1848+: Last and First Men

From Marxmail

http://www.marxmail.org/msg56882.html

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/obama-socialist-connections-0209

What’s So Bad About Socialism Anyway?

Just like they don’t really know what the Che T-shirt means, Generation
O doesn’t really care if you call them — or their new president —
socialist. They want answers beyond the message.

By: Stephen Marche

Roland Barthes, the French theorist and semiotician, once wrote that sex
is everywhere in America, except in sex. For the past 40 years, the same
has been true for socialism, which has been simultaneously nowhere and
everywhere in America, falsely denied by its politics and falsely
claimed by its popular culture. As the federal government puts the
finishing touches on its plan to effectively nationalize America’s
banking system, Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour epic Che is
opening in select theaters, and its hero could have scarcely imagined
that it would be America’s first M.B.A. president who would oversee the
proletariat’s glorious march to the workers’ control of the means of
production. Alan Greenspan, meanwhile, the prophet of capitalism, has
traded his coat of many colors for Job’s sackcloth and ashes (“I found a
flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure
that defines how the world works”), and though Obama spent the month of
October denying that he is a socialist, his inauguration is upon us and
the point is moot. Socialism, real, perceived, or simply misunderstood,
has shit-blossomed to new prominence, and Americans are scrambling to
make sense of it in this new age of Obama.

Since the ’60s, the Hollywood Left has preferred its socialism vague and
mushy — a feel-good unattainable ideal, preferably starring Warren
Beatty — rather than a system of government that can actually be put
into practice (as it is in Europe). And though Soderbergh has made a
movie that even Castro likes — El Jefe approved it for screening at the
Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana — Che will hopefully
cause people to ask themselves whose face they’re wearing. If you
believe in the freedom of the press, the right to belong to a political
party of your choice, the due process of law, and/or private property,
then Che Guevara was a monster, plain and simple. But even with that
knowledge, it’s unlikely that Johnny Depp will get rid of his Che
medallion. And it’s unlikely that all the pseudo-hipsters who buy their
Che T-shirts at Urban Outfitters will stop wearing them. No. These
T-shirts send a message, which effectively boils down to this: I have
vague left-wing sympathies but don’t read history. I am educated enough
to want nonconformity but not intelligent enough to avoid conformity. I
believe in supporting the wretched of the earth but happily purchase
products from multinational corporations.

It’s all part of a long history of reducing the genuine struggles of
peoples around the world for social justice to pretty baubles, from Jane
Fonda’s Radio Hanoi broadcasts to Madonna mugging in guerrilla gear to
TV personality Tim Vincent wearing a hammer-and-sickle shirt on Access
Hollywood. In 2007, Cameron Diaz carried a Maoist messenger bag while
sightseeing in Peru and was forced to apologize — 70,000 Peruvians were
murdered by the Maoist Shining Path in the ’80s and ’90s. At least with
Che chic, the idiocy is dreamy and romantic and you can pretend that
wearing his face is all about being young, riding motorcycles, and
having South American — level sex; Mao was responsible for the death of
60 million people — he makes Hitler look like an amateur.

Cameron Diaz is not, of course, a communist. She’s a ditz — that’s her
ideology. Her Mao bag was tasteless, not evil. And she’s far from alone
in her tastelessness. The coolest literary bar in New York is KGB in the
East Village — the 92nd Street Y for young writers — and it’s full of
Soviet propaganda. In Toronto, I was once in a bar called Pravda that
had, alongside Lenin and Che, a picture of Felix Dzerzhinsky on the
wall: He founded the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, and described his own
job as “organized terror.” There are communist-chic bars and restaurants
in Melbourne, Australia, and Singapore, too, and the trend has recently
returned to its birthplace. In Berlin, the hotel Ostel re-creates, in
minute detail, the experience of living under Soviet rule in the GDR.
You check in at “Border Control.” Images of party leaders stare down
from the walls like the Big Brothers of yore, and Ostel even has a roll
of GDR-era toilet paper under glass in the lobby. Hilarious. Nothing
shows the defeat of tyranny more thoroughly than its reclamation by
nostalgia.

And so dead politics return as public dreams, with the same process
neutering the kaffiyeh, the cooling head scarf traditionally worn by
Palestinian peasants that now warms the necks of trust-fund kids. Here’s
how this erstwhile symbol of solidarity with the downtrodden became a
status totem: Yasir Arafat sympathetic old-lady professors at Berkeley
their worshipful students the guys they go to Sam Roberts concerts with
Rachael Ray in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad. With each exposure, the political
symbol loses meaning. Which is why Che’s face isn’t appropriate for
community organizers anymore; it suits pro poker players at Vegas
nightclubs much better.

Obama has promised fresh politics, new in substance, new in style. We’ll
see. Like FDR and LBJ before him, he has had to reject the title of
“socialist.” But let’s face it: McCain was on to something back in
October when he croaked in a radio address, “At least in Europe, the
socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are up-front about their
objectives.” (Obama was busy texting his supporters.) BHO’s predecessors
cloaked their agendas with camouflage terminology, the “New Deal” and
the “Great Society,” and Obama may yet find some similarly palatable
euphemism for his attempt to strengthen the core of the federal
government through massive infrastructure overhaul, universal health
care, and, yes, higher taxes and redistribution of wealth. But already
the way we perceive and process world events is changing. Shepard
Fairey’s Obama posters have been the most successful political art in
half a century — the grimy, brutalist images reminiscent of nothing so
much as the socialist-realist propaganda from World War II and the
Spanish civil war, the era when America crushed fascism and built the
strongest middle class in the world. What the Fairey posters show is
that Generation O is embracing the political aesthetics of their
grandparents, and like many of their grandparents, they don’t really
care what you call them. Socialist, pragmatist, vegetable, mineral:
Obama’s followers want results, on the financial crisis, the
environment, and the war in Iraq. Who has time to watch
four-and-a-half-hour movies about dead guerrillas?