December 20, 2005
Osama-Santa
Thank Jim Shaw for the picture of three robot Osamas razing a cityscape. It is part of a larger piece he did. The Santa hats were collaged on afterwards in the Christmas spirit without his direct knowledge. In the last election the Bush Crime Family and right wing opinion engineers in general capitalized on the battle over America’s most primary and basic symbols. The ancients understood the necessity of play – a little give and take – in the symbolic order. Jupiter had his lightning bolts, etc. All the gods had their particular recognizable emblems. Only their power wasn’t limited to these symbols. In America, Conservatism vs. Liberalism is all too often boiled down to those who would protect the symbols vs. those who would seek to denigrate them. The conservative mind, fraught with so many contradictions galore, is a complicated psychology to try and describe. On the one hand symbols like the flag and Bald Eagle are imbued with the greatest imaginable significance. Yet, at the same time, they are relegated to some kind of endangered list and one must at all costs, without the slightest regard for the greater democratic good, protect them from extinction at the hands of wayward do-gooders. In this scenario the symbols are incomparably powerful and simultaneously so frail as to need our constant attention and supervision. Since it is not a picture of a nascent culture that requires constant care and protection the Neocons paint, it must be one of an aging and doddering culture they would have us so worried about. There has from the start been the off-putting specter of death worship in the Bushevik lexicon. Air America’s Randi Rhodes (not to be confused with the heavy metal guitar noodler Randy Rhodes) made the comparison between the Neocons and The Door’s Jim Morrison. “Death, death, death,” she said, “It’s all about death”. While Morrison’s death wish is the subject of enough Doors songs to give Ms. Rhodes's comparison legs to stand on, it is remarkably romantic compared to the outright predatory nature of the Busheviks. Morrison’s use of death imagery is anarchistic, designed to undermine and collapse dominant symbology, while the rightists completely misunderstand the generative nature of the dark side. It is, alas, a symbolic house of cards the Neocons have erected as the basis for their authoritarian and cruelly predatory ideology. As with everything else the Bushevik system was exclusively based on immediate gains. No waiting around for these folks. Their whole strategy was boiling everything down to the most common psychological denominator in order to take full advantage of our most hidden prejudices and fears. The danger of primary symbols, however, is that they strike deep into our unconscious mind, far past the point of clear cut ideological returns, and are hard, if not impossible, for these death-mongers to efficiently control.