March 14, 2005
Mark Crispin Miller
Our U.S. national sense of self is more often than not a crippled mess of puffed up symbols, loaded ideological rhetoric, mixed with the most awkward humility and earnestness. The lack of the critical tools necessary to examine larger cultural developments has limited popular debate to a hopelessly circular polarizing politics of Us versus Them. Sure, there have always been folks like Herbert Marcuse and Gore Vidal to provide invaluable historical and theoretical counterpoint to the irrationalism of our form of government and the lawlessness of the power elite, but few are capable of addressing those concerns better than Mark Crispin Miller does in Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney’s New World Order. Crispin Miller first achieved a broader audience for his brand of cultural criticism in the 80s with Boxed In: The Culture of TV, a series of essays on popular culture that were astutely able to get at things no one had really been able to vocalize before. Contemporaries of Crispin Miller included Stuart Ewen, whose All Consuming Images was a similarly insightful examination of consumer culture. Other powerful contributions to what was tragically a short-lived debate, even within the art community, included Herbert Schiller’s Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. Unlike the previous generation, 90s artists eschewed politics almost altogether in favor of their professional aspirations, barely giving it even ideologically proscribed lip service. Perturbed by the lack of popular response to what he sees as a very clear and present danger, Crispin Miller has, however, continued to examine the terms and conditions of our cultural illusionism. What distinguishes Crispin Miller from likeminded critics is his relative calmness and broadmindedness in the face of the shit storm. Take as example his historically minded comments in a recent interview: “We see the same sort of paranoid projection among many of the leading lights of our Cold War – the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who was in fact clinically insane; the CIA’s James Angleton; Richard Nixon; J. Edgar Hoover; Frank Wisner, who was in charge of the CIA’s propaganda operations worldwide. Forrestal and Wisner both committed suicide because they were convinced the Communists were after them. Now, there was a grain of truth to this since the Soviet Union did exist and it was a hostile power. But it wasn’t on the rise, and it wasn’t trying to take over the world, and it certainly wasn’t trying to destroy James Forrestal personally. We have to understand that there was just as much insanity in our own government as there was with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks.” (See the whole interview). Crispin Miller’s historical objectivity aside, it takes a particular kind of intellect to comment on the mindset of a Government that would hire Madison Avenue to run a pro-U.S. PR campaign in the Middle East. As commentators point out, it is one thing to run a PR campaign like that here at home where everyone wants to believe more than anything that the war in Iraq is more than justified, but doing so abroad one encounters an active alternative media. There is ultimately no amount of PR that can stymie world opinion, especially when that opinion starts to become expressed in popular culture. M.I.A.’s song “Galang” is amazing proof of the extent to which global culture is already responding to the crisis.