identity--ostensibly, the reason English goes to Provincetown in the first place. Instead of embracing the town, which English disgustedly describes as a "whole town of gay people," English works to assert a heterosexual identity with the decidedly bisexual Leanna Sousa, and when this fails, he turns to the imaginary identifications of conspiracy theory, finding solace in linking himself with first Gerald Twinbrook, and then the mythic Truth Infantry. Johnson, I argue, casts English as a meloncholic white man, adrift in a post-sixties world where white and male no longer have primacy. The dynamic I'm sketching here is roughly that articulated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. As she does throughout, she here describes gender identity and fragile and subject to disruption:

In the Lacanian framework, identification is understood to be fixed within the binary disjunction of “having” [men] or “being” [women] the Phallus, with the consequence that the excluded term of the binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of any one. The excluded term is an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire” (66).

By excluded term, Butler means homosexuality, an identity she has shown to be repressed in the typical Freudian/Lacanian Oedipal complex--for Butler it's not the incest taboo that's central, it's the homosexual taboo. Butler throughout makes the case that heterosexuality is, essentially, ideological, and needing to be affirmed continually. Her point would seem to be supported by the masculinity scholars like Michael Kimmel who emphasize the centrality of homophobia to straight male identity. While it's not his only problem, English is nothing if not disrupted and haunted, and this disruption and haunting plays out in the largely homosexual Provincetown; Johnson repeatedly calls attention to his uncertain, tenuous grasp on his masculine identity in the context of Provincetown. It's bound up with a larger crisis, of course, but I think it's appropriate to emphasize that English is a hanged man. And in the last third of the novel, English explicitly turns to conspiracy in flight from both Provincetown and his crisis. (Yes, the whole thing can be framed in terms of mental illness, but English's discourse remains contiguous with the rest of the novel, except where he imagines a conspiracy.) I know of no other text that establishes the identificatory dynamic around conspiracy theory in exactly this way, but Johnson's text seems to align with Butler's account of the Lacanian heterosexual matrix as fictional, and, by implication, doomed to fail. English can't possess the Phallus.

Butler sets this binary against what she describes as “multiple identifications [that][…] constitute a nonhierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that call into question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution” (66). There's something joyful in the language Butler uses here, the shifts and overlaps and nonhierarchies; later on the page, she seems to identify these multiple identifications with the "subversive and parodic convergences that characterize lesbian and gay cultures," and it's here that I see Leonard English, the lone gunman, rejecting this joy in favor of the stark loneliness of his mental and literal jail cells.

Admittedly, my reading of Provincetown may not exactly gibe with Butler's sense of how law and liberation work. Later in Gender Trouble, Butler offers a sharp, complex reading of Foucault's introduction to the autobiography of Herculine, a hermaphrodite from the nineteenth century. Here, Butler seems to assert that there is no outside to the regulating fiction of the law which produces both heterosexuality and homosexuality as, respectively, identity and non-idenitity:

[T]he law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity; the law requires conformity to its own notion of ‘nature’ and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign.

Herculine’s pleasures and desires are in no way the bucolic innocence that thrives and proliferates prior to the imposition of a juridical law. Neither does s/he fall outside the signifying economy of masculinity. S/he is ‘outside’ the law, but the law maintains this ‘outside’ within itself. In effect, she embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis (106).

So, I suppose, Provincetown is not in an "off season" in regards to the law; the "off season" is within the law itself (the rules aren't "suspended" in Provincetown). The melancholic joy of the drag bar expresses as much. So English's problems don't disappear if he embraces the queerness of his setting; but could he avoid his eventual tragedy? While it doesn't directly relate here, I love Butler's final sentence here, about the law that produces only rebellions that defeat themselves. It's an argument one might make about English's final action--trying to shoot the Bishop, while dressed in drag--but I'm not sure if it's accurate to frame this action as rebelling against any order, gender or otherwise. (If all of this seems a bit far afield from a conflicted white man who begins believing in a conspiracy theory to prop up his weak heterosexual identity, so it goes. Making untenable connections should be a benefit of this medium.)

Lonely, no gun

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Carter, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of what cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved--absolutely and purely--that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone. That Judge Carter fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing more would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It's a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I've tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human existence? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I revise my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on (269).

Another stunned, overwhelmed investigator/narrator in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. Like Libra's Nicholas Branch, O'Brien's narrator chases an ephemeral question with no clear answer, digging through piles of information in the course of pursuing disappeared senator John Wade and the disappeared wife John may or may not have murdered. But this narrator, way off the page, speaking directly only in footnotes, is no Branch, because he doesn't seem defeated by the lack of answers here (though the crime and motives, as in Libra, are on the page, here scattered throughout the novel in O'Brien's brilliantly instrumental use of the tools of postmodernism).

Like Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, In the Lake of the Woods concerns a male protagonist who struggles for an intact identity in the face of dissolution, though arguably Wade's grasp on sanity is even less tenuous. Both men are led to a conclusion; for both men the conclusion involves violence. Furthermore, both men are rooted in a particular historical time: both mens' crises are caught up in the Vietnam War (As a veteran, of course, Wade's crisis relates much more directly.) Wade is a gunman who remains utterly, horrifically, insanely alone: the metaphor O'Brien keeps returning to is a head full of mirrors, all reflecting in. (Both works may well comment on the fragmented cultures of the postwar period in addition to the specifically masculine questions they explore.) There's no potential to get over Vietnam in O'Brien's work; Wade is forever in that blood-drenched irrigation ditch shooting PFC Weatherall, a point O'Brien makes clear through the postmodernist technique of repeating sentences exactly. But as with Leonard English, the historical and the personal intersect for Wade: Vietnam--specifically, My Lai--merely offers a fantastic, phantasmagoric stage on which Wade's masculine demons play (his suicided father called him Jiggling John). The magic Wade turns to--his platoon calls him Sorcerer--is the magic of self- and other- deception, a way of, as O'Brien has Wade think "conceal[ing] demon history from all others and most times from yourself," of "betray[ing] the present with every breath drawn from the bubble of a rotted past" (245).

O'Brien's language of magic and demon history nicely intersects with conspiracy theory, and certainly a senatorial candidate's disappearance, or enscandalization, resonates heavily with the political material beloved by conspiracy theorists. Wade, though, creates his own conspiracy, as a "pro" who knows, like conspirators, how to manipulate surfaces so that the real story remains hidden. But in contrast to English, Wade desires to "evade" the real story, for the real story concerns not a mystic plot with identificatory payoffs, but irrational, directionless violence that simultaneously results from the masculinlist logic of the war and the disjointedness of his soul. Wade is both historical, emblematic of a generation of sixties-fleeing men, and singular, entangled in the cutting binds of his own personal tragedy.

Losing all definition

Somewhere in the middle of The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy relates the curious tale of a man driven rootless, near mad, by a series of cascading tragedies that end with the death of his young son in a tornado, a death for which the man bears some responsibility. McCarthy figures the man as a kind of mystic, one who has dwelled in Nietzsche’s abyss to return no more. The man comes to rest under a miraculously half-destructed church, a church whose roof stands on three corners alone. Sitting where he can be crushed by the roof, the man begins to study the Bible furiously:

He pored over the record not for the honor and glory of his Maker but rather to find against Him, To seek out in nice subtleties some darker nature. False favors. Small deceptions. Promises forsaken or a hand too quickly raised. To make cause against Him, you see. He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up by the very void to which we wished to stay opposed (153).

Daring death, the man finds spiritual mission, a God from which no favor can be courted, only swift, unjust death To me, this is the spiritual lure of conspiracy: a power so great that its boundaries cannot be mapped, its depths not plumbed. A power made up of men, but a power that transforms these men themselves into demons.

Lonely apotheosis

But they would drink together under the scuppernong arbor on the Sunday afternoons, and Father said how for that moment Wash’s heart would be quiet and proud both and that maybe it would seem to him that this world where niggers, that the Bible said had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better housed and even clothed than he and his granddaughter—that this world where he walked always in mocking and jeering echoes of nigger laughter, was just a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was the one where his own lonely apotheosis (Father said) galloped on the black thoroughbred, thinking maybe, Father said, how the Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God’s eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think A fine proud man. If God himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that’s what He would aim to look like” Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (226)

In Faulkner’s typically complicated arrangements of identification, Wash Jones, the poor white squatter who lives at Thomas Sutpen’s abandoned fishing cabin, views his identity as merged with that of the great (if failed) patriarch Sutpen, but only through a kind of fantasy, by dismissing the everyday world as a dream and imagining in its place a world where Wash and Sutpen are friends, colleagues, equals. Disempowered, emasculated, bitter, Wash recreates his world (at least in Mr. Compson’s view) as a world where he fraternizes with men like Sutpen, where he rides a thoroughbred alongside Sutpen. I suspect that Wash’s identification with Sutpen is similar to the identification that appears in some forms of conspiracy theory, that, more often than not, conspiracy theory, despite its protests about decrying power, is actually about identifying with power, in particular the men who wield it.