A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Swiftie Bloat Controversy

Humans are a fascinating species. Whether it is the wars they needlessly fight because of their arrested development, the genocides they engage in, the bombs they develop that can kill millions of their own species and devastate the earth in the process, or whether it is their soap operaish lives humans just keep giving commentators a lot to write about and a lot to write about on the absurdity of human existence particularly in the core nations of the world.  

Someone who has been a soap opera star almost since she came on the pop music scene as a singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The tabloid sensationalist press online and offline has been full of stories about her alleged feuds with Beyonce, with Kaye West, and with too many “boyfriends” to count (the latter apparently her claim to authenticity fame). Presumably for Swift and others of her pop music ilk, any publicity is good publicity because it sells records and whatever else these stars are hawking these consumption dominated disneyfornicated days.

Recently Swift has spurred controversy because of her politics, specifically her retweeting of Michelle Obama’s remarks on the terrifying US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the end of a national abortion policy in the United States. Additionally, her relationship—whatever it is—with Travis Kelce of the US football club the Kansas City Chiefs, has, in addition to her presumed politics, led many, particularly on the populist right, to whinge and whine about Swift’s presence at football games and the camera eyes that focus on her during football games and about “celebrities” making political statements (a truly bizarre admonition since all in a democracy, including right wing amateurs, have a right of free speech) . Finally, controversies have arisen recently over whether Swift performs live during her concerts.

Let me be upfront, I have rarely ever listened to Swift’s music. I did, early in her career, her “country” years, listen to a few of her songs. They were not my cuppa tea any more than Star Wars was and is—I am not tweenee or a teenie either demographically or metaphorically—though I did find them OK and decently written. I am not, in other words, one of those tweenees or teenagers who ties his or her—mostly hers I suspect—identity to a celebrity and to an intimate stranger, a term film critic Richard Schickel used to describe the relationship between fans and the simulated celebrities they tied their identities to and sanctify as secular saints in the process. Swift, of course, has become one of those intimate stranger celebrity “saints” to millions.

I don’t know whether Swift sings live during her concerts though I would not be surprised if she didn’t or if she kind of didn’t. Many contemporary popular “artists”, after all, often sing to pre-recorded vocals, sometimes multiple pre-recorded vocals and are thus actually live only partially or only occasionally. Welcome to the world of postmodernist “live" popular music and its technologically driven spectacle. What I do know is that when I heard her sing at a charity even for those devastated by the bush fires in Australia I was not impressed by her voice though I should note that as a rock fan who likes Rush and Acca Dacca voices have never been a big deal for me. I don’t know whether she used or uses autotone or other forms of technology to beautify her voice because the tweenie and teenie masses now expect it in this age of the increasing automatisation of musical performers in the pop music world, something that does bother me but then I never wanted to be a cyborg.

What I also know is that when Swift is seen as being defamed, as being profaned, by others, her tweenie and tennie fans mobilise into an army who rush to the defence of their beloved intimate stranger on social media sites like YouTube and Facebook. This time they are rushing to defend her against accusations that she is not playing live, an accusation that has been made before against Swift. One of the many defenders of the Totem Taylor faith which I recently saw on YouTube argued that Swift had put an end to the lip synch controversy when, during a recent concert in London, she praised her band who, she claimed, played live for three and one half hours a night. 

The thing is that this apologia and polemic by Swift doesn’t put an end to the controversy. The claim that Swift clearly showed she was live in London is a hypothesis that has neither been confirmed or falsified by the empirical evidence yet. It may have been confirmed for those who have emotional and identity ties to the secular saint they clearly adore but knee jerk faith in a saint is not empirical evidence. It is ideological “confirmation”.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Culture, Ideology, and Social Blindness

 

There are a lot of problems on full display in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube to see if one wants to and is able to. By and large, many if not most “reactors”, including the most intelligent and educated amongst them, display, on observation, a limited knowledge of the history of popular music, the political contexts of popular music, the cultures of popular music, the geographies of popular music, and the economic contexts of popular music. 

There are actually several“reactors” with a degree of reflexivity who actually realise the fact that they have a limited knowledge of the realities of popular music. This is why many make the argument that they want to come to whatever they are reacting to tabula rasa, with a blank slate, so there is no need for them to do research on a popular music song. There is, admittedly, a certain logic, if one of the multiple cultural logics that are out there, to this apologetic. It is a logic that leads to a practise that is not that dissimilar from the iron cage of popular music listening those of us who grew up with popular music and particularly rock and roll—which was more broadly conceptualised than it is today thanks to market segmentation and listener prejudices—were locked into at the time. We came to the songs we heard from an artist for the first time with limited knowledge of that artist. We, after all, lived in the world before the brave new digital media when new bands and new music really were new to us. We really did hear the music of these new bands somewhat tabula rasa. 

That said, we quickly developed prejudices about artists and bands and music we came to like or dislike, normatively grounded prejudices that impacted whether we continued to listen to or purchase the product of particular new artists then or in the future. I, for instance, fell in love with the Beatles when I was a kid and first heard one of their songs by on top 40 AM radio—the dominant form of the radio species that we listened to at the time--in 1963. I would go on to purchase every Beatles album and many of the extended plays and singles the Beatles released over the years. 

I also, as we humans tend to do in our more naive years—naive years that sadly never end for many—developed a manichean tinged binary related to the Beatles along with my childhood friends who also liked, or perhaps better put, loved the Beatles. This manichean binary led us, defensively, to dislike certain other bands or artists because we loved the Beatles. For us, the Beatles, were sacred and bands that competed with the Beatles artistically and economically, like the Rolling Stones, were profane. 

This manichean binary didn’t last, at least for me, very long as I quickly came to love songs by the Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, and a host of others. I quickly came to the normative conclusion that good music was good music regardless of whether it was by the Beatles or not. That said, I did continue to have a preference for certain genres and styles of rock and roll and I did have other musical prejudices that lasted for some time over the course of my life such as my unwillingness to listen to country music, something the Beatles changed my mind about when they covered a song by Buck Owens, a country star at the time, which I liked a lot.

The obvious problem, of course, with the tabula rasa argument proffered by “reactor” apologists, and the tabula rasa practise of us young music lovers, a problem you recognise when you start thinking empirically, is that we never come to anything, including music, tabula rasa. We are, for example, influenced in the music we have aleady listened to, either positively or negatively, by our parents, by our peers—something a recent experiment pointed up again recently--music gatekeepers, the radio, and by the television, for example. This means that what may sound reasonable initially—I don’t want to prejudice my listening experience of a song for the first time—isn’t really all that reasonable let alone rational from an empirical perspective. Instead it looks like a justification and rationalisation for blissful ignorance about, for instance, music cultures, music economics, and the politics of music.

I want to focus briefly on “reactor” ignorance, an ignorance revealed in their YouTube reactions, about how the economics of the music industry has and still does impact the music that is produced by the mainstream music industry. There are several “reactors” on YouTube whose YouTube “reactions”—they certainly do not constitute criticism, historical analysis, or the fruits of research and thus probably violate fair use or fair dealing exceptions with respect to copyright laws—betray an ignorance of the economics of the music industry. Those who whinge and whine about fade outs in popular music, for instance, miss the fact that one of the reasons for fade outs had to do with the fact that well into the 1970s singles dominated the popular music industry marketplace. A the time, it was a statement of faith among the suits who ran the music industry that singles, which were considered their profit making bread and butter, should be two to three minutes in length and no longer which is why Focus’s "Hocus Pocus”, Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4”, and Yes’s “Roundabout”,  to chose three examples among many possible ones, were released in shortened single versions to the mass radio audience in the United States, a mass radio audience which still listened to AM Top 40 radio and over which DJ’s, many of whom seemed less like music lovers than empty shils for the suits who ran the radio stations for profit, and whose reason for being seemed to little more than to spread the gospel of business advertising and the next single you should buy, itself a form of promotion. Speaking of talking over records, in the thank god for small mercies category, “reactors”, who are the equivalent of the AM DJs of today, at least, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, stop a song at some point or points so they can talk “over” it. Ain’t the brave new digital world wonderful?

In the early days of FM radio you could, at least for awhile, hear the longer versions of “Hocus Pocus”, “25 or 6 to 4”, “Roundabout”, and other longer songs, on free form countercultural FM radio in the late 60s and even into the early 1970s. where the DJ’s tended to be music lovers like ourselves. In the Dallas of my youth, for instance, I could and did hear bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues, the Mothers of Invention, and others, on  a free form FM radio station in Arlington. Then the commercialisation of FM radio set in. This commercialisation and eventually centralisation turned free form countercultural FM stations into clones of AM radio and created an alternative format for listeners of an increasingly segmented and increasingly limitedly defined rock music landscape, album oriented rock, a form of rock that was harder than musics that were increasingly defined as pop. On AOR FM stations one could, for example,  listen to certain new album cut, album cuts that became the equivalent of singles on Top 40 radio. Additionally, pressure was put on the progressive rock bands one heard on countercultural FM radio who were told by the suits in no uncertain terms that they needed to write singles that the suits could sell in mass quantities to a mass audience increasingly defined in increasingly segmented terms. Those who were able do that, like Kansas and Genesis and eventually even Yes, did.

This ignorance of the industry emphasis on singles and the history of the realities of rock radio is just the tip of the ignorance appears to be bliss iceberg that one finds in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube. “Reactors” seem not to know much about the history of payola in popular music (something that still goes on if in a roundabout way as Rick Beato and company note), the hierarchical structure of the music industry with its multiple ways to take percentages from artists for their “services”, the impact or lack of impact of the FCC on media, the political power of economic elites including music industry elites, the history of rock genres, the different cultures of rock including the culture that grew up around the ideology of authenticity in the mid and late 1960s and early 70s, the role popular music elites played and play in how artists sound in the studio and in what they wore or wear, and the different lyrical strategies of popular artists (satire, parody, metaphor, allegory, and so on), to note only a few of the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the world of popular music that influence how popular music is made and what it “says".

In the end, of course, none of these empirical facts really matter to most “reactors” on YouTube. Most “reactors” live in a mental world where they have been socialised not to look beyond more individualist factors and a world in which they have been socialised for conformity only to consider whether one likes or doesn’t like an artist and his, her, or their musics. And while liking or disliking something, including popular media on social media reaction videos in the brave new digital world, has been impacted by economics, specifically, the fact that “reactors” make advertising monies along with social media outlets like YouTube, most “reactors” seem to have been able to convince themselves (false consciousness?, the social and cultural construction of reality? rationalisations?) that they aren’t pandering to their demographic for the purposes of making a “buck” even though many, including some of the more genial and knowledgeable “reactors” who have turned themselves into marketable commodities, clearly are. Whether they actually love the music they are listening to, thus, is an open question.

And so it goes…

“Informants": I “observed" a host of reactors including but not limited to Rob Squad Reactions, Andy and Alex, BrittReacts, DatOne Reacts, Mike and Ginger, Hanier Family, VerdyChannel, HarriBest Reactions, Trash Talkers, MyIndie Productions, Dana’s Faith, DashyXDandDadReacts, Kerry Tries It, The Wolf HunterZ (a and b), AileenSenpai, Bars and Barbells, Millie Mochi Tunes, JustLP, Reactor2Drummer, Sing with Emma, the Charismatic Voice, Vinand Sori, the Thamesmen Too, Virgin Rock, Lost in Vegas, Maggie Renee, the Vocalyst, Brad and Lex, L33Reacts, Archive Jem Reacts, Life with Recklezz, Asia and B.J., Sight After Dark, John Slop, NicknLex, Brit Pops React, Rayactions, Trash Talkers, Jamel_AKA_Jamal, Alex Hefner, Dean Bros, Virgin Rock.

It needs to be noted that many of the “reactors" on YouTube also “react” on Patreon, a monetisation site, which, according to Patreon’s capitalists, allow those using their service to create “community”.  On Patreon commodities, in the form of human reactors, are commodified and extract moneies from "patrons". Though I have not visited Patreon it is clear that many commodified “reactors” have their “patrons" vote for what they will listen to or watch and react to next and offer them “rewards” for “patronising” them via monthly financial support. The owners of Patreon, of course, take a cut (8% to 12% “commission”) from these “reactor” labourers” patron pledges. Some “reactors” sell “merchandise” to supplement their income.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cult of Cultural Correctness

 

Humans as we should know by now, well at least intellectual and scholars should know by now, are the product, as Charles Darwin told us years ago, of biology and environment, our biological, political, economic, cultural, and geographical environments. Humans are thus not only their DNA, though many still seem to want to believe that they are. They are also, and to a great extent, what they have been socialised to be, which is why so many of those socialised for conformity preach or parrot the gospels of “democracy”, right wing populism, liberalism, radicalism, capitalism, and exceptionalism in a core nation like the United States. 

One can readily see and hear such political, economic, cultural, and geographic correctness channelled in “reaction" videos on social media sites like YouTube. I was recently reminded of the interpretive power of socialised cultural correctness while watching and listening to a “reaction” video to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, and Martin Landau, a film considered a classic by many if not most film historians and critics, by a reactor who is clearly neither a film historian or a film criti who calls her “channel" Danielle Baggett after, one assumes, herself. In this “reaction" video Baggett and her father “react" to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest at the request of Baggett’s grandfather.

There is a lot to unpack culturally and ideologically in this nearly one hour “reaction” video. There is, for instance, the limited attentiveness of both Baggett fils and Baggett pere to the narrative and plot of the film. Both miss for example, the fact that Grant’s character, Roger Thornhill, is mistaken for the US government spy George Kaplan, who turns out to be a fabricated fake of one of the alphabet soup of US intelligence agencies in order to deflect attention away from the real government agent who has infiltrated a gang of spies in the film. Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan because he calls for a page who is paging for George Kaplan at that exact instant setting in motion the Kafkaesque plot of the film, a theme—the wrong man theme--Hitchcock was deeply enamoured of and which is present in other Hitchcock films like 1935’s The 39 Steps. In this they are following a path well trod already by previous “reactors” to North by Northwest who also generally miss this critical and crucial plot point. 

While this limited attention to films is interesting and certainly raises questions about the nature of human attentiveness and attention spans, which, claim some commentators, have declined in the postmodernist age of fast paced television commercials, fast paced MTV commercials masquerading as music videos, Hollywood films that mimic the rhythms and lack of depth of postmodernist television commercials, and social media, which seems made to order for the the commercial style with its lack of depth and its associated limited attention spans, I want to focus in this essay on how cultural correctness over determines how these two “reactors" and by extension most YouTube “reactors” in general “react" to films, television shows, and music. These culturally correct “reactions”, one can compelling argue, tell us more about the cultural contexts of the “reactors” than they do about that to which they are “reacting” to, something I think that is clearly the case in the Baggett “reaction” video to North by Northwest. Before I dig into this, however, I should note that I don’t think the attention spans of most humans have ever been that long particularly since so much of what humans “do” becomes embodied and becomes, as a consequence, mechanical or rote. Just ask a cashier in a grocery store.

It should be clear by now to anyone who reads and watches reactions to films, including that of the Baggett’s, who reads polemical writings on films, and who listens to those who make films, including actors, talk about how they approach their roles in films, that the ideology of realism, whether physical or emotional, in cinema is one of the major if not the major polemical aesthetic approach to film that has been demagogued and polemicised for over the years. For many “reactors”, critics, and film personnel, films should be and/or feel real or natural. Note the normative nature of this polemic. This cultural ideology, which is a social and cultural construct, this notion that film and television should be realistic (which is different from real which film, even documentary film, can never be though it can be more or less naturalistic), is a debate in art aesthetics, of course, that has been going on for years and will be going on for many years more. Realists, for instance, argue that art, be it poetry, literature, painting, photography, film, or television, should represent visual or psychological reality while surrealists, to take an example of another approach to art, polemicise for an art that is more dreamlike and less linear and hence more truthful. It is also a debate that most social media “reactors” are blissfully unaware of inscribed within the film should be real cultural ideology that they almost always are. It is this culturally and ideologically correct baseline—that film should be “real”-- that undergirds the Baggett “reaction” video and most “reaction” videos on YouTube.

It is this socially and culturally constructed notion of “realism” that leads Baggett fils et pere, who have been socialised into a notion that films should and should only be realistic—the Church and Cult of Film Realism--to “criticise” North by Northwest for its representation of a romance between Cary Grant, who was 54 at the time he starred in North by Northwest, and Eva Marie Saint, who plays Eve Kendall the government spy who infiltrates the “gang that included James Mason and Martin Landau, who was 35 when she starred in North by Northwest. It is this socially and culturally constructed notion of “realism” that leads the Baggett’s and others like them—which is most of the “reactors” on YouTube-- to whinge and whine almost non-stop about petty irrelevancies like why would he, she, or they do that or that would never happen about something that is inherently unreal, film, which like all art creates its own multiple realities, rather than on how, for instance, the story of the film is constructed, on  the nature of the acting in the film, on the metaphors the film is playing with, or on how the film is an allegory of x, y, or z.

There are a number of things fascinating about this cultural correctness. While it is certainly historically and sociologically important to note that Hollywood did and perhaps still does have a tendency to pair older men and younger women in many of their films—think Funny Face with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn from 1957 or Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn from 1954, just to name two examples among many—most reactors to do not emphasise the historical and sociological aspects of this tendency. They point it out for normative and polemical purposes. They point up such relationships, in other words, to note how dreadful or”eeeeew”--a “scholarly” term that is right up there in “critical" and “analytical" intellectual content with that other term commonly used by many “reactors”, "cheesy", many “reactors" utter in their “reactions”-- such relationships are.

There is, of course, a wonderful paradox in this culturally and ideologically correct criticism of the relationship between Thornhill/Kaplan/Grant and Kendall/Saint in North by Northwest and other Hollywood movies of the past, a paradox those who make what they think are realist “criticisms” generally ignore. In this instance, the fact they typically ignore is that there have been for millennia and continue to be relations between older men and younger women for a variety of reasons including cultural (the love thing), political (I want to have a relationship with someone who shares my political culture), economic (I want to marry someone with money), and geographical (geography, like class, limits one's relationship options). but we should never forget that demagogues and polemicists, which is what most social media “reactors” are, are rarely if ever interested in empirical facts. They want their normative cake so they can eat it too and far to often make you eat it as well because they, for the most part, believe that they are in the right and have god, whoever they consider that god to be, “sacred" or secular, on their side. 

Aren’t humans fascinating? I have been studying them for almost sixty years along with their contradictions and hypocrisies—the tendency for pots to call kettles black and vice versa—and they never cease to amaze me regardless of their political, economic, cultural, or geographic stripe. Welcome to life lived as if it should be a “theocratic" highway.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Reactors Misreact to Harold and Maude

As I have noted before watching reaction videos on social media forms like YouTube reveals a lot about the cultural contexts, ideological contexts, and mentalities of reactors and, in actuality, generally much less about what reactors are reacting to. Recently I watched a number of reactors “react” to the 1971 black comedy Harold and Maude written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby and what these social media“reactions” reveal about their social media “reactors" is, as always, fascinating and enlightening.

Catch-up Packets, for instance, like so many ill and limitedly educated “kiddies" today--I am using the term “kiddie" literally and metaphorically here—are, as their “reaction” reveals, fundamentalists or literalists who, as is typically the case with “reactors", can’t get beyond the most basic surface level of a film. As a consequence they miss the rather obvious point of the Harold and Maude. They spend much if not most of their “reaction” time making pointless and irrelevant remarks about irrelevant things like how Maude is profaning the sacred occasion of a funeral, failing, in the process, to understand how our perceptions of funerals, sacred or profane, are social and cultural constructs. They spend their “reaction" time pontificating about the unrealistic representation of Harold and Maude running from the cops in the film, about Harold’s treatment of the dates his mother sets up for him in the film, about Maude’s decision to end her life in the film, and so in. They, in other words, apply a notion of “realism” to a film, a notion of “realism" one of Harold’s dates actually makes fun of in the film to the film, because they have been socialised to believe that realism in film and, by extension, realism in art, is a sacred rule that all films and, by extension, all art, should follow. 

This dogmatic “realism”, an approach to film and by extension art if I can call it that, means that the two “reactors” who make up the YouTube reacting duo of Catch-up Packets don’t get the contextual countercultural rebellion against authority aspects of the film though Maude when she recalls her history of activism points this up at one point in the film. It means that they don’t grasp or comprehend what Harold and Maude actually is, an allegory about death and life, living and not living. As Maude says at one point in the film while she and Harold are at one of their two funerals, summing up the meaning of the film in microcosm, Harold and Maude is about burials and births, about the circle of life. They miss the fact that Maude, despite being a Holocaust survivor, someone who has had brushes with death, and despite being 79, is an allegory of life and that Harold, despite being a young teenager, is an allegory death. They miss the fact that by film’s end old life dies in order to give young death a life to live, something symbolised and expressed in a number of ways in the film including by Maude’s yellow umbrella, by Harold’s rebirth in the vagina sculpture, by Harold going from pale facial colour to increasing lively facial colour as the film progresses, by Harold’s increasingly colourful clothing as the film progresses. and in Harold dancing off in the final scene of the film banjo in hand enjoying his new life.

Anna Chipman Reactions reaction, like that of Catch-up Packets, is rent through with the realist fallacy. Though she gets, to some extent the allegorical nature of Harold and Maude, that Maude, for example, represents life and Harold death, gets that Harold’s countenance becomes less pale through the course of the film and, in the process, foregrounds that Harold becomes more alive as the film progresses thanks to his relationship with Maud, and gets the theatricality of Harold's obsession with the spectacle of death, she mistakes Harold’s fascination with the spectacle of death for suicidal tendencies and pontificates about the dangers of such tendencies. She mistakenly blames Harold’s mum, who she sees as a latter day version of Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, for missing the suicidal tendencies in her son, suicidal tendencies that are not actually there, a misreading that is clearly over determined by her own admitted battles with depression. 

This imposition of the personal on Harold and Maude shows how viewers often see films through their own biographies rather than for what they actually are and miss, in the process, what a film actually says or reveals in its actual text. She misses, for example, what Harold’s mum does not miss, namely that Harold’s enactments of death are absurd. I enjoyed being dead, Harold tells Maude at one point in the film. Additionally, by noting the awe inspiring nature of the Golden Gate National Cemetery Chipman fails to grasp the sixties anti-authoritarian and anti-war aspects of the film and, of course, fails to comprehend how the sacred is socially and culturally constructed when she comments that military cemeteries are "awe inspiring". For the director of Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, on the other hand, military cemeteries were profane and pointed up the absurdity of nationalism and of war, something pointed up, for example, by Maude’s history of activism for social justice causes and by the fact that Maude is a victim of Nazi nationalism. In the end, Chipman’s reaction to Harold and Maude shows that many contemporary reactors not only impose an ideologically grounded realism inappropriately on an artistic text they also impose their own ideologies inappropriately on an artistic text as the fetishised becomes the normative and the normative, in turn, becomes the descriptive, something that should be bass ackwards. And  it shows that many if not most "reactors" have difficulty grasping and comprehending absurdism, black comedy, satire, and parody in films, all of which are present in Harold and Maude and all of which go unmarked by Anna Chipman Reactions.

The reactor James Vs. Cinema, a self-identified filmmaker, barely scratches the surface of the Harold and Maude and like other “reactors” before him and after him is a bit to fundamentalist in his interpretations of the film. He gets the humour of the film, even some of the dark humour of Harold and Maude, though not all of it, and he grasps that the film, on the literal level, is about Maude teaching Harold how to live. However, he misses the allegorical aspects of the film, the anti-authority aspect of the film, and many of the absurdist aspects of the film. He does explore the mise-en-scene of the film and how it is another way the medium of the film communicates its message, something one would expect of a filmmaker.

One of the more interesting and initially amusing reactions on YouTube to Harold and Maude is that of Screentime with Phil and Erika. As Phil tells us in the introduction to their reaction to the film he and Erika are, with the help of The Ringer, an online cyber magazine that lists the fifty “best” romantic comedies since 1970, watching the fifty best Rom-Coms since 1970. The Ringer puts Harold and Maude at number forty-six in its poll of the greatest Rom-Coms since 1970. Apart from the inherent absurdity of such a list—these lists are always highly selective and grounded in a lack of comparative empirical analysis—the notion of Harold and Maude as a Rom-Com is somewhat misleading since it is more allegory than Rom-Com. As Phil and Erika adjust to what Harold and Maude really is, however, they recognise the complexity and depth of the film, Harold and Maude’s dark humour, and get the power of Maude, a victim of the Holocaust, being more life oriented than Harold grasping in the process that Maude is the life force in the film even if they miss a bit of the life-death-rebirth allegorical nature of the film though Erika does get how Ashby and company used changes in clothing to represent Harold becoming more alive thanks to Maude, including the anti-authority allegory in the film as a consequence, perhaps, of the residue of the realist fallacy in their “reaction" that dominates so much thinking about film and television among far too many reactors today including, if less so, Phil and Erika.

There are "reviews" of Harold and Maude on YouTube that I haven’t largely explored at this point. I did watch one of some thirty minutes in duration—most of the others are a fraction of that length—from the review duo of Off the Shelf Reviews, a review that offered an insightful, enlightening, and well argued close analysis, and a review that might make one hypothesise that reviewers generally know more about how films actually work than reactors for a variety of reasons. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is indeed the case.

Miserable Political Experience: Musings on Politics, Academics, and Political Science

 

When I was an intellectually younger man so one of the major works in American political science was Yale Political Scientist Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of how American government actually worked in one American community, Yale’s home city of New Haven, Connecticut, a book published by Yale University Press in 1961.  Dahl’s book took a consensus and conflict theory approach, the two major theoretical approaches to politics (and by extension American economics and culture presumably) in the social sciences at the time, arguing that New Haven, and by extension the US, was pluralist and stratified and hierarchical in its interest group centred politics.

Who Governs, which made Dahl an intellectual and academic celebrity and superstar, would prove to be a critical jumping off point for empirical and normative theoretical analyses and critiques of American politics in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the era when I took my undergraduate degree at a university that will henceforth remain nameless because of its increasing theo-fascism. The late 1960s, of course, saw a revival of Marxist theory and practise in the US in American intellectual life and American academia and many Marxist critics of Dahl’s work and his later theory of polyarchy. grounded in his early work, saw Dahl as too much of a consensus theorist. Dahl, however, was hardly, like Max Weber, a purely consensus or functionalist theorist since he argued that there were power inequalities in American political culture. Some interest groups, Dahl argued, had more power, authority, and hence influence than others. But then attacks in the social sciences during the long sixties on consensus and functionalist theorists was as much in the heady and overgeneralising academic air just as it was in the countercultural air of core nations more broadly at the time and this almost revivalistic oxygen did not really breed more nuanced critiques. 

For many of those who did recognise that Dahl was both a consensus and a conflict theorist it was Dahl’s conception of power that many of them had a problem with. Many of Dahl’s critics found it to limited and limiting. Subsequently, of course, the conception of power and its adjunct authority has broadened in the social sciences since Dahl and this is all for the good in my opinion. Power is not only about getting A to do B, as Dahl had it. It is also discursive. Humans are, as contemporary studies of power have shown, embedded in socially and culturally constructed webs thanks to socialisation, for instance, that rule out certain ideological options by marginalising them and silencing them, something that should be remembered in these looney politically and ideologically correct days on increasingly fascist university campuses. As such power, in both its social and cultural constructionist discursive and rhetorical form and in its ability to make A do B form, is central to traditional, modern, and postmodern societies with their class, ethnic-racial, gender, and age inequalities.

As I have grown older I have become increasingly convinced that conscious ideology plays a very limited role in how American (and core nation) politics actually works and functions, something that some if not many academics and intellectuals embedded as they are in their own little fetishised world  of Enlightenment rationality with education as the means to right thinking enlightenment and subsequently liberation (intellectual and academic nirvana) aren’t likely to agree with me on. There are, of course, a few true believers for who conscious ideological purity is important. Sometimes such ideological purity movements can give rise to a cult centred around a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense. I give you the contemporary Republican party which has become an institutionalised cult centred around their holy figure of Donald Trump, their Tangholio. For most potential voters, however, I am increasingly convinced, fatigue, tiredness, and weariness of the party in power plays an important role in who they vote against and who they consequently vote for.

Such weariness of those in power, of course, works hand in hand and hand in glove with the demagogic polemical attack strategies of those prominent political forces not in power. In a media world with a steady diet where those prominent and elites out of power attack those in power for all sorts of political, economic, and cultural woes, with their sky is falling sensationalistic if it bleeds if leads apocalyptic rhetoric coming from polemicists and demagogues and which has become central to the communication sphere, works quite well, as it always had, with the masses. As such, the social and cultural construction of weariness and tiredness is quite easy to manufacture and, in turn, manipulate. We can readily see this process working in contemporary Britian where those who once voted Tory, even in areas traditional Labour geographies which switched to Conservative in the last election, look ready to switch to Labour to throw the bastards out in the upcoming election. We can see it in Canada where the Liberals of Trudeau, who won two successive elections, are running behind the Conservatives once again. Shades of Harper Tories. We can see it in attack dog politics in the United States today.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to assert that political culture is nothing but fatigue politics. Luck and being in the right place at the right time are factors in elections. The recent Labour victory in the United Kingdom, for instance was aided and abetted not only by fatigue with the Tories after fourteen years of Conservative rule in the UK but also by scandals in the Conservative Party, the incompetence of the Conservative Party, specifically the incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and scandals in the Scottish National Party, all of which aided the Labour Party. 

Additionally, there are, as I noted earlier, true believers who operate on the elite faithful and elite demagogic political levels and on the mass political level in the core nations. There are a cadre of true believers among the masses. Political culture in core nations is also, as the celebrations of D-Day today show, symbolic, grounded in cultural meanings even if those cultural meanings, as they have been on this “sacred" D-Day, rather and necessarily so vague since one can interpret things like “freedom” and “liberty’ in multiple ways while others can see such meanings for what they are, the ways and means great powers like Imperial America, Imperial Russia, Imperial China and wanna be Imperial Europe manipulate the masses via vague declarations that play on national and regional faiths and broad notions of what has been socialised into some as profane.

The Books of My Life: The Limits of Power

The United States, born out of a revolt against monarchical and parliamentary "tyranny"-- taxation without representation--has long had a collective sense of its own uniqueness, its own chosenness, and its own destiny. For many Americans the United States, the first new nation according to Seymour Martin Lipset, was a light unto a world dominated by tyrannies of various kinds including monarchical, imperial, and theocratic. For most Americans the United States was a shining example unto a world in chains, a city on a hill that showed that it was possible to throw off the chains of political, economic, and religious oppression that bound them and start anew in a wilderness that, of course, wasn't really a wilderness.

Paradoxically, the new United States of America, a self proclaimed empire of liberty, a state born out of the need for freedom from tyranny, was also an empire and hence, at least potentially, tyrannical. It was an empire born out of geographical imperialism. It was an empire that spread from its east coast hearths into indigenous lands beyond the Appalachians, into the equally imperial French lands beyond the Appalachians, Spanish lands to its south and to its west, and Mexican lands to its east and southwest throughout the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. It was an empire that spread in a variety of  ways including by treaty, by robbery, by flim flammery, by purchase, much of it coerced, and by military might. It was a new empire that warned other older empires in its Monroe Doctrine (an imperial doctrine that parallels the near beyond of imperial Russia) that it and it alone guaranteed the "freedom" of the Americas from the tyranny of imperialism, a doctrine which, at the time that it was proclaimed was an act of hubris, self-righteousness, and self-satisfaction, a treaty that only became a reality when President Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary to it, a corollary added after the United States had become the dominant political, economic, and cultural imperial hegemon in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine also made the US the cop on the American block a role the US has played ever since in Latin America and the Caribbean  where it has "intervened" on a number of occasions to "lend a helping hand" to those "poor backward nations" that just don't look like or act like chosen America.

As an empire born out of the British empire and fed by the same ideologies of uniqueness, chosenness, and mission of the mother country and impacted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by modernity including bureaucratisation, industrialisation, rationalisation and the bureaucratisation and the industrialisation of the military, the United States would eventually come to mirror the very European imperial great powers they hoped to liberate themselves from. In the late nineteenth century the United States, after its war with Spain, spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, the latter in response, in part, to another rising empire, the empire of Japan. As the empire of liberty spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, an empire that had political, economic, cultural, and military dimensions, American elites made sure that those who lived in the Spanish lands into which the empire of liberty spread didn't have the same liberties and freedoms that those citizens of god's chosen had. The empire of liberty was, after all, an empire of Anglo-Saxon liberty, a major reason why the United States wanted, at times, usually in periods in which there were tensions between the British and the Americans, to annex British North America and Canada to it but not the Spanish and Portuguese regions of the Americas beyond a few islands of "strategic" naval importance in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The Great War and World War II drew the United States increasingly into the global affairs of other European empires. The empire of liberty helped liberate Europe from supposed Prussian militarist tyranny in World War I and it helped liberate Europe and the Pacific from Nazi and Japanese tyranny in World War II. After the war it helped Western Europe and Japan recover and rebuild, helping turn Western Europe and Japan into political, economic, and cultural mirrors of itself in the process. This American helping hand would have long term consequences for America's economy. After World War II the empire of liberty, which was always an empire just like any other empires of the past despite the exceptionalism rhetoric, was an empire, along with other empire "less agreeable" empire, the USSR, helped decide not only the fate of nations and states--shades of the Congress of Vienna--but, as one of the cops on the world block and eventually the dominant cop on the global block, world cops that helped ensure that the world the empires created behaved itself in the way that the great powers thought it should. If the countries of the world didn't obey their “beneficent" parents they were, of course, taken to the wood shed by Big Daddy Smith America and Little Uncle Jones, the USSR

The post-World War II era saw the empire of liberty confront another "tyrannical" empire that trampled on the political, economic, and religious freedoms of its people and which threatened, according to true believing ideologues and manipulative demagogues the freedoms of Americans. As is always the case with great power interactions the Cold War, as the sometimes cold and sometimes hot conflict between the US and the USSR was called, was a tit for tat war. It was a war in which each side in that struggle mirrored, to some extent, the other. Both the US and USSR, for instance, were modern bureaucratic states that were, as a consequence, oligarchic, they were both states that had expanded into frontiers, they were both states with notions of their own uniqueness, chosenness, and mission to the world, and they were both states with military-industrial complexes that fed the Cold War each was fighting. When the American imperial Smith's, for instance, united its Atlantic allies or clients into a military alliance the imperial Jones's of the USSR had to follow suit creating in the process an alliance of its own in Eastern and Middle Europe. This is not to say that there weren't important differences between the two great powers who now fancied themselves superpowers (a notion of empire, I suppose, suitable for the comic book age), for there were important differences between the two. The USSR, for instance, was a more unipolar centralised bureaucratic state while the US, though dominated by its economic bureaucracy, had a political bureaucracy that once upon a time, at least on occasion, had a degree of autonomy,  and, on occasion, usually periods of domestic crisis, asserted this autonomy.

To deal with perceived Soviet geographical, political, economic, and cultural ambitions the United States adopted a strategy of containment and deterrence, strategies indebted, to some extent, to the writings of American social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr if in a more manichean and simplistically vulgar way than Niebuhr often intended. The US used a variety of strategies, including the threat of nuclear attack, economic aid or bribery, and covert operations, strategies also used by the Soviets, of course, to contain the Soviet empire and deter it from further expansion. As the Cold War thawed with the death of Stalin, the United States and the USSR added detente, a live and let live policy, to their arsenal of interactions with the USSR but always with an eye on gaining some advantage over the enemy other, something Nixon and Kissinger were able to initiate particularly thanks to their opening to Communist China.

The US, though its demagogues generally refused to admit this over the years, was always the dominant of the post WWII superpowers and hence had major advantages in the Cold War. It was economically, technologically, and militarily superior to the more technologically backward USSR. By the post-Stalin 1950s, in fact, technology was playing an increasingly important role in the war of words of the Cold War even if for many the struggle was more of a morality play than anything else. By the 1950s the superpower contest was increasingly being fought out on consumption terrain, something symbolised by the kitchen debate between American vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, a debate in which Nixon touted the  technological and hence economic superiority of America thanks to its technologically “sophisticated" consumer society. By doing this Nixon helped create a variant of the Cold War, a variant in which the notion of the freedom to consume consumer goods increasingly became freedom itself. The Cold War, at least on one level, had become a war in which the plentiful consumer society of the United States was counterpointed to its opposite, the austere and rationing USSR, geerally eliding, of course, the fact that the USSR had been devastated materially and physically by World War II. Demagoguery on the March.

Historian Andrew Basievich, in his The Limits to Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), makes much of the conflation of freedom and the freedom to consume in post-World War II America. For Basievich this linkage in the wake of crises associated with guns and butter Vietnam era America, the oil crises of the 1970s--both of which brought inflation--America's transformation from a creditor nation to a debtor nation and its policy of increasing military spending while cutting taxes, maintaining the welfare state, and building up the military--a delirium Bacevich traces to the faux conservative Reagan era--gave birth  to a profligate America living beyond its means thanks to its lines of credit. At the same time as a profligate America came into being, argues Bacevich, Americans too began living beyond their means thanks to their individual lines of credit and their credit cards, credit cards that became increasingly easy to obtain in the wake of the Reagan era deregulation of financial institutions of various stripes.

This ideological linking of freedom with consumption, in turn, argues Basievich, gave rise to a second crises in post-1960s and post-oil crises America, namely, the necessity for politicians of all stripes, if they wanted to get elected, re-elected, and attain or maintain power, to play the we will give you what you want card again and again in order to get elected or re-elected and hence acquire or maintain power. This makes it increasingly difficult, according to Basievich, for politicians to deal rationally and realistically with the ever increasing debts and deficits of a US living off the credit of others And this, in turn, has, says Basievich, led to an increasingly delusional, dissembling, and corrupt American political culture.

Closely linked to an America living beyond its means crisis are two other crises, claims Bacievich, a political crisis and, by extension, a military crisis. In the wake of World War II, claims Bacevich, the United States morphed into a military-industrial-national security state dominated by an imperial presidency that linked economic and political oligarchs in a number of ways. Many corporations, for instance, though Basevich doesn't really explore this, increasingly relied on research subsidies and government contract subsidies for military weapons creating a socialist welfare state in which wealth was redistributed from taxpayers to wealthy American corporations in the name of national security. It was a national security state that increasingly claimed that any enemy of the US was an enemy of freedom including the freedom to consume.

In an American dominated by consumption practises and ideologies, argues Bacevich, the imperial presidency increasingly, and even more increasingly after 9/11, used its military might to assure, by "convincement" or coercion, that the American way of life and the American way of consumption continued despite threats to the empire of consumption out there in the wider world. As a consequence the Cold War doctrine of containment and deterrence withered away to be replaced in the War on Terror and its dogma of the preemptive first strike. Take them out before they can take you out became the mantra of the warhawks of the war on terror ensconced in the pleasant confines of the imperial presidency and who, of course, rarely, if ever, took part in the battles of the war for "freedom". This led to an attack on Iraq that was justified by a tissue of lies because the warhawks wanted Saddam Husssein gone. Accompanying this policy change were related declines in the American willingness to engage in diplomacy, a decline in American consultation with its allies, and an increase in the arrogance and hubris of America's unelected policy"experts" that advised the American imperial president, an arrogance grounded ultimately in the American civil religion.

Bacievich has written an interesting, enlightening, and well argued introduction to post-WWII and post-9/11 American imperial policy. I appreciated Bacevich's neo-Nieburhianism. The Limits of Power is not only an empirical analysis of the American consumer and national secutiry state but a neo-Nieburhian jeremiad against the use of the military as a big stick to to help maintain the American consumer oriented way of life. Bacevich urges America to return to a more Niebuhrian containment and deterrence strategy, one that opts for diplomacy over military force but, at the same time, is conscious that military force might have to be used when necessary but in a way consistent with the doctrine of just war. I appreciated his exploration of the nationalist religious faith that undergirds the American sense of being special, of being unique, of being exceptional, and of being called by god, nature, or history to spread the gospel of Americanism to the rest of the world. I appreciated the fact that he was not afraid to point out the obvious hypocrisies of the US including forcing austerity on others but not on itself and its specious justification for dropping nuclear bombs of Japanese civilians during World War II, the it will end the war quicker rationalisation. I appreciated Bacevich noting that the US, after 9/11, discovered that Central Asia was, or so it claimed, essential to American security. I only wish that he had also noted that by redefining Central Asian nations, many of them formerly part of the USSR, as essential to American security and the continuation of the American way of life, the US simultaneously used this as a means to try to box its old enemy, Russia. This get Russia policy, by the way, whether by overt and covert means, has also been at play in the Ukraine, Russia's near beyond, since the disintegration of the USSR and fed into a number of other tensions between the US and Russia. I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of the process by which the freedom to consume was incorporated into American notions of liberty and freedom. I appreciated him asking readers to think about whether the freedom of nations and individuals to be profligate is a freedom too far. Finally, I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of how the US morphed from a creditor nation to debtor nation and the consequences of this affluenza without, apparently, a vaccine to help to fight it or at least contain it. Whether the US can continue to subsidise the profligate American way of life while running in the red is a question that needs to be asked and addressed. On the other hand, I suppose the US can keep on borrowing in order to subsidise the American way of life as long as someone is willing to lend it monies at interest. 

There are a few issues I had with Bacevich's book. Bacievich could, for instance, have put American profligacy and its cultural and ideological scaffolding, individualist narcissism, in the broader context of the rise of modernity and postmodernity. He could have explored American exceptionalism more broadly and comparatively. The American civil religion, after all, is a lot like other forms of exceptionalism around the globe, including that of Canada and New Zealand, with their ethnocentric notions of superiority. When allied with imperialism, these forms of ethnocentrism can be hazardous to human health as the history of empires since Ancient Sumeria show. While Bacievich rightly notes that the American civil or civic faith is a religion with its own universalised articles of faith and its own transcendent catechism to which "real" and "true" Americans are expected to conform, he doesn't really deal with the fact that a fetishised modern capitalism has been central to the American public faith for some time. I wish Bacevich had explored in greater detail how the narcissistic American consumer society links up not only with the imperial presidency but with the American corporate welfare state, a welfare state that invariably promotes weapons production and wars. I wish Bacevich had explored how the impact of deindustrialisation and globalisation with its cheap products made by cheap labour in semi-peripheral countries helped transform America from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. In many ways the cheaper consumer goods that flowed into the US from semi-peripheral states allowed the American middle class and working class to continue consuming despite stagnation in wages and a decline in wages and benefits in a postmodern America now dominated by the poor paying and even poorer available benefits service or retail sector. Needless to say, the increasing importation of consumer goods from sermi-peripheral countries into the US and the decline of manufacturing in the United States hasn't done much for America's trade imbalance. I should note before I go that these criticism may be a bit unfair since The Limits to Power ia a short book of just over two hundred pages which is aimed at a more common denominator than academia but they need to be said.

Whither America? Bacevich hopes for a transformation that allows America and Americans to reflect on the disease of affluenza that afflicts it and them and to reflect on the arrogance that afflicts America and Americans as it did other empires before it. Such reflections, he hopes, will push America and Americans to adopt more responsible and rational monetary policies and to tamp down on the arrogance and parochialism associated with the American civil religion and hence American foreign policy. Cultural transformations, however, often require an economic, political, cultural, demographic,or geographic crisis in order to stimulate change and even then culture is often resistant to change as cultural anthropologists have known for nearly a century. Perhaps a coming debt and deficit crises will make America and Americans more reflexive, more humble, less arrogant, less bullying, more good citizens of the world, and more financially responsible. On the other hand, if the recession of 2008, also driven by hubris, the hubris of many in the investment bank industry that had convinced themselves that they had conquered risk through the innovation of hybrid derivatives (the social and cultural construction of reality), is a guide, the hope that America and Americans will adopt more rational domestic and foreign policies is, to paraphrase Rupert Giles, probably doomed. After all, the 2008 bust, bad as it was, did not come close to effecting a cure for American affluenza because the federal government doled out American taxpayer monies to bail out the too big to fail investment banks who had made bad investments, something that should in itself make us question the faith many have in the rationality of human beings. After a period of woe is us and woe is me America and Americans returned to their happy faced merry consuming ways, just as George Walker Bush had urged them to do after 9/11, and put the re-regulation of the hubris filled profligate investment banks on hold. No more Glass-Steagall for us, I guess. Sorry Oliver, only gruel for you.