Looking for Mr. Finch.
Sometimes you wish they’d go for the pith, you know?
Of all the loathsome spectacles we’ve endured since November 2—the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his “mandate”—none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the “moral values” edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib.
That really ought to be shouted from battlements, for fuck’s sake, but—and much as I love em-dashes, and the clauses you can tuck inside ’em—there’s no rhythm. No rough music. No beat to pump a fist to.
Still. It’s one fuck of a clarion call.
Fred Clark gets it, too; and if his last line is more stiletto-snark than trumpet blare, well, the stiletto’s the weapon of choice right now in the op-ed alleys of the world.
Some political observers have responded to the electoral map and the exit polls by suggesting that if Democrats want to succeed in the scarlet states they will need to: A) accept the gelded notion of “morality” as a category primarily concerned with the condemnation of sexual minorities; and B) join in and embrace this impious form of piety to win more votes.
This is bad advice. It is also—what’s the word I’m looking for?—immoral.
We don’t need their morals. We have a better grasp of the morals they claim than they do. We don’t need their mandate. You ask Americans wherever they live what they want, what they really want from the world, you get them down to brass tacks and away from buzzwords slippery with rhetorical snakeoil, you do that and we win on the issues every single fucking time. What we need is their mantle, the one they drape over themselves before stepping up to the pulpit, the mantle that we let them steal because in a moment of weakness we felt sorry for the people they claimed to be. It’s that air of authority, that choice box seat in the frame they build themselves; it’s the high ground on the battlefield of their choosing, not ours. —It’s an old, old story, this theft, and it hinges on a fundamental human weakness: the confusion of style for substance, medium for message, dazzle for insight, mantle for morals—the design flaw lurking in our fantastic abilities to recognize patterns and leap to conclusions. It doesn’t matter that the emperor has no clothes, so long as he he’s got the mantle. It doesn’t matter, the words coming out of his mouth; we’ll help them along, after the fact, to what we think they were supposed to mean, until they’re no longer recognizable as what was said. We expect them to be moral, because authoritative, older men are always moral authorities—and so they are, no matter what nonsense they spew. We expect them to equivocate, because thoughtful, nuanced folk always equivocate, and would you look at that? —That’s what the mantle does, and that’s why we’ve got to get it back.
How? I don’t know. (Dismantle the hierarchies implicit in your language! cries a wag in the back. Well, bucko: that’s a strategy. What we need, here and now, are tactics.) —The mantle’s a slippery thing, too slippery to grab: it’s an air, yes, an attitude, but it’s also an expectation. It’s a way of seeing, but more imporantly, of being seen. It’s granted as much as it’s assumed; it’s taken as read, as much as it’s spoken. It’s a story, is what it is: the story we expect to see, and the roles we expect the people we’re seeing to play in it. Change the story, and you change the world. We don’t need to take back the mantle before we can go on to win; we take back the mantle, and we’ve won.
—Which puts us in the realm of strategy again. Not tactics. And anyway, sure as dishes and laundry, there’ll be another to fight in the morning.
But are you starting to see the problem with letting the red states go hang, with cutting our shining cities adrift on our blue hills and leaving them to their hardscrabble ignorance? That’s taking on the roles they deign to give us in the story they want to tell, the one they’ve been telling ever since they snatched the mantle from us—and while pretending “they’re” the conscious authors of this story is as artificial as pretending there’s only one story, or heck, that there’s a monolithic “them” against a unified “us,” and you can even make the argument that there’s a dark power in taking up the roles they give us and twirling our mustachios to the hilt, jiu-jitsuing their story over its logical cliff, still: the mills of poetic justice grind even slower than the other exceeding kind, and anyway, there’s other ways.
What other ways?
(What was I saying about pith?)
Look, this whole thing got started because somebody was searching for arthurian parallels and washed up here and when I went poking to remind myself what Arthurian parallels had to do with what I’d thought I’d written, and I found myself in the middle of some stuff about a Joss Whedon television show that has been squatting, all unseen, at the heart of this one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state bullshit because the story that’s being told, the story that we’re telling, the story that we’re letting them tell has no place for it. And this is pop culture, yes, this is art, such as it is, and all of that is chopping wood and carrying water when what we need, here and now, are tactical airstrikes (our best targets being the news, and how we get it, and how we pass it along: the stories we make all unknowing when we do, and how we go about changing them: that word, sir, “morals”: I do not think it means what you think it means), but this is a long, slow, tedious business, writing, and grace comes from unexpected quarters, and fortune favors the prepared, and this is what I’ve got, here and now. Make of it what you will. Wood’s still gotta get chopped; the water won’t carry itself, and as far afield as we might have wandered from Abu Ghraib and economic injustice, still: the pulpiest attack on this poisonous story we’ve somehow been tricked into telling, the most half-assed all-unknowing attempt at snatching the mantle from the emperor’s bare shoulders—it’s infinitely more useful than yet another round of fucking the South.
And Whedon’s a step or two up from pulp.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvotes the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely fills out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
Of course, what you have to realize there, is the story he was trying to change is one we tell ourselves. (Which is why Mal’s an atheist, see. This is therapy, not outreach.) —Thing about changing stories is everything’s up for grabs until the new narrative settles in, and nobody’s gonna know exactly how everything falls out until it does—and that’s maybe another reason why it’s comfortable to paint ourselves with blue-state woad and charge their rhetorical guns, yet again. At least we know what to expect, right?
There’s other ways, though. Might behoove us to start looking for them.
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I got yer Mr Finch right here: "When are you going to stop treating this bastard as if he was human? When are you going to learn? When is everybody going to learn?" Addressed, ideally, to Messrs Leahy and Biden.