ABSTRACT
LITTLE KINGS AND BABY HITLER
This thesis conducts an investigation of the othered child’s position in
society in terms of agency. Within this thesis I plan to investigate the imagined
futures of othered children in comparison with their treatment as teens and young
adults. I’ve borrowed the term ‘progressive present’ from an English grammatical
verb aspect-an aspect that indicates continuing action in the present that will take
place in the future, conveying a clear plan for a transition. I’m using this term for
its literal temporality and figurative suggestion. I wish to differentiate this from
ideas and changes we seek that will affect the distant future; I acknowledge that in
many cases these two ideas of the future are bound up in each other. However,
rhetoric of what I have called the ‘fantasmic future’ often becomes the vehicle
through which changes for the present progressive are either held hostage or
campaigned.
Alyse Nicole Yeargan
August 2015
LITTLE KINGS AND BABY HITLER
by
Alyse Nicole Yeargan
A thesis
submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in English
in the College of Arts and Humanities
California State University, Fresno
August 2015
APPROVED
For the Department of English:
We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student
meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the
university and the student's graduate degree program for the
awarding of the master's degree.
Alyse Nicole Yeargan
Thesis Author
John Beynon
English
Lisa Weston
English
Steve Adisasmito-Smith
English
For the University Graduate Committee:
Dean, Division of Graduate Studies
AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION
OF MASTER’S THESIS
I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in
its entirety without further authorization from me, on the
condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction
absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of
authorship.
X
Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must
be obtained from me.
Signature of thesis author:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people without whom this project would not have been
accomplished. First and foremost I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. John
Beynon who acted as a mentor to me and encouraged this project from beginning
to end. Dr. Beynon, you’ve got a wonderful way of finding meaning and creative
pursuable thoughts in what seems like mindless rambling. Thank you so much for
your support.
I’ve also had the great fortune to be surrounded by friends and family who
are not only supportive but have also helped me to work through my own ideas.
Katrin Boniface, thank you for being my shoulder to lean on and for always
thinking the best of me.
Jessica M.B. Fareri, thank you for always being my cheerleader and editor;
with out you this process would have been so much more of a crisis.
Katie Beberain, thanks for being my travel companion.
Lorena Slocum, you’ve always made me think, thank you for all the
insightful conversations and, of course, for being a wonderful friend.
Jenna Doggett, thank you for always putting up with me.
Lastly, I’d like to thank my Mom and Dad for always encouraging me to
think and do for myself and for doing everything they could to ensure that what I
wanted was always an open possibility for me if I was willing to make it happen.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................ vii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1
The Insupportable, The Cherished, The Queer Child ....................................... 1
CHAPTER 2: THE KIDS ARE [NOT] ALRIGHT: SYSTEMATIC DENIAL
OF LEGACY ................................................................................................. 7
(Re)Producing “-ism”: Sterilization in North Carolina .................................. 14
Living the Dream: What “Can” and What Never Will ................................... 21
CHAPTER 3: PREACHING TO THE GRAVE: NON-REPRODUCTIVE
FUTURITY AND THE DEATH- DRIVE IN ALLEN GINSBERG’S
HOWL .......................................................................................................... 29
‘Awake, arise’: Modern Prophets ................................................................... 30
I Can See For Miles: Visions of America ....................................................... 35
The Wheel in the Sky: Conflicting Futurities ................................................. 37
Is It Only Teenage Wasteland? ....................................................................... 42
CHAPTER 4: PRESENTING A PROGRESSIVE PRESENT: THE FUTURE,
TODAY! ...................................................................................................... 46
Mirrors, Hair Loss, Millennials, Joel Stein and Other Middle-Age
Disappointments................................................................................... 46
Current Occupation: Progressive Existence.................................................... 50
Looking at Agency .......................................................................................... 54
CHAPTER 5: DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO: POSITIVE
DISOBEDIENCE ........................................................................................ 61
Hey Teachers! Leave Those Kids Alone! ....................................................... 65
The Good Lie?................................................................................................. 68
So What? And Other Unanswered Questions ................................................. 70
vi
Page
WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................... 72
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1. “Hopes and Dreams,” Nineteen Letters Long, December 2013 ............. 27
Figure 2. Poster, Adbusters, July 2011 .................................................................. 56
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
The Insupportable, The Cherished, The Queer Child
A friend of mine once asked me “If you could go back in time and kill baby
Hitler, would you do it? I mean, of course, you would do it, right? You could save
millions.” But his question gave me a great deal of pause. Despite the good of
ridding the world of a person who is arguably considered one of the most heinous
villains of modern western culture, I could not agree to this even in the
hypothetical. Most people would agree to the execution of Hitler as an adult. As
an adult he is culpable for his crimes. Hitler the child, however, represents for
society a completely different ideology than that of the villain his adult-self
manifests as in the minds of millions. Baby Hitler is off limits and beyond
culpability for any crimes of the future self, no matter how certain one could be
that the crimes would take place. It is simply impossible to kill baby Hitler. As a
child, Hitler the person is under the protection of the imagined ideal of his
potential. He represents, as all children do, an unattainable fantasmic distant future
in which society will be ideal. The child cannot be executed because a knee-jerk
reaction is to protect the future: it is this response to threats to futurity, which is
afforded to some and denied others, that reveals the way the hegemonic norm uses
reproductive futurity to replicate and perfect the ideals of the hegemonic norm.
Recognition of this sent me on an investigation of the othered child’s
position in society in terms of agency. Within this thesis I plan to investigate the
imagined futures of othered children in comparison with their treatment as teens
and young adults. I formulate a critique against the fantasmic future, but not the
progressive present. I’ve borrowed the term ‘progressive present’ from an English
grammatical verb aspect-- an aspect that indicates continuing action in the present
2
that will take place in the future, conveying a clear plan for a transition. I’m using
this term for its literal temporality and figurative suggestion: when I talk about a
progressive present I’m referring to a near future that is concretely tied to the
present, but I am also toying with the idea of the political progressive, specifically
the political and cultural changes we seek which will affect our present and our
immediate future. I wish to differentiate this from ideas and changes we seek that
will affect the distant future; I acknowledge that in many cases these two ideas of
the future are bound up in each other. However, rhetoric of what I have called the
‘fantasmic future’ often becomes the vehicle through which changes for the
present progressive are either held hostage or campaigned.
I formulate a critique of the fantasmic future-- an idea of the future that
foresees (to the point of farsightedness) a perfecting of culture and the fulfillment
of the American Dream (Berlant 4). I want to reveal the ways in which imagining
and governing a country on this iteration of the future is at best a situation that
results in disappointment and at its worst can lead to or be used in defense of the
systematic dehumanization of peoples. My hope is to map out the toll the idea of
a fantasmic future and the American Dream takes on a person throughout the
trajectory of their life. The rhetoric of the fantasmic future is used to indoctrinate
children into culture, and then inevitably becomes exclusionary to adults who are
seen as ‘unfit’ participants in that future. Freud explains this well in On
Narcissism; he says that the parent is “inclined to suspend in the child’s favor the
operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been
forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were
long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his
parents … the laws of nature and society shall be abrogated in his favor;… ‘His
3
Majesty the baby’ as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfill those
wishful dreams of the parents” (Freud 90).
Freud suggests that the child represents for the parent a way to access goals
and dreams that the parent themselves was unable to obtain. Even if these goals
defy logic the parent is able to maintain an imagined grasp on them through the
idea of their child’s perfection and perceived ability to do anything. Edelman
expands upon this idea in No Future, suggesting that the idealized fantasmic child
is not an individual conceptualization but a societal view of children, in general.
Edelman argues that children come to be used as symbols of a potential fulfillment
of that which society has yet to obtain. Children are denied personal agency as
they are seen as “fantasmic beneficiaries” as opposed to part of a progressive
present, which will soon come to fruition (Edelman, No Future 9).
The narcissistic fantasy of the self1 leaves the subject with what seems like
two options within the symbolic. That is to either attempt to procreate and thereby
put off confronting their own disillusionment with their inability to fulfill and
perfect their culture or fall into the pursuit of jouissance and fully embrace
narcissistic flattery of the self that is the death drive.
The terms jouissance and death drive are both taken from psychoanalytic.
The death drive, originally proposed by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, was defined as an urge towards self-destruction. As Freud describes it
this urge is a violent impulse to return to an inorganic state. Lacan and Edelman
rework this drive, it is not to be confused with suicidal tendencies but rather the
death-drive describes a subject who has devoted themself to the pursuit of pleasure
1 Edelman quotes and builds on Lacan in this theory. See Lacan. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminare of
Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955,
ed. Jaques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli; New York: Norton, 1991
4
at the forfeit of other aspects of life. This pleasure, called jouissance by
psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and while it translates simply as enjoyment, it has
the connotation of orgasmic enjoyment; within the death drive this pleasure is
aggressively sought after but very rarely attained. In No Future, Lee Edelman
integrates both Freud and Lacan’s theory into cultural critique, highlighting the
way the subject under the influence of the death drive is not only a danger to
themselves but also serves as a source of societal opposition. The death drive,
Edelman suggests is the desire to abandon the need for societal validation; by
relegating themselves to the margins of society the subject in the death drive
becomes one that exemplifies a contrast to the goals of the hegemonic norm.
When the child that is supposed to fulfill the narcissistic fantasy of the self
refuses to procreate (or otherwise refuses to fall in line with the expectations of
their culture) they fail to create a fantasmic beneficiary. Both they and their parent
cannot continue to imagine their hopes and dreams fulfilled in a perfect and
unending future. The parent is confronted with the unexpected and crushing blow
of their own disillusionment and with exclusion from that fantasy. They are both
also faced with the imagined or real disappointment of society. This queer child
who is unproductive and procreative, an aspect which comes unexpectedly to
themselves as we often intend to be part of the hegemonic norm ourselves only
finding out in adulthood that we do not adhere to its requirements or intend to fill
its drive to futurity, finds themselves burdened with an unexpected and crushing
disillusionment with a culture they cannot adhere to and cannot accept or validate
them in-turn. This lack of validation shoves the queer child (often no longer a
child) into the death drive. Coming out as anything that doesn’t fall in line with
the heteronormative: “Mom, Dad, I’m a gay, a feminist, don’t want kids, dating an
5
“other,” causes both parent and child to be suddenly confronted with their own
narcissism.
Narcissism seems like a dirty word to us here but, I’d like to diverge from
its current connotation as an “excessive” self-love or a psychosis, and instead I’d
like to think about Narcissism’s power as a defense mechanism for the subject
who has been rejected by the hegemonic norm. I think we need to embrace it and
recognize the discursive power it holds in its ability to set the self apart from the
symbolic—acting as Edelman suggests Queerness does. Yet, narcissism and its
growing trend in the millennial generation acts as a root of analysis for a
renunciation of hegemony within the general population; in essence, we are a
generation performing queerness through our narcissistic pursuit of jouissance
resulting from a disillusionment with the current blatant unattainability of the
American Dream. This narcissism further fuels our self exclusion, wanting others
as an audience not rather than counterparts, turning the queerness from
performance into reality when the narcissistic subject fully embraces the (equally
imaginary) illusion of uniqueness and plunges themselves into the death drive.
I find myself resonating with the idea of Baby Hitler: simultaneously
embodying the child who is needed, but not wanted. A child that becomes an adult
that cannot be supported, but as a child, he cannot be dispatched or disavowed.
This child represents the fantasmic future, as all children do; but the child is also a
person who represents the downfall of that imagined future in adulthood. The
child will be thrust into the narcissistic frenzy of himself and there by retroactively
disowned for his rejection of hegemony. It is in this ability to refuse or accept any
part of what is offered by the fantasmic future that the queer subject is able to find
agency and contribute, or not, to hegemonic culture. The celebration of
individualism that is called narcissism by the hegemonic norm (rightly, or not) is
6
where the queer subject finds the most ability to influence and find happiness in
their progressive present.
CHAPTER 2: THE KIDS ARE [NOT] ALRIGHT: SYSTEMATIC
DENIAL OF LEGACY
In Lee Edelman’s first chapter of No Future, “The Future Is Kid’s Stuff,”
he suggests that reproductive futurity is used as a means of steering the populace.
He suggests that hegemonic norm uses the idea of the child to create an ideal
world; the child is the means through which the ideals of the norm will finally be
perfected and come to fruition. Edelman writes that the child functions
as a prop of the secular theology upon which our common reality
rests – the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our
collective narrative and out collective narratives meaning… The
child whose pure possibility suffices to spirit away the naked truth of
heterosexual sex seeming to impregnate heterosexuality itself with
the future of signification by bestowing upon it the cultural burden
of signifying the future, figures and identification with an always
about-to-be-realized identity. (13)
The child is not simply a growing human who will one day soon be an
adult. They have instead been burdened to carry upon tiny shoulders all symbolic
meaning of the future of their culture. Their culture hopes so fervently that they
will be able to grow into the people who will solve all the problems of their world
or, if they do not, will certainly produce the generation that will. Due to the value
placed on the child as both that which gives direction to existence and also as that
which will fulfill the unfulfilled desires of the previous generations, the idea of the
child becomes an extremely effective means through which the population can be
manipulated. Using Jacques Lacan's theories, Lee Edelman argues that love is a
reproduction of “the subjects narcissistic fantasy,” that one loves what one sees of
oneself in others. Taken in the light of reproductive futurity, the notion of love
8
presented by Edelman suggests that to the subject the self and the present are not
enough. The subject’s investment in itself as part of the hegemonic norm demands
a continuation of the fantasy of the self. A continuation of the fantasy of the self
allows the subject to avoid confrontation with the imperfectability of their
culture. Thus the subject is driven to reproduce, and to love that child in so far as it
is a reproduction of the self and the culture. The child, therefore, is an immortal
manifestation of the subject’s narcissistic fantasy (Edelman, No Future 13). This
chapter argues that the Eugenics program active in North Carolina in the early and
mid twentieth century suggests that the hegemonic norm forecloses, in a very real
and permanent way, some people’s access to the perpetuation of the self. Their
othered status, be it because of race or class, renders them excluded from the
fantasy which the hegemonic norm hopes to reiterate and perfect in the next
generation. Martin Luther King Jr. marks an antithesis to eugenics programs in the
modern American social consciousness. He is in our minds a heroic champion of
equal rights whereas eugenics programs are remembered as tools of villainous
oppressors. I set them along side one another only to compare their rhetoric not to
equate their ideologies in any way. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream”
speech and the usage of the symbol of the child’s extreme motivational qualities;
he draws on images of the fantasmic future in order to enact change for the
progressive present.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uses the familiar rhetoric of the future,
exemplified through his own children, in order to move forward changes in the
present. Though King appeals to the listener’s cultural investment in the fantasmic
beneficiary, he seeks to make changes not only for the future but for the
progressive present as well. Many of the scholars examining King’s “I Have a
Dream” speech have remarked on his usage of religious rhetoric, noting his use of
9
prophetic voice, which “served as a vehicle for integrating secular and sacred
issues inherent in the struggle for civil rights” (Vail 53). King’s speech is noted to
draw on the “African American rhetorical tradition of ceremonial protest and
jeremiad speech-making;” the Jeremiad is noted as a particularly moving
rhetorical choice on the part of Dr. King as it “fit ceremonial protests because it
too framed dissent within the celebration of past promises and hope for future
fulfillment of them” (Lei 84; Miller 87). Despite citing King’s use of the Jeremiad
as a tradition that combines present disillusionment with future hope Lei and
Miller do not point to King’s imagery involving children as a further cementing of
these ideas, nor do they note the strong appeal to pathos that this combination
creates.
Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech uses one of the perhaps most widely
remembered and loved appeals to futurity. Durthy Washington argues that his
speech’s great success relies primarily on “pathos, as he relies heavily on ‘loaded’
language geared towards engaging the emotions of his audience” (Washington
17). King begins the speech remembering the emancipation proclamation signed
one hundred years ago; saying “but one hundred years later, the negro is still not
free” (1). The present for King, with all its glaring inequities, is not satisfactory. It
is not the ideal he was promised by the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence. King says the writers “were signing a promissory note to which
every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black
men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’” (King 1). He reveals the failure of past
generations to make good on the responsibilities he feels were left to them, one
hundred years of failure to insure equality. He calls these words the forefather’s
“promissory note” (King 1). A promise to be fulfilled and insured in the future, a
10
very telling word choice on the part of Dr. King which he goes on to carry into a
pathos appeal to the audience using futurity. He moves the audience with him
through time, from five score years ago to “now,” again gearing the reader up for a
focus on the future. He says:
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the
fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of
cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is
the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to
rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit
path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the
quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now
is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. (King
2)
King’s repetitive use of “now is the time” jars the audience to action in the
present. He effectively riles up the crowd, but gives them no reason to act until
the last line when he says “for all of God’s children” (King 2). This line seems to
imply two potential readings the first of which is rather straight forward: all people
being seen as “God’s children” by most Christians. The second interpretation is
more literal. He seems to be urging the audience to act for equality for children,
subtly making the pathos in this statement hinge on reproductive futurity.
King details and then turns away from the dismal realities of the American
South-east, saying: “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is
redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South
Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, .. knowing that somehow this
situation can and will be changed” (King 4) King gives the listener hope for the
future saying the “situation can and will” change but his hope is rooted in the
11
future, both in thought and tense. He continues the notion that “now” is a time of
struggle, but the future remains for the listener an unknown: “we face the
difficulties of today and tomorrow,” says King (4). King’s diction operates in
favor of both the fantasmic future as well as the progressive present through his
emphasis on the word “can,” drawing attention to its grammatical mood in the
present perfect progressive. However, “can” despite being classified as part of the
perfect tense has a meaning that is liminal and contingent on action in the present,
therefore “can” operates as a near imperative, a call to action. “Will,” in the future
perfect progressive then shows that this action will be carried from the present into
the future. He paints the situation as ripe for change that can be long lasting, and in
speaking he carries out an active role in changing the present for a more
progressive future.
He then launches into the most renowned portion of the speech. King
details his dream for racial equality in the United States but first he is sure to
assuage any notion of radicalism. He first makes it clear that this dream is not
divergent from the dreams of the white hegemonic norm, assuring the audience
that it is instead utterly congruent with it: “ I still have a dream. It is a dream
deeply rooted in the American dream” (King 4). This clarification is crucial to the
reception of his speech, as it makes him seem less radical, which allows for the
appeal to pathos that follows it to be effective. He has to contextualize himself,
and his vision for the future, within the hegemonic norm in order to enact it in the
present because he is othered by his race. In order to seat his appeal outside the
realm of the queer and the othered he must align it both with the historical
representations of the national ideal, the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, and with what is considered to be the ideal for the future by the
12
hegemonic norm. Since this centers largely on reproductive futurity King’s most
effective pathos appeal comes in the form of depictions of the child.
The speech crescendos into a full-blown fantasy of perfected equality
which centers on reproductive futurity as its vehicle for pathos. He uses the appeal
as a turning point in the speech and it is probably the most quoted part of the work.
He says: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of
former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down
together at the table of brotherhood”(King 4). King’s use of the image of the
“sons” of former slaves and slave owners is not necessarily a direct appeal to
reproductive futurity as those sons could be adults contemporary to the time the
speech is given. However, taken in conjunction with his opening phrase “one
day,” the listener instantly gets the idea that these “sons” are born of the
generation to come, that they are the future. In this statement it seems that sons
can refer not just to sons but also, grandsons and great grandsons. ‘Sons’ acts as a
tangible way to access many future generations to come.
King goes on to say “I have a dream that my four little children will one
day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by
the content of their character” (King 5). Now, bringing in his own children to his
appeal, King again strengthens the pathos present in the argument; not only does
he give a real life and face to the benefactors of his dream, but also he appeals to
the commonality of having children and wanting the best possible future for them,
something that he shares with the entirety of his audience. Dr. King then expands
this image, saying “one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls
will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers. I have a dream today!” (King 5). Just as his four children are siblings he
expands that bond of kinship across the lines of race and through the most
13
segregated state in the nation. Again, King defers to an image that the hegemonic
norm cannot refute, one of happiness and equality for the children of the future.
Washington argues “Dr. King draws a sharp contrast between the promise of the
past and the disillusionment of the present by his transition from formal to
informal rhetoric,” something that Lei and Miller have cited as part of the
Jeremiad tradition (Washington 18). These arguments might be furthered by
suggesting that King depicts the future, through reproductive futurity, as a shining
utopia wherein equality and harmony are achieved which operates as an image of
the fantasmic future. This image appeals to the hegemonic norm as it represents a
perfecting of culture; however, it also acts as an incentive towards action in the
progressive present showing things as they could eventually be.
Through presenting contrasting images of the present and future Dr. King is
able to motivate his audience into action very effectively. His diction reveals that
he is tapping into a larger motivating force: the hegemonic norm’s desire to
replicate and perfect itself. It seems that most change is sought out through this
formula: imploring the public in the present to act within the near future of the
progressive present to realize the dream of the fantasmic future. However, the
progressive present is often held hostage by a focus on the fantasmic future, with
no real clear goals or actions taken within the progressive present. The fantasmic
future becomes problematic because of its fantasmic nature, it is a utopian ideal
that is desired by all but not necessarily agreed upon in all aspects; for example, in
the fantasmic future no one is othered, but how we reach an existence without
marginalized people is not established. In “Black Presidents, Gay Marriages and
Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama,” Judy
Rohrer argues that “citizenship in this country [the United States] has long been
(re)produced through the violence and exclusions that establish normalcy” (107).
14
Rohrer is putting forth the idea that reproductive futurity is made an imperative
because of the expectation that children will be indoctrinated into a social situation
with the same expectations and mores as their parents—therefore continuing the
systematic inequities of the past generations. Rohrer suggests that arguments of
futurity are used to enforce and reproduce inequality through the implementation
of violence and exclusion within society similarly to the way Dr. King uses the
idea of reproductive futurity to bid for equality.
Both of these being true demonstrates the way that the fantasmic future
holds both children and adults in a bind which hinders progress, since they have
been indoctrinated into completely opposing cultural ideologies that act as part of
the same fantasy of the future where in ‘heterosexual white men are still privileged
above all others’ still and simultaneously, ‘all people are created equal’. While the
fantasmic future may hold both these ideas as true, obviously reality cannot, thus a
bind is created as people and legislature work for and towards an unrealizable
future. Dr. King is able to use this image of futurity to his advantage; he draws on
the image of the fantasmic future to gain traction for his movement which impacts
seeks to greatly impact the progressive present.
(Re)Producing “-ism”: Sterilization in North Carolina
In No Future Lee Edelman works off of Jacques Lacan theory of “the
subjects narcissistic fantasy,” to dissect the symbol of the child. Edelman argues
that love is a reproduction of this fantasy, that one loves what one sees of one’s
self in others (Edelman 73). Edelman suggests that for the hegemonic norm the
self and the present are not enough, mostly due to their mortal nature. The
subject’s investment in itself demands a continuation of the fantasy of the self, a
legacy. Thus the subject is driven to reproduce, and to love that child in so far as
15
it is a reproduction of the self. The child, therefore, is an immortal manifestation
of “the subject’s narcissistic fantasy” as the child provides an extension of not
only the parent but of the culture that the parents indoctrinate the child into
(Edelman 73). The subject’s narcissistic fantasy of itself is of course largely
influenced by the ideals presented by the hegemonic norm.
Edelman’s theories taken in consideration with the Eugenics program
active in North Carolina in the early and mid twentieth century suggests that the
hegemonic norm forecloses, in a very real and permanent way, some people’s
access to the perpetuation of the self. While many nations across the world and
states within the US implemented sterilization laws based upon eugenics in the
early 1900s many of them were shut down during the 1940s because of eugenics’
association with Hitler (Cullen 163). I will be focusing on the North Carolina
program because its lengthy duration, its recent resurfacing in the popular media,
and its prevalence of documentation. The sterilized women’s othered status, be it
because of race or class, renders them excluded from the fantasy which the
hegemonic norm hopes to reiterate and perfect in the next generation In the case of
the nearly 6,000 women who were sterilized between 1946 and 1977 by the
Eugenics program in North Carolina, denial of access to reproductive rights
suggests that these potential children were unlovable and unworthy of existence
because they did not serve as a method of continuation of the “narcissistic fantasy”
of the hegemonic norm. . The sterilization of these women reveals the very real
way in which the hegemonic norm goes about replicating itself and attempting to
bring about a version of the fantasmic future through controlling reproductive
futurity.
According to the North Carolina Office of Justice For Sterilization Victims
run through the North Carolina DOA, the program began in 1929 and continued
16
until 1974. The office says: “between 1929 and 1974, an estimated 7,600 people
were sterilized by choice, force or coercion under the authority of the N.C.
Eugenics Board program” (NC DOA). They only seem to have concrete statistics
from about 1946 to 1968, the program’s most active period, despite the program’s
beginning in 1929. A report from the North Carolina DOA states: “85 percent of
the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white” (Hopper and Kessle).
The state of North Carolina has begun considering “payments” for victims. CNN
reports that “After going back and forth on the issue for 10 years... the North
Carolina legislature agreed to give $10 million to victims. If signed by the
governor, North Carolina would become the first state to compensate sterilization
victims… Each victim would get about $50, 000” (Cohen, North Carolina Law
Makers 1).
In “Between Choice and Coercion: Women and the Politics of
Sterilization in North Carolina, 1929-1975,” Johanna Schoen details
the first person accounts of several women in North Carolina. In
1966, a 36 year-old white woman who suffered from schizophrenia
and had put her three children from a previous marriage up for
adoption sought sterilization after her second husband began
pressuring her to have children. Schoen quotes the North Carolina
State archives in saying: “the North Carolina Eugenics Board for
sterilization refused to authorize Shirley’s [a pseudonym]
sterilization on the grounds that her husband objected to the
procedure despite his absence during her stay at the [mental]
hospital… Shirley’s history of mental illness was clearly connected
to her inability to cope with the responsibilities of parenthood.”
(132)
17
Schoen also highlights cases involving African American women whose consent
to sterilization was clearly coerced; however Schoen is also sure to note that this
experience was not the totality of experiences in the minority communities in
South Carolina, that some women sought out the sterilization as a positive choice
and sight of agency in their lives (133). While I do not wish to undermine the
option of sterilization as a source of potential agency in women’s lives, I would
like focus on the North Carolina Eugenics Board as an entity of the state and
highlight the ways in which its agenda was to propagate and influence future
generations through sterilizing those deemed undesirable in the present. Often
times this meant the sterilization of those of lower class and minority groups.
In the literature from the period in which the sterilizations began growing in
frequency, a piece very tellingly entitled “Better Human Beings Tomorrow” by
Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, M.D. “argues for wider uses of the sterilization law” (1).
It’s clear that Gamble wishes to realize a fantasmic future and is willing to do so at
a cost to many in the present. In his argument for the implementation of
sterilization Gamble states that “tomorrow’s population should be produced by
today’s best human material” (Gamble 1). His first statement is a loaded one; the
term “best” is of course, completely subjective. One can infer that “best” here
translates into that which approximates the ideals of the hegemonic norm.
Gamble’s article discusses the use of sterilization for the purposes of ridding the
population of those who are “mentally impaired” a term which extended to include
“illiteracy as well as mental defects [and] the over-all picture in relation to mental
competence and the ability to rear children successfully” (Gamble 1). The
legislature also stipulates that “giving birth to two out-of-wedlock children” would
also constitute feeble mindedness and qualify the woman for sterilization (Rauch
70). While Gamble’s article says nothing about race, class or those considered to
18
be sexually-deviant it is clear from the statistics of the sterilizations, nearly half of
which were done on non-white females, that the state of North Carolina’s idea of
“best human material” entailed being white (Gamble 1). In fact, nearly “two-thirds
of women sterilized in North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s were black;”
eugenics laws by their very nature targeted those of minority and lower classes
because the wealthy were able to afford private care (Powell 488).
In an interview with MSNBC, Elaine Riddick, an African American woman
sterilized in 1967, admits that she was sterilized at the age of 13. The broadcast
says that a child, conceived through rape, was taken from Riddick and then she
was sterilized. The news correspondent suggests that “eugenicists believed that
poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were genetic traits,” thus inferring that
Riddick was sterilized to prevent her from producing other poor black children,
who, like herself, did not fit the ideal of the hegemonic norm (Hopper and Kessle).
The eugenics program “sterilizes those the state would have to take care of
[through welfare] and improves the gene pool” (Hopper and Kessle). Cohen
argues that “numerous systems of oppression interact to regulate and police the
lives of most people” and here one can see the way the state government has truly
oppressed some of the people of North Carolina. It has provided the reader with a
very real example of the way that racism, classism and the idea of reproductive
futurity come together to “systematically marginalize and oppress those subjects
there by defined as deviant… in particular women of color on welfare who may fit
into the category of heterosexual but whose sexual choices are not perceived as
normal, moral or worthy of state support” (Cohen, 77-78). Through the means of
sterilization the hegemonic norm, in this case the larger constituency of North
Carolina (which has approved this legislation), has foreclosed upon the agency of
Riddick and thousands of others. One can see through this historical example the
19
way in which the hegemonic norm is attempting to replicate and ‘perfect’ itself by
literally weeding out those who fall within the intersections of minority race and
lower class; legislators focus on creating a fantasmic future and to do so they are
willing to damage the present. Riddick and thousands of others are cut off from
the fantasmic future but, they are able to act in favor of a progressive present by
drawing attention to the atrocities done to them. These victims are also able to
educate those around about the inequalities they face and hold those responsible
accountable. Certainly nothing can replace or undo what was unjustly done to
these citizens; however their action in the present which hold their government
accountable are brave and sets a precedent which progresses our culture forward in
the present towards a more equal society.
Despite the differences in their goals, Gamble, the doctors executing
sterilizations recorded in the MSNBC news broadcast, and Dr. King use the idea
of the child to create pathos to support their respective ideologies. Dr. King speaks
about a future when his children will know equality and the chance to truly pursue
happiness as is promised to them in the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. He says he wants the future to be able to stand on the “solid rock of
brotherhood” (King 1). ‘Brotherhood’ in this passage seems to stand in for not
only peace but also the idea of equality. One could distill this into one simple
idea, Dr. King seems to persuade his audience to work for a future in which his
children can have the best possible chances for success and happiness as is
described in the “American Dream” (King). The rhetoric used to discuss the
sterilization of thousands of North Carolinians centers around similar ideas. The
root idea being the “best chance” for the happiness, success and well-being of the
children and through them the future (Hopper and Kessle). The doctors in the
recording shown in the broadcast center their rationalization of their actions
20
around the “chances” and the future of the child, the life they foresee the parent is
able to provide for their potential offspring (Hopper and Kessle). King and
Gamble share similar rhetoric as well. Both use the word “tomorrow” seemingly
to stand in for the idea of the future (Gamble, King). According to Edelman,
tomorrow is a very loaded concept that it seems both Gamble and King are using
to persuade their audiences. Edelman states that
The child in the historical epoch of our current epistemological
regime, is the figure for that compulsory investment in the
misrecognition of figure; it takes its place on the social state like
every adorable Annie gathering her limitless funds of pluck to ‘stick
out her chin/ and grin/ and say/ ‘Tomorrow,/ tomorrow,/ I love you
tomorrow,/ you’re only a day away.’ And lo and behold, as viewed
through the distorting prism of the tears she calls forth, the figure of
this child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s
rainbow, serving like the rainbow, as the pledge of a covenant to
shield us against the threat of apocalypse now- or apocalypse later.
(Edelman, No Future 13)
For Dr. King, children, laden with all the symbolic meaning of being ‘tomorrow,’
act as a way for both him and his audience to cope with the despair and
disillusionment they feel with their current state of oppression. Conversely, but not
un-ironically, it is this same image of shining tomorrow that the white North
Carolinian Eugenicists rationalize their motives around.
Children, the future, and ‘tomorrow’ represent for ‘the present,’ that is to
say adults, legislating bodies, the media and the overarching hegemonic norm of
society an untenable reality. As a method of coping with this mortality and the
disillusionment with the present, for example that seen with in Dr. King’s speech,
21
these unfulfilled perhaps impossible desires for the ideal, the ‘American dream,’
are placed within the realm of achievability not for the present but for the present’s
offspring, the future, the child. The child is then, according to Edelman given “an
identity intent on disavowing the threat to the symbolic order of meaning that
inheres in a structure of desire that drives us to seek fulfillment in a meaning
unable, as meaning, to fulfill us: unable, that is to close the gap in Idenity that
‘meaning’ means” (Edelman, No Future 13). Looking back to the mid twentieth
century, in North Carolina, one can see the all too real enactment of the a cultural
“disavowing the threat to the symbolic order” (Edelman, No Future 13). Poor,
single, black women, dubbed ‘unstable’ or ‘deficient’ by the state of North
Carolina were not seen as capable of reproducing the ‘American dream.’ They
were perceived as a “threat to the symbolic order,” to the idea of white, upper and
middle class values. Thus they were first ‘disavowed’ in the symbolic – they were
dubbed ‘unstable’ or ‘deficient’- and then their ability to be a threat was removed.
They were made literally unable to reproduce something contradictory to that
which was desired by hegemonic norm.
Living the Dream: What “Can” and What Never Will
Edelman presents the idea of the child as the product of the dream of
reproductive futurity. That child is what gives perpetuation—immortality to the
mortal, fulfillment to the unfulfilled, promise to the disillusioned and subjugated,
security to a precarious hold on power- and direction to the present. The idea that
the child will be a legacy, the “fantasmic beneficiary” of the culture sustained and
created by its predecessors gives validation and direction the actions of the culture
(Edelman, No Future 73). Each enactment by the hegemonic norm is by that logic
22
done with the interest of itself at heart, which is therefore an interest in
reproductive futurity.
One must wonder what the effect of the idea of the “fantasmic beneficiary”
child is on real children (Edelman, No Future 73)? It seems that at a young age
children are molded to believe that they will become part of a fantasmic future,
that they themselves will be fantasmic beneficiaries who will change the world
and bring about a perfect hegmimonic world order-- finally realizing what has thus
far only been symbolic. Children themselves are made to believe this when they
are young. The legislation and rhetoric surrounding the child creates the illusion
of infinite possibility and certain perfection. The child is told a plethora of equally
unlikely things. They can solve world hunger, children can bring about world
peace, or they can be President of the United States. Children can do all this
because they are the future; for the present (adults relating this to children) the
future is not real. For adults, “can” is understood as liminal and exists in our minds
as part of the perfect tense, meaning that the action is completed. “Can” is
complete in its infinite possibility, but of course part of possibility is the
understanding that it also may not come to fruition. Unlike Martin Luther King
Jr’s words in which the situation of racial inequality “can and will” change, there
is no real assurance made for children that “will” enable them to establish the
dream of the fantasmic future and do all the great things they were promised.
Rohrer argues that Obama’s presidency has only strengthened already
widely spread myths that “every child (or at least every boy-child) in the United
States is being encouraged to believe anew that anyone can become president—
that with hard work, the sky’s the limit (girls must be content not to reach the sky
but to continue banging away at the glass ceiling ala Sarah Palin and Hilary
Clinton)” (Rohrer 110). Despite the obvious fact that the vast majority of children
23
will never become president, it seems paramount to adults that children believe
that they can obtain such a ranking.
The concept of ‘being President’ seems to stand in for being able to do
anything. Symbolically the presidential office represents “control of the free
world” as it is so often put; that, however, is a more complex idea than it
superficially seems. Children at least briefly seem to exist outside the social
contract of the hegemonic norm, as they are not yet fully indoctrinated with its
intricacies—they do not yet fully function within or as a part of the culture in to
which they are born. “Being President,” seems to represent a means of controlling
not only a capitalist means of production but also the President seems to set the
standard of what it means to be “American,” an embodiment of the ideals of the
hegemonic norm. The notion of Presidency enables the adult to feel as though the
child can truly achieve all the ideals of the hegemonic norm, despite the seeming
impossibility of this task, because as President the child can own and thereby
perfect reality to align with the symbolic order, with out needing to break the
system already present or create a new one.
The adult desire for the fantasmic future means that children are
systematically denied agency to seek out non-normative views. “Timmy you
cannot be Tarzan when you grow up. Wouldn’t you much rather be a Doctor and
help people?” Timmy will undoubtedly shift his views to those he is indoctrinated
with, knowing only a desire to please and receive comfort. Children are lead into
the hegemonic norm by the culture that surrounds them as well as inundated
directly with ideas that point them in the direction of conformity to those norms.
Hypothetical Timmy may be told he can do and be anything he wants when he
grows up, but the fact is he is actually being instructed to choose from a slim set of
options which appeal to the hegemonic norm. A popular children’s television
24
program, Barney, reveals the simultaneously heavy handed and subtle way in
which children are directed into normative life and career paths. In “Barney: You
Can Be Anything!” Barney brings a group of children into his costume shop where
they are invited to try on anything they please. Surprising though it may be for a
purple dinosaur, all the costumes shown are utterly mundane (when compared to
Presidency). As the children move through singing the Alphabet, each letter
represented by some sort of career themed costume, the viewer notices that many
of the jobs fall somewhere within the means of production; they are either a
something “maker” or something “builder.” Barney thereby makes children aware
of the average but necessary jobs that keep society functioning. These jobs are
shown them in a positive and desirable light thus imprinting upon children that
they should seek out jobs that contribute or produce something for societal
consumption.
The most interesting portion of the episode comes at the end of the song
when one of the children tries on a cowboy hat, saying “but I don’t think I’ll be a
cowboy” to which Barney asks “oh, why?” and the boy walks into frame and says
“this ten gallon hat is too big for me” with the hat down over his eyes (Barney).
Everyone laughs. In this moment the viewer is privy to the subtle steering of the
child towards the norm and away from unrealistic jobs. The writers have scripted
the scene in such a way that encourages a plethora of jobs, but the “cowboy” is
ruled out, albeit playfully. It seems an impossible coincidence that the job the
writers have chosen to be literally ‘un-fillable,’ symbolized through the oversized
hat, is the one that is most often associated with boys make-believe games.
Through this brief scene the writers act as enforcers of the hegemonic norm,
foreclosing this unrealistic life path for the child viewer, thus subtly persuading
them to pursue one of the more ‘normal’ career paths.
25
Children exist within the dream of the fantasmic future. They are not yet
indoctrinated into social contract. Hollow promises like “you can be anything” or
“you can be president” work to bring children into the hegemonic norm, but also
reveals the hegemonic norm’s stake in futurity. As children grow, however, it
becomes evident that they are not illusionary incarnations that perfectly reiterate
the hegemonic norm. They reveal themselves to be mere humans instead. When
that happens the world around them stops telling them they can achieve all the
wonderful hegemonic dreams they were promised as children. They are no longer
special, no longer “fantasmic,” they are no longer the future. This temporal shift
is actually a mental one; at some point children are no longer thought of as stop
the future and instead are considered part of the present. One could argue that
these hollow promises and the ‘fantasmic’ dream of futurity that children have
been inundated with has resulted in the perceived “entitlement” of the so called
“Me Me Me Generation” (Stein 1, 5) It seems reasonable to suspect that when
someone promises a young adult a job after high school and college and then said
job is impossible to obtain, be it because of racial oppression, economic downturn
or any other factor; that person would be angry and disillusioned. This
disillusionment results in movements like Occupy Wall Street which “aims to
fight back against the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair
global economy that is foreclosing on our future” (Occupywallst.org). This
movement is not the only place these feelings are being expressed. Nearly
everywhere in pop culture seems to be lashing out against the process through
which children become part of the hegemonic norm.
A comic created by Nineteen Letters Long called “Hopes and Dreams”
(Figure 1) depicts in its first frame a boy, at a desk imagining himself as a GrecoRomanesque warrior and leader. Showing the audience the ‘un-fillable’ dreams of
26
the very young, before he is persuaded to more ideal pursuits by the hegemonic
norm. Much like they boy wearing the cowboy hat in Barney, the boy abandons
that goal in favor of a new one. The second frame of the comic shows the same,
slightly older boy at a school desk imagining himself as what can be read as the
President of the United States. The dream man wears a suit and tie, he speaks at a
podium with a seal on the front, he is gesturing grandly to an audience of media
officials who hold out their microphones to him. The boy imagines himself as a
wielder of power: a white man with a suit and quaffed hair, not only a member of
the hegemonic norm but a leader, shaper, and representative of it. The same power
seen in the Greco-Roman general is now channeled in a way that the hegemonic
norm deems worthwhile. In the third frame, the boy now appearing to be
adolescent, imagines himself a businessman. He is shaking hands with another
businessman, both look happy and are well dressed with suits and briefcases. The
boys face is no longer in the wide eyed, ecstatic grin of the young child’s, or even
the smile of the older boy. Now the boys face is drawn as a flat line suggesting he
feels neutrally about this imagined future. The slow shift of the boys dreams along
with the change in facial expression suggests to the viewer the push towards
conformity with the hegemonic norm and the feelings of disappointment and
disillusionment that come along with the forced changes in world view. Finally the
viewer sees the boy, grown in a tie at his desk working, his face a frown. He
imagines he is home in front of the TV, escaping his present reality all together.
The viewer watches the boy’s slow failure to actualize the hegemonic norm's
dreams for tomorrow, as he inevitably becomes just another person.
Children, even if they are baby Hitler are protected, cherished, and revered
so long as they continue to represent the possibility of the perfected future for the
hegemonic norm. It is this unrealistic view of the child, which Edelman depicts as
27
Figure 1. “Hopes and Dreams,” Nineteen Letters Long, December 2013
28
a distortion of the real child, that allows for the child to be used as a symbol
wielded to manipulate the emotions, be it for better or for worse. The symbol of
the child’s extreme motivational qualities seems to come at a price, ironically to
real children. These children are imprinted with unrealistic expectations of
themselves and the future they are to create for themselves and as a result seem to
end up just as disillusioned with the present as their parents, perpetuating the cycle
of futurity.
CHAPTER 3: PREACHING TO THE GRAVE: NONREPRODUCTIVE FUTURITY AND THE DEATHDRIVE IN ALLEN GINSBERG’S HOWL
Similarly to Martin Luther King Jr., Allen Ginsberg also sets forth visions
of an American future that have been called prophetic by many. Both use a
similar rhetorical strategy, that of the sermon. King’s vision, the 1963 “I Have A
Dream” speech, directly conforms to the pre-existing hegemonic ideal of the
‘American Dream.’ King centered his prophecy on an idealization of American
society through reproductive futurity. Ginsberg’s Howl, published just seven years
prior in 1956, presents a vision of a drastically different futurity. While King’s
future promises an immortality striving towards perfection of the American dream
through reproductive futurity, Ginsberg acts as prophet for the death-drive-- “the
negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (Edelman 9). Howl presents
a queer future that is free of the stringently enforced oppressive hegemonies
present in McCarthy’s1 America. Ginsberg worships the physical body,
homosexuality, and the temporary without legacy; he offers a vision of America
that is divorced from the standards set forth by the hegemonic norm in order to
reaffirm himself and other people who have been marginalized. He adapts
religious figures and rhetoric to make holy sacrament of figures he sees in
everyday life. In his poetry, Ginsberg rejoices in the aspects of his life that the
hegemonic norm disagrees with. And in perhaps his most subversive move,
Ginsberg demonizes capitalism and it’s reliance on children to continue its means
of production. Howl envisions a future that is preoccupied with the progressive
present and the celebration of counter-culture.
1 McCarthyism refers to the second red scare, a period during the cold war in which many
Americans came under investigation for affiliation with the communist party. It is generally characterized
as a time of paranoia and conservatism.
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‘Awake, arise’: Modern Prophets
Both Ginsberg and Dr. Martin Luther King go about attracting their
audience with similar oration styles. Ginsberg’s poetry uses a long line based on
breath giving the reader or listener the idea of oration and an organic rhythm that
is more like that of a sermon. In fact, to further emphasis the feeling of this style,
Ginsberg calls one of the poems in Howl “Sunflower Sutra,” a ‘sutra’ being a
“sermon delivered in an oratorical style” (Hahn 532). When reading his poems
aloud Ginsberg would often grow in fervor, volume and breath length as the poem
grew in intensity. This gives greater impact and emotion to the line. In “The
Prophetic Voice of Allen Ginsberg” Stephen Hahn argues that the “exhaustion of
breath” at the end of the line “gives an intensity to” the end of the line and thus
heightens the intensity of the poet’s emotion (533).
Hahn argues “these patterns build.. to a point where the voice seems to
carry itself by sheer will and urgency of statement” (533). This description is not
unlike that which one could give to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream”
speech. Like Ginsberg, King seems to use his breath to regulate and punctuate his
lines. His use of parataxis on the repeated sentence “I have a dream” as well as his
raised volume and vocal intensity for that line demands audiences’ attention. King
then lowers and softens his voice for the subsequent explanations of what his
dream entails until he comes to the ending of each line which is again punctuated
by exhalation and an influx of volume and intensity. Both King and Ginsberg
seem to use what Hahn deems the “prophetic voice,” one that is not the “personal
voice of the poet, but the one used to enact the universal or the historical dilemma
of the soul in a particular nation” (527). The perception of this voice comes not
only from the oration style and structure of the two works but also from the
subject matter. Both authors are, to varying degrees of literality, preaching for
31
what they see as the betterment of human kind and the recognition of themselves
and those who have been othered.
Despite the similarities in style, delivery, and the usage of religious
rhetoric, what is deemed worthy of reverence by King and Ginsberg is worlds
apart. Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” is rife with images from a variety of religions.
Where King refers to “all God’s children,” presumably meaning a Christian God
being as he was a Reverend; Ginsberg goes about bestowing Grace on those who
normative society would call damned (King 1, 2). Ginsberg queers Christian
conceptions of religion and God. He plays with the idea of Heaven being under a
train track “Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated” (Ginsberg 13). El here doubles for both the OldTestament name for God and for the elevated train tracks. The angels are
“staggering,” perhaps drunk, on the roofs in poor neighborhoods. Certainly they
are not the beings of hot burning grace as they are characterized both by Milton
in Paradise Lost (5.16-20) and St. Augustine’s City of God (Book XII Ch. 1). Both
of these characterizations were influential depictions of Angels, since descriptions
are very scant in the Judeo-Christian testaments themselves. Within “Howl” the
reader sees Ginsberg reimagining not just religious iconography itself, but
challenging and attempting to expand cultural imagination of what is religious. He
subtly points out the culturally constructed nature of many of these images by
including Angels, which are more documented in the cultural imagination rather
than actual religious testament.
“Howl” breaks the bounds of what was considered public decency when it
comes to sexualized (i.e. homosexualized) language whilst still using imagery of
religion. Ginsberg depicts men “who howled on their knees in the subway and
were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts” (Ginsberg 13). Here
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Ginsberg brings up the image of the supplicant at tragic prayer, but then it is
conflated with someone in the act of fellatio in public. He continues, canonizing
men in the act of homosexual intercourse, writing: “who let themselves be fucked
in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” (Ginsberg 13). The
phrase ‘and screamed with joy’ conjures the image of the Saint in the state of
religious ecstasy. Like Eve hopes to do in eating the apple2, Ginsberg provides an
actualization of the elevation of the soul through homosexuality. He writes: “who
blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic
and Caribbean love” (Ginsberg 13). Here he uses the graphic imagery of
homosexual sex encounters to juxtapose with conventional conceptions of
religious icons such as saints and seraphim. Again these seraphs are not the
depictions readers are expecting, they are instead what would have been
considered the dregs of society—canonized motorcyclists, angel sailors, the
devout homeless on trains and roofs. Ginsberg creates for himself a queer idolatry
where none exists. When juxtaposed with King’s very traditional depictions of “all
men as God’s children,” and other culturally pervasive depictions of Christianity,
such as City of God and Milton, one sees how radical the nature of Ginsberg’s
depictions is. These comparisons highlight the extreme difference in the messages
of the ‘prophets’ King and Ginsberg.
Unlike King, who is sure to ground himself firmly in the hegemonic before
appealing to his audience for change, Ginsberg entrenches himself in the absurd;
he takes that which most hold scared and removes its power and status by
declaring everything to be sacred. Ginsberg does this quite literally in “Footnote to
Howl.” He “entirely transcends the question of polite behavior, of queerness of
2 Milton, Paradise Lost. Book V. Lines (75-80)
33
the appropriate. He somehow skipped right around our American obsession with a
binary scheme of human sexuality” (Doty). Ginsberg has been rejected by his
culture as impious, insane3—a queer, so in turn he gratifies himself and others like
him, declaring them holy where no one else would. Ginsberg first writes the body,
in particular those used for sexual acts into holiness, “The world is holy! The soul
is Holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and
asshole holy!” (Ginsberg 27). This action is narcissistic but it’s not selfish. It is an
action of extreme self love to declare yourself, your body and soul, holy but this is
not a sacrament he keeps to himself. Ginsberg begins with the entire world and
narrows his view of holiness to include not only the corporeal but the parts of the
body often thought most carnal and unable to be elevated. He continues,
“everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in
eternity! Everyman’s an angel!” (Ginsberg 27). In this line Ginsberg spreads
holiness to all. In declaring the queer holy, he deems them save-able, worthy of
love and life something many others in McCarthy-era America would not.
Where others would lock Ginsberg and others like him away as ill and a
threat to America, he deems them not only worthy of life, but also worthy of
worship. He deems them ideal. In “Transgression, Release and ‘Moloch’” Jeffery
Gray says that Howl is “the return of the repressed- aesthetically, sexually,
spiritually and politically,” and indeed Ginsberg does work to affirm and sanctify
those who reside on the margins of society like himself (Gray 39). What is pivotal
is the way Ginsberg does this, he makes a place for himself in the present. He does
3 Ginsberg was arrested at the age of 23 and agreed to serve his time in a Psychiatric Institute
rather than prison. His mother was also hospitalized in a Psychiatric Institute and in 1947under went an
unsuccessful lobotomy. As a result of these experiences and the subsequent labels and marginalization
faced by those diagnosed with mental illness the themes weigh heavy on Ginsberg’s work. For more
information see: Hadda, Janet. “Ginsberg in Hospital” American Imago 65.2. 2008.
34
not wait and hope that some power will find the holiness in him and other
marginalized people that he feels has always been there; he pronounces it himself.
Where society might pronounce Ginsberg queer, insane, or any number of
offensive slurs he counters societies power and begun producing pronouncements
of his own. In Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the
Performative Gill Jagger builds on Judith Butler’s theory of the power of
pronouncements saying, “it is not a kind of sovereign power as in the voice which
names that makes any particular naming effective because the power of that
naming subject is derivative of ‘the force of reiterated convention’” (Jagger 147).
Ginsberg operates against this “force of reiterated convention,” those nominative
utterances our culture uses to establish and perpetuate the binaries of society
(Butler 33). In writing, publishing, speaking, being heard and read, he stages an
affront to this authority and circulates a counter narrative. This counter narrative is
one of pronouncements which break apart the meanings of those enforced by the
hegemonic norm. Ginsberg upends the hierarchies laid in place, and makes
meaningless their binaries; everything is holy therefore nothing is holy, madmen
are proclaimed angels. Ginsberg works to counter his own “linguist
vulnerability,” Ginsberg, like all of us at one time or another, has been hurt by
words. Words hold a power over him because they represent implications or
consequences: someone called him insane so he was hospitalized, someone called
him homosexual so he was vulnerable to a slew of dangers and he was
marginalized. We are all vulnerable to the power of pronouncements, but in his
“Footnote to Howl” Ginsberg attempts to grab back some of that power. While his
pronouncements are narcissistic they act as a defense mechanism, his own
pronouncement of holiness acts to shelter him in whatever small way from those
pronouncements that have operated to marginalize him.
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I Can See For Miles: Visions of America
King wants himself and other African Americans to be fully accepted and
integrated into society. He is only pushing against one social factor oppressing
him- racism. King seeks to make a place for his race inside American normativity.
To do this he situates his dream as being “rooted in the American Dream” (King
2). King is careful not to alienate the idea of American perfection. He calls on
religious rhetoric and images seemingly pulled from the song “America the
Beautiful,” or “Let Freedom Ring” which are included at the conclusion of the
speech, saying: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and
every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain,
and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be
revealed and all flesh shall see it together" (King 2). Here King uses the
topography of American terrain as a metaphor for American social justice. Just as
the land will be developed through the ever-continuing manifest destiny, the
continued pursuit of equality will make life smoother for those generations to
come. Combining these two notions makes his dream non-threatening to old
“bolster” style4 American idealism. The obvious Christianity present as well as the
notion of American natural beauty have become so inextricable from the idea of
what America is that Martin Luther King can use these ideas as symbolic of the
normativity of his dream.
While undoubtedly racism presents many multifaceted oppressors against
those othered by it, Ginsberg seems to be pushing against something more
complex. Ginsberg seems to be fighting against American normativity as a whole.
4 American artistic movement in the nineteenth century in which was comprised mainly of
idealized landscapes, namely those of Thomas Cole, which were commissioned by the government to
inspire westward movement. See: www.Berkshirefinearts.com. However, one could also argue that King is
drawing on a Romantic literary tradition too.
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Ginsberg offers a complete antithesis to the way King uses American idealism to
demonstrate his normativity. Instead Ginsberg unapologetically states his nonnormativity and demands that America do good. In “America” Ginsberg works to
undo the myth of American perfection. He says “America after all it is you and I
who are perfect” but this line works completely as satire. He is juxtaposing the
idea of perfection with all of America’s and his own flaws. He uses parataxis to
condemn capitalism in the first line “America I’ve given you all and now I’m
nothing” (Ginsberg 39). The reader is unclear on why he is nothing until he goes
on to clarify that he’s has presumably given his last “two dollars and twenty-seven
cents,” the line reads out a bit like a check, name: “America,” amount, and date
“January 17, 1956” (Ginsberg 39). He goes on to reverse the conventional way of
thinking about communism in the period asking “when will you be worthy of your
million Trotskyites?” (Ginsberg 39). He condemns the American military war
machine saying “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (Ginsberg 39). Ginsberg
refuses to give up drinking, smoking marijuana, or his “obsession” which seems to
ambiguously nod at many different obsessions. It could be read as Ginsberg’s
constant questioning of America, or something less literal and pertinent to the
poem. It could be read as only his queer inclinations, as right after he refuses to
give up drinking and smoking he says “I sit in my house for days and stare at the
roses in the closet” (Ginsberg 40). “In the closet” falls at the end of a long line,
meaning that it would receive more emphasis due to the final exhalation.
Emphasizing a term that is well known to be coded for hiding homosexuality,
though it is far less definitive than many of Ginsberg’s other statements, seems to
acknowledge homosexuality as while still framing it in a way that is suggestive of
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America’s institutionalization of homosexuals. To “stare at the roses” on the
wallpaper is a frequent and well-known image of insanity5. Ginsberg seems to
further argue against stereotypes of those who have been diagnosed mental
illnesses when he says “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind” (39). He
seems to be suggesting that being in his “right mind,” thinking with clarity, is the
one which leads him to see all the flaws inherent to America. However, this line
also seems to hide a double entendre. “Right” may very well stand in for ‘right
wing’ politics. He cannot write his poem until he’s aligning himself with
conservative America, lest he be vulnerable to all sorts of trouble, such as sitting
trial for obscenity6. Ginsberg uses a sledge-hammer to condemn America in this
poem, but he is subtle about what seems to be his most subversive point: that to go
against the normative structures of American society is to be marked and othered.
The Wheel in the Sky: Conflicting Futurities
In No Future Lee Edelman cites the symbol of the child as a major swaying
factor in politics. He says that the child becomes the “fantasmic benefactor” of
society, who will inherit and perfect it. He argues that we are unable “to conceive
of a politics without the figure of the Child” as it “embodies the citizen as an ideal,
entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always
at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (Edelman 11).
With out naming this phenomenon as such King seems to have his finger
on the pulse of it and he uses it to his advantage. He demands racial equality, but
for him it’s only a dream. He is careful never to consider it as actualized for
5 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” Project Gutenberg, November 5, 2012
6 “The Howl Obscenity Trial” Shaping San Francisco’s Digital archive @ Found SF
www.foundsf.org
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himself. This would be too subversive and self-severing to be productive to his
goal instead he demands equality for the future. Instead he embraces what
Edelman describes as the political opposition to the death drive and embraces the
“the continuous staging of our dream of eventual self- realization” that is
symbolized through the child (10). To draw attention to King’s speech as a true
enactment of the theory Edelman has laid out it seems pertinent to capitalize on
the term ‘self-realization.’ I’d like to clarify that ‘self-realization’ is really what
King was hoping to obtain for African Americans, as it stood in 1963 they are not
fully realized as people. They are instead marginalized, not fully able to realize the
American dream as they are excluded from existing as the subject. That is just
what King’s speech attempts to establish: a common “dream” (as both Edelman
and King call it) that would grant African Americans the ability attempt to realize
the American dream. African Americans would then have access to the
“Imaginary wholeness” through their children, who because of their othered status
in 1963 were excluded from imaginary perfection because of their othered status.
The othered child seems to represent a deeply complex positionality. It seems to
represent a child that is expected to fail at attaining ‘Imaginary wholeness’ or the
American Dream. However, that child’s status as a Child leaves them in the
position of hope-bearer for those othered adults. The othered child simultaneously
represents the idealized future and the misery of the present.
Despite or, perhaps more likely, because of locating himself as queer in
Howl and Other Poems Allen Ginsberg paints himself as a prophet for an
American future totally divergent from the ‘American Dream’ and those
ideologies presented by King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. During the height of
the Cold War and McCarthyism non-normative sexualities, religions, and politics
became conflated with treason. Gayle Rubin reflects on this and writes that
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“Right-wing ideology” of the time “link[s] non-familial sex with communism and
political weakness“ (147). Thus, despite whatever political affiliations a person
may have had, “bad” sex (that which is non-reproductive, extra marital,
homosexual or any other litany of things) automatically affiliated a person with
factors completely outside the reaches of the erotic (Rubin 150). McCarthyism
also directly linked the American socio-political standing with that of capitalism.
To be American was to be heterosexual, capitalistic, Christian and white. One can
see how King and Ginsberg take radically divergent paths in dealing with their
othered status. While King has chosen to try and situate his future as within
normative American society, Ginsberg has chose to present a future that is
radically divergent of that presented by McCarthyism.
In his analysis of the film All About Eve, Robert Corber outlines the way
both communists and homosexuals were treated as “other in the discourses of
national identity” (37). He investigates the way the paranoia during the Cold War
made passing more of a necessity, for both communists and homosexuals.
However, because communist and homosexuals were less legible there was yet
more paranoia in normative culture because of the heightened invisibility of the
other. This same phenomenon is noted by Lee Edelman in “Tearooms and
Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” Edelman uses details from
the Jenkins tearoom arrest during the Johnson Presidency, and other period media
pieces on homosexuality, to characterize the equation and presumed affiliation
between communism (the non-capitalist) and homosexuality (the nonreproductive), in the early 1960s. These associations caused paranoia surrounding
the homosexual and communism, their conflation, and the handling of
homosexuality in the media. Edelman theorizes that “gay male sexuality” in this
period was seen as “a yielding to weakness or a loss of control” (563).
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Homosexuality then becomes a question of mastery and submission of one man
over the other—it is seen as a loss of the masculine quality of control. This
conceptualization of homosexual acts was the root of the paranoia and conflation
with communism as Edelman so cheekily puts it when “post-war America, finds
its defenses subject to penetration for the first time by the superior missile
technology of its foes” (564).
Ginsberg certainly would have been aware of the extremely negative
opposition to his sexual activity and socio-economic ideology would have
garnered him. In fact, American Scream contains previously unreleased interviews
with Ginsberg from several decades. Raskin talks with Ginsberg about his
paranoia about the CIA during the early cold war years, and fears that he would
under scrutiny or brought up on charges because of his far leftist leanings (Raskin
xii). So, clearly these societal pressures were clear to Ginsberg, yet, in “America”
Ginsberg openly expresses his feelings against capitalism.
In “The Ghosts Of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg’s Old Left
Nightmares” Ramírez, and in Ben Lee’s “Howl and Other Poems: Is There Old
Left in These New Beats?,” make a compelling arguments for the reading of
Ginsberg’s “Moloch” as the same Moloch found in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
demonstrating the influence of past left radicalism on Ginsberg’s supposedly
brand new beat ideals (Lee). Ramírez argues that through “a series of synecdochic
leaps” “Moloch” comes to stand in for capitalist industry as a whole (Ramírez 56).
While there may be accuracy to Ramírez’s argument it seems instead that
Ginsberg is suggesting that the American people have made a bastardized religion
out of Capitalism. The religious context of the term “Moloch” and its biblical
meanings are used by Ginsberg, along with a cultural awareness of the Metropolis
scene, to critique capitalism as an incredibly dangerous false idolatry, like the
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biblical Moloch that feeds on children. Demanding children to make things and
buy things, thus perpetuating the capitalist system. A system that McCarthyism
has bound into an even tighter knot along with heterosexuality.
The ‘Moloch’ section of “Howl” seems to suggest an anti-capitalist, nonreproductive futurity, presenting a very different image of the future than that
which is presented by Dr. King. “Moloch” being defined as a “A person or thing
to which extreme or terrible sacrifices are made; a terrible or remorselessly
destructive person or force… name of a Canaanite god, pronounced by post-exilic
Jews with the vowels of ‘shame’ in order to mark their aversion to idolatry”
(OED). Parents were said to have sacrificed their “seed” or children to Moloch to
win his favor (referencing Leviticus 18:21). It seems that both the popular movie
Metropolis and Ginsberg draw on this biblical meaning of the word. In Metropolis
the workers are injured and killed by the great machine in the underground
factory, the protagonist looks on in horror and cries “Moloch!” at it when young
men are carried away on stretchers, only to have new men take their places. Thus
the movie critiques the capitalist industrial system’s treatment of workers as subhumans. Ginsberg takes his image of Moloch out of the factories though,
demonstrating the way that the support of capitalism has permeated all of
American society. He writes “Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
Sobbing in armies!” (Ginsberg 21). He goes on in the passage picking out aspects
of the infrastructure of society “Moloch the cross bone soulless jailhouse and
Congress of sorrows” (Ginsberg 21). Not only does Ginsberg equate the jailhouse
with the Congress of the United States, he equates them both to a false god to
whom children are sacrificed. While at this point it may sound rather like an
appeal to futurity, something like ‘save the children from the evil industrial
machine which has permeated all of society,’ similar to the appeal made by
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Metropolis, it is actually rather divergent from that by the end of the section.
Ginsberg says “Moloch in whom I sit lonely… Lacklove and manless in Moloch!”
(22). One cannot sit “in” an economic system; one can sit in a country though.
Here America, Capitalism, and Moloch seem to be so conflated by Ginsberg he
doesn’t bother to delineate them. He seems to acknowledge his queerness and
difference in this passage, saying “crazy in Moloch! cocksucker in Moloch!”
(Ginsberg 22). He blames capitalism for his lack of male lover, because of course
McCarthyism doesn’t abide by either queer lifestyles or communism. The reader is
subtly reminded of the way in which Capitalism demands and drives heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. Without people having children who will
buy things and who will make them?
Is It Only Teenage Wasteland?
Where King has expressed a congruence with the social ideals of the
American Dream and has used the symbol of the Child to persuade his audience to
be more inclined to allow them access to the “Imaginary whole” of the hegemonic
future, Ginsberg expresses a drastically opposing vision: that which articulates the
Death Drive. Unlike King, Ginsberg has opted out of the chain of signification of
the “promissory identity” that results in King’s recognition of himself as Other,
motivates the racism he faces, and drives him to seek the ‘self- realization’ of his
race through appeals futurity. Ginsberg’s poetry expresses “the negativity opposed
to every form of social viability” (Edelman 9). Ginsberg finds this ‘selfrealization’ in the worship and reverence of those things around him which he
feels are untainted by “Moloch.” In “Footnote to Howl” he goes about declaring
mundane and even abject things holy. He then turns his attention to time “Holy
time in eternity holy eternity in time” (Ginsberg 26). The circular language used
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here gives the reader the impression of a non-linear time scale, presenting the idea
that Ginsberg’s ‘fantasmic beneficiary’ is in fact himself.
His queerness (communist, gay, non-Christian, ‘mentally ill,’ drug user
status) both in his reality and that which is reflected through his poems “names the
side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by
which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism ” (Edelman
3). Ginsberg in his poetry represents for America, and himself, an “ethical value”
in so far as he is so ostracized from the ideals of hegemony that he is able to call
bullshit on them. And in fact he does so explicitly: “they broke their backs lifting
Moloch to Heaven!...Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!” (Ginsberg 22).
That being said, what interest me more than Ginsberg’s position “outside
and beyond political symptoms” is the precursor to that position (if one exists).
Certainly, if Martin Luther King’s four little children are othered by their race,
their othered status renders them somewhat outside the normative society, somewhat queer. Yet they still carry all the hope of the symbol of the Child. Can’t then
the queer child experience the same duality that King’s children do, seeing the
way in which they are not going to be successful as members of the norm, that
they will never realize the American dream, yet simultaneously burdened with the
knowledge that they should or perhaps that they would like to?
Ginsberg’s journals seem to reflect departure from the attempted
embodiment of the idealized norm, to the disillusionment with the American
dream. In late April of 1952 Ginsberg journals about his life trajectory in a section
called “A Novel” he says:
At 14 I was an introvert, an atheist a Communist and a Jew, and I
still wanted to be president of the United States/ At 19, being no
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longer a virgin, I was a cocksucker, and believed in a supreme
reality, an anarchist, a hipster totally apolitical Reichian; I wanted to
be a great poet instead./ At 22 I was a hallucinating mystic believing
in the City of God and I wanted to be a saint./ At 23, a year later, I
was already a criminal, a despairing sinner, a dope fiend; I wanted to
get to reality./ At 24, after being a jailbird, a schizoid screwball in
the bughouse, I got laid, girls, I was being psychoanalyzed./ At 26, I
am shy, got out with girls, I write poetry, I am a freelance literary
agent and a registered democrat; I wanted to find a job./ Who
Cares?/” (ed. Ball 17)
Ginsberg expresses his gradual disillusionment with the American dream and by
extension America through depictions of his gradually lowering expectations. At
14 he doesn’t seem phased by the difference his upbringing has afforded to him.
He is othered, but he still believes he can be President of the United States. This
suggests he believes the widely spread myths that “every child (or at least every
boy-child) in the United States is being encouraged to believe anew that anyone
can become president—that with hard work, the sky’s the limit” (Rohrer 110). At
14 Ginsberg seems to conceptualize the symbol of the Child, the rhetoric they are
told as an actuality of his future, suggesting that at least on some level he identifies
himself as part of normative society. By 19, however, Ginsberg locates himself as
queer, his dreams of his future no long align themselves with the hegemonic ideal
of presidency for children but there is still a grandeur to them that suggests there is
little disillusionment with societies ability to accept him as “great” – gay is not the
factor that brings him into the death drive. However, the othering provided by his
sexuality and the other non-normative factors of his up-bringing seem to cause
him to “grow sideways” as Kathy Stockton suggests in The Queer Child. It seems
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that poetry has given an outlet, a ‘sideways’ to Ginsberg, a way to negotiate his
othered status and using the ideals of the American dream (hard work, and the idea
that everyone has a ‘talent’) he can garner acclaim as a great poet. One sees that
by 26 however, all of those ideations have been for whatever reason been
foreclosed for Ginsberg; he is ambivalent and wants to find a job.
It is easy to say that Ginsberg simply expresses normal feelings of angst
that all young adults face as they enter what is so often dubbed “the real world.” I
expect that to some extent that is what Ginsberg is contending with; however, I
think such an argument is a willful ignorance of the impossible and ludicrous
things American society tells children they can actualize, only to then turn around
a decade or two later and tell them to “get a job,” “be realistic,” “settle down,” and
“have some kids.” This process of false idealization and then rejection is what
pushes queer children out of access with self-acceptance and into the death drive.
The queer or marginalized young adult cannot access the ‘imaginary whole’
through reproductive futurity, and the young adult is constantly told their
progressive present (i.e. the idea that their own life is enough to satisfy the self)
are foreclosed upon us by hegemonic society. While Edelman praises the position
provided by queerness as it provides clarity on the actions of the hegemonic, it is
not with out risks. I would not say that those risks are in any way particular to
queerness, instead they are those particular to anyone who feels isolated and
disillusioned with one’s own life and future. After all, that’s all the fantasmic
future provides for society, a reason to believe “the sun will come out, tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 4: PRESENTING A PROGRESSIVE PRESENT:
THE FUTURE, TODAY!
The present’s hope to realize the ideal of the fantasmic future often leads to
their discontent with the young adults who have (unsurprisingly) failed to grow
into the fantasmic future their culture had hoped they would become. As we’ve
seen this discontent has resulted in the continued marginalization of many. It has
resulted in the choice to sterilize thousands, the abuse of thousands of people of
color, and it has done damage to those who identify as queer or non-normative.
Allen Ginsberg and Martin Luther King Jr. present us with two different examples
of coping with the damage done by the idea of the fantasmic future: either seeking
refuge in the death drive, divorcing oneself from hegemony and advocating its
opposite, or attempting to change conceptions with in the hegemonic norm and
integrating those who have been marginalized as part of the formation of a more
perfect union. The recently dubbed “Millennial Generation,” those born anywhere
from the 1980s to the early 2000s, have come under heavy scrutiny from previous
generations for being narcissistic, lazy, and more or less ruining everything (and if
they haven’t yet, they certainly will soon).
Mirrors, Hair Loss, Millennials, Joel Stein and Other
Middle-Age Disappointments
The negative talk the millennial generation the past couple of years creates
a clear image of this disillusionment in the older generations with their own failure
to create a fantasmic future. Of course, the blame is not put on the previous
generation but instead fault is found with the young adults themselves. Foremost
among the millennial’s critics is the TIME article by Joel Stein “Millennials: The
Me Me Me generation” published in May of 2013. Stein notes that the “instance
of narcissistic personality disorder is three times as high” in millennials (Stein 2).
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And, “58% more college students scored higher on the narcissism scale in 2009
than 1982” (Stein 2). While I don’t wish to debate the severity of narcissistic
personality disorder or its negative impacts on the paitents’ life, I would like to
posit that the overall leaning towards narcissism demonstrated by the “58% more
college students” who “scored higher on the narcissism scale” than in past years
suggests that narcissism is being used as a defense mechanism. In On Narcissism
Freud posits that:
Difficulties in psycho-analytic work upon neurotics led to the same
supposition, for it seemed as though this kind of narcissistic attitude
in them constituted one of the limits to their susceptibility to
influence. Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the
libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of selfpreservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to
every living creature. (102)
Despite the fact that Freud is hardly considered a current expert in the field
of psychology, I think that what he has theorized, and what queer theory has loved
him for, is his ability to comment on, not actual psychological conditions, but
rather social and cultural conditions.1 Narcissistic personality disorder defined by
the DSM VI as “pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for
admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood” (APA 9).
However, the DSM V points out “the essential features of a personality disorder
1 García and Sánchez nicely synthesize Žižek’s theory of ideology as the matrix of that which we
find conceivable. Žižek posits that Freud, other psychoanalysts and philosophers point “towards the hidden
foundations of discourse and the supposed rationality on which such discourses are based, which do not
mask a foundational reality but a position of the enunciating subject who hides the material conditions of
enunciations… this materiality is embodied in, and still more, is constituted by conflicts of power” (García
2-3). Žižek’s theory affirms Freud’s cultural pertinence by suggesting that Freudian theory allows us
insight into discourse. García, George and Carolos Gmo. Aguilar Sánchez. “Psychoanalysis and Politics:
The Theory of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2.3. 2008.
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are impairments in personality (self and interpersonal) functioning and the
presence of pathological personality traits” (APA 9). By highlighting the
impairment to function the most recent revision of the DSM alludes to the normal
defense mechanism from which the personality derives its name and basis.
Obviously, the personality disorder effects the individual, but when Stein speaks
of an entire generation’s narcissistic leaning; then, I feel, narcissism can be
considered as not only a cultural condition but an indicator of a particular threat
which the psyche defends against with narcissism. The millennial generation is not
a generation of narcissists, but instead a generation in fear who have turned to
narcissism, “excessive self-love, vanity, self-admiration or self-centeredness” to
defend against the socio-economic conditions which threaten their futures (OED).
In “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,” Judith Butler states that
precarity constitutes “conditions that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside
of one’s control” (Butler 1) For the millennial generation, their own socioeconomic system presents this threat. In “Dude Where’s My Job,” Walter Benn
Michaels takes a look at the progressive present and says that in 2020 “of the
163,537,100 jobs expected to exist, only about 20% will require a BA” a number
which he got from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Things that were stressed to this
generation from their early childhood no longer apply for them. They’ve gone to
college, they’ve worked hard in school. Now they can’t get jobs and can’t afford
to do the things the American dream promised they would be able to and society
pushed as the most important things for them to do.
Millennials cannot get work, they cannot get medical insurance, homes are
being foreclosed upon, they’ve accrued enormous student loan debt. “Economic
inequality has been increasing of over half a century; in 1962 the bottom 80% of
American house holds had 19.1% of the country’s wealth; by 2007 that number
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had dropped to 15%” (Michaels 1006). And then between 1983 and 2009 the net
worth of that bottom 80% of people in the nation dropped “from $65,300 to
$62,900” (Michaels 1006). These statistics suggest that there is no opportunity for
earning wages, paying off debt, owning a home, or otherwise funding a
comfortable life.
In his Time article Joel Stein says millennial “development is stunted:
more people ages 18-29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the
2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults,” He insinuates that the millennial
cares little for the cultural goal to which we were all to be indoctrinated to strive
towards – bringing about a fantasmic future through reproductive futurity. Stein
demands the generation be read as a failure because they are producing ‘selfie’,
student loan debt, and graduate degrees instead of wedding rings, white picket
fences, and babies. The American dream as outlined by Berlant is not living up to
its promise that “if you invest your energies in work and family-making, the nation
will secure the boarder social and economic conditions in which your labor can
gain value and your life can be lived with dignity” (4). Millennials did as
instructed, went to college, dreamed big, took out loans, but they cannot afford to
move out, start a family, etc. The millennial cannot easily or happily fulfill the
imperative of reproductive futurity, they cannot use it to legitimate or immortalize
themselves because of the socio-economic turmoil (or perhaps they simply do not
want to). The seemingly narcissistic (selfies, social media, reality TV) actions that
have become synonymous with the generation and picked on as a pet-peeve of
many seems to be the way the millennial not only defends themselves against the
onslaught of disillusionment with their own society but also a means of
immortalizing the self.
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Teachers, Guidance Counselors, parents and grandparents promised that if
the tiny millennials did what they were told, got good grades, played sports,
learned an instrument, participated in art class, and then went to college, they
would get their happily ever after. They were told the American dream would
deliver. But, of course, there are some plot holes in our storybook; no one told us
the economy was down (be it cyclically or not). No one told us the American
Dream was just false advertising. No one told us that we all wouldn’t be able to
realize it no matter how hard we worked.
Current Occupation: Progressive Existence
Precarity created by inequalities in the socio-economic and political
systems in America has caused young adults to be seemingly at odds with the
American dream, hegemony and to has caused them to seem narcissistic. Rather
than critique the system that has failed millennials, writers like Joel Stein have
instead critiqued the generation, crying foul on a symptom rather than the disease.
The Occupy Movement has been represented as one comprised primarily of
young people, perhaps because of their main demographic much has been said
against the Occupy Movement to belittle its goals or to make them seem more like
a group of troublemakers rather than a movement that seeks positive change in
their social and economic system. In “Rachel Carson’s Toxic Discourse:
Conjectures on Counter publics, Stakeholders and the ‘Occupy Movement’” Max
Wexler posits that the Occupy Movement is one of these ‘toxic discourses’ which
seeks only to spread dissonance instead of one that works for change. He frames
the Occupy Movement an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality, where in the 1% and all those
who would believe they could benefit or obtain such status are called
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‘Stakeholders’—they invested in this socio-economic system and believe it will
supply reciprocity to them. Wexler writes:
The Occupy Movement tacitly indicts stakeholder theory as a cooptive strategy. The so-called ‘legitimate agents’ have about them
publics, who due to benefits either accrued or forthcoming, buy into
the version of the future put forward by the center. The ideal of the
‘greater good’ in stakeholder theory is constructed within the zone in
which relationships form. In this zone, reciprocity operates… In
turn, the stakeholders tacitly serve to buffer the center from more
contentious counter publics. In so doing, they help assure the
center’s ongoing legitimacy or, in a manner of speaking, shield the
center from the brunt of toxic discourse. (183)
It seems to me that while Wexler’s logic and research is valid, his claim does not
extend the scope of the issue far enough. The term “stakeholder” is deeply
reminiscent of “shareholder,” leading the reader to mentally reduce the Occupy
Movement and by extension the precarity facing the entire millennial generation,
down to a question of economics. Certainly, economics is a factor in this precarity,
but there are many other underlying problematic social ideologies that have
contributed to the situation millennials face. Occupy does present a “toxic
discourse” insofar as, yes, it does critique America’s capitalist system and many
social factors as Wexler says; but it is not a movement that simply seeks to make
noise against big businesses and shareholders that would ignore them.
Occupy instead offers a critique not only of gross economic inequality, but
its inconsistency with the American mythos. According to news reports from the
protests themselves in 2011, “The overwhelming sense among the protestors is
that they have been betrayed by what may be termed the ‘Horatio Alger’ myth that
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has become the imagined narrative of the Americans. The foundational idea that
leading an exemplary life in the face of adversity can allow anyone to climb from
rags to riches” (Jayadev). To reduce Occupy down to a protest purely about the
economic structures of the US grossly ignores the way that capitalism has shaped
and become entangled in the cultural mythos and shaped American hegemony.
The Occupy Movement offers a critique of the larger structures of American
hegemony, which dictate that they must conform to and produce a future that is
currently impossible.
In an interview entitled “Occupy Aesthetics” Adbuster founder and editorin-chief Kalle Lasn says that for the last 20 years or so they had considered
themselves “culture jammers” but something, recently had changed that “now we
may be beyond this, in a kind of revolutionary moment, where it’s quite obvious
that” there is a crisis which he calls an “ecological, psychological and financial
tipping point” (Mclauchlan 8). Lasn says “What we need now is more than
culture jamming” which seems to be a sort of cultural critique that he hopes will
have people shifting focus or taking a look at the culture around them (Mclauchlan
8). Lasn says he hopes that the Occupy Movement can help the political left move
beyond “a negative or reactionary response to the status quo” (Mclauchlan 8).
Lasn goes on to predict that people’s involvement in the movement will spur on
some changes in the progressive present things like “getting the Robin Hood Tax
implemented, or fighting for campaign finance reform or winning the long, hard
fight for a binding agreement on climate change”(Mclauchlan 10). While one of
the main complaints about the Occupy Movement has been its lack of united voice
or cohesive demands, here we see an overarching theme within Lasn’s claims: that
changes should be made to that would benefit the American people in the
progressive present. If these laws and policy changes were put in place made
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however, they would represent a threat to the fantasmic future. They constitute and
admission of defeat on the part of the ‘Horatio Alger’ myth, in that their
instatement would indicate a flawed and inequitable system that needed
rebalanced, which is after all the demand of Occupy.
Media attempts to show Occupy as a movement acts to undo the critique to
the fantasmic future that is represented by Occupy. The media depicts the
movement as one comprised of young people, lead by those were “’internet and
social media savvy’: ‘a few smart people on the internet can call for something
and, if it captures the public’s imagination. It can get tens of thousands of people
out on the streets’” (Reimer 2). The media often called Occupier’s questions about
the government naive, but there is true power and critique in a simple question. If
you are taught all of your life that Democracy is “by the people, for the people”
only to find that your, your friends, and your families needs are being ignored by
your government then asking “Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the
people over the polis?” is not a “naïve, basic question” by someone “new to
politics” it is the critique of someone one who is finding themselves disillusioned
with the American political system and someone who is seeing the incongruities
between what is presented in the American mythos and the actualities of
representative government. The speaker isn’t naive; he is calling out indoctrination
he received as a child as one that proclaims a fantasmic future, one of equality and
infinite opportunity, as one that is completely counter to his experience. Leaving
him asking: Is democracy not what I was told it is? Or is this just not a
democracy?
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Looking at Agency
Occupy constitutes an action of agency on its participants, both young and
old, they have revoked the sovereignty of not only the American dream, but
hegemony in general. The movement is individualistic in its visual articulations
and uniting in its nomenclature. Its participants, through the act of rebellion
constituted by merely being in a space, taking up the space, and not vacating it,
have denied sovereignty to the American mores, norms and by extension
American hegemony and instead made have sovereignty, among themselves, their
own collective agenda. This is reflected not only by the simple act of being
together in one place, but their slogan as well.
Adbuster made famous the image of a ballerina who holds position
perpetually, poised on top of Arturo Di Modica’s “Charging Bull”-- the mammoth
(at 3.5 tons and 18ft long) bronze statue that resides permanently on Bowling
Green (Figure 2). The Bull was conceived of by Di Modica “as a way to celebrate
the can-do spirit of American and especially New York” he saw it as “ the perfect
antidote to the Wall Street Crash of 1986” and dropped it off (illegally) without
warning, with the help of several on December 15, 1989 early in the morning
(ChargingBull.com.). Despite initial resistance to the ‘gift’ Wall Street, and NYC
by extension, have come to truly embrace the bull as a landmark. The ballerina
holds a position entitled “Attitude” where in the working leg is raised, and bent at
the knee in a 90-degree angle such that the knee and foot are held at the same
level. In an interview by Sam Eifling, Lasn remarked that the image of the
ballerina to him “was a sublime symbol of total clarity. Here’s a body poised in
this beautiful position and it spoke of this crystal-clear sublime idea behind this
messy business… this ballerina is so sublimely tender” and certainly she is, no
matter how practiced and athletic the position is always some what precarious
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especially when you take into account that she is pictured poised on the rounded
surface of the bull surrounded, rising just above the mist of what is presumably
smoke or tear gas, indicated by figures in gasmasks in the background. But the
image is also one of power, she is above the gas and dust, seemingly unaffected
and unperturbed by it, her hands and face hold a graceful ease that speak to the
sublime qualities Lans hopes the image incurs. She seems still, untouched wave of
motion that surrounds her. This quality of stillness in her ‘attitude’ is created
through juxtaposition, she is surrounded by some sort of haze, thicker in some
areas, thinner in others. The bull she is poised atop dips its shoulder, about to rock
onto it’s haunches and charge forward, his tail in a perpetual curl the tassel of
which seems to move in a breeze. Behind the bull men in riot gear charge forward,
suggestive of what a protester my fear encountering. The curl of the bull’s tail is
echoed in the dancers leg but there is no phantom breeze here, she is stillness
unconcerned with the bull below her or the chaos behind her. Above her it reads
in a stark red “What is our one demand?” A question repeatedly asked of the
movement, but never truly answered.
Certainly, it is propaganda that is not the question, the question is rather:
What is it selling? The fact that this is propaganda is demonstrated even in Lasn’s
own response on the poster. He says:
To me it was almost like an invitation, like if we get our act together
then we can launch a revolution. It had this magical revolutionary
feel to it, which you couldn't have with the usual lefty poster which
is nasty and visceral and in your face. The magic came from the fact
this ballerina is so sublimely tender. There's some idea there, and the
power of it comes from the fact that most of the time you'll never be
able to answer what it is. It's just there. It's just a magic moment that
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Figure 2. Poster, Adbusters, July 2011
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you can feel in your gut that it's there, and you're willing to go there
and sleep there and go through the hardship and fight for it. Once
you start answering it too clearly then the magic is gone. (Eifling)
He speaks about the poster with a sort of wistful mysticism that, though it may stir
for some, it hardly does anything to describe or explain the poster or its use. He
cannot say it is propaganda for were he to do so it would undo the very power that
propaganda posses. The posters propagandist message is straightforward though:
Join the Occupy Movement, bring your tent, and You, singularly, with the rest of
us will rise above the inequalities of Wall street. You will dance on their frozen
rage.
The poster, and it’s propagandistic message represents a subversive
message and hopes to engender a power that will subvert hegemony not only
through the bringing about of it’s message, i.e. Actual actions. But, it’s mere
existence and circulation is a subversion. It creates a discourse that presents these
ideas at all. In Aids DemoGraphics Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston open their
book by stating “This book is intended as a demonstration, in both sense of the
word. It is meant as direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands
of as many people as possible. And it is presented as a do-it-yourself manual,
showing how to make propaganda work in a fight against AIDS” (Crimp 13).
Crimp and Rolston set out to do what so many books on Rosa Parks failed to do:
they wish to teach you how to participate in civil disobedience movement. Staring
back at the reader from the page to the left of thirteen is a hand made protest sign,
GUILTY, is spray-painted atop an image of, then presidential candidate, Bush Sr.
The bottom reads: “Testing is more effective than treatment” (Crimp 12). The
book emphasizes propaganda’s use in protest and its subversive powers, its ability
to critique and to circulate a discourse through an art form long claimed by and
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relegated to the dominant political powers. A power that one can see reclaimed by
not only Adbusters as is seen in their ballerina poster but also those participating in
the movement. With signs like: “Hey Capitalism, It’s not you, It’s us. Just
kidding. It’s you’ ‘The Banks got bailed out, we got sold out’ ‘Debt is Slavery’
‘USA= United Shareholders Association’ ‘Free Enterprise is not a Hunting
Season’ – Signs at Occupy Wall Street and at Occupy Boston” (Jayadev,
Economic & Political Weekly). While their propaganda isn’t as elegant as the
Adbusters poster it’s still evident: equating Capitalism to a bad boyfriend you
want to dump, saying that the government sold them out and left them stranded,
calling debt an inhumane act that keeps them bound and interred to companies,
rebranding the USA as for corporations not for people, and highlighting the way
that corporations have taken the free market to mean they can take advantage of
the American people.
The Occupy Movement made popular the saying “We are the 99%,” a
slogan that hopes to “give voice to the widespread frustration that so few (the 1%)
[those that hold the majority of wealth in the nation] seem to hold all the power.
The vast majority (the 99%) lacks an (equal) say in the social economic, financial,
political and ecological processes that affect (and threaten) our lives” (Juris 435).
It seems counter-intuitive that a movement that proclaimed itself to be the 99%
would represent itself with the image of one woman and one demand, insinuating
a sort of unity that seems impossible, however what they’re actually uniting
against is the overall factors of precarity that make them question the sovereignty
of their current government. While Lasn remarks on the sublime qualities of the
ballerina she seems to also represent something interesting and perhaps
unintentional on the parts of the designers. By showing only one woman in the
midst of a creative act they highlight the enormous action of subversive agency
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taking place on the part of each protester. The essence of the Occupy Movement,
is just that, to occupy a space, to take up a space that would usually only be moved
through. With the protestors in gasmasks in the background the ballerina poster
suggests a factor of public demonstration protests that the Occupier could expect
to encounter, the police. Occupiers and other protesters present an action of
agency that is an affront to the governing and authority structures that we accept as
sovereign. In Althussurian terms, they refuse to be hailed. In Judith Butler’s essay
“Agencies of Style for the Liminal Subject” she summarizes Althusser’s theory of
the hailing ritual in which the subject recognizes and ritually obeys an authority
figure, thus cementing the authorities power, proving it sovereign through the
ritual of allowing oneself to be hailed. Butler writes:
in Althusser’s very definition of ideology, as well as his insistence
that ritual links the ideational dimension of a practice with its
material status: ‘practices are governed by rituals in which these
practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an
ideological apparatus’ and ‘ideas are.. material actions inserted into
material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves
defined by material ideological apparatus from which derive the
ideas of the subject. (33)
By occupying a space and refusing to leave it when asked the Occupy protestors
constitute a massive undoing of ritual agency. They refuse to be ‘hailed’ by police
authority, which are material representations of the sovereign authority people
have put in the government, by doing so they have refused the authority of the
government and made a visual, ritual, material showing of the fragility of its
authority. Each and every single individual in the Occupy protest completes this
material action of agency which destabilized the authority of the government, they
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refuse to complete the hailing ritual which would cement its sovereignty and by
refusing they enact a ritual with constitutes its sovereignty as unrecognized. The
collective action of an entire mass of people completing this ritual constitutes a
massive affront to government sovereignty, which is of course the nature and
purpose of protest. More interestingly though, is that this collective action signals
a transfer of agency, the Occupiers by refusing the hailing ritual and staying
together have used their agency to create a new ritual which cements a sovereign
power in the Occupy movement itself.
CHAPTER 5: DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO: POSITIVE
DISOBEDIENCE
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout
his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process
of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of
education that is not a system of indoctrination. ...You are being
taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to
a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a selfperpetuating system. (Lessing, xxii)
Education constitutes one of the means through which children are formally
indoctrinated into their culture. To many, indoctrination is a strong, even
offensive, word that rings of brainwashing, but that’s not how I mean to use it in
this section. Indoctrination is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as
“instruction; formal teaching” and then later during the cold war it took on the
connotation of “the ‘instruction’ of prisoners of war, etc., in Communist doctrines,
ideas etc.”. We all must be introduced into our culture and its values in some way,
and in this process we are taught that certain things are true, this form of
indoctrination is not evil. Teachers, parents, and legislators work to ensure that
children can be successful adults within their culture. It is not my intention to tear
down this system or demonize it, it has done well by me and as I make my way
through academia I suspect it will continue to bring good to my life. I critizse and
point out weaknesses in the American educational system so that it might be
improved upon.
Education becomes a touchy subject for many because of its place in the
complicated intersection between the progressive present and the fantasmic future.
In my first chapter I touched on the way media and the promise of the fantasmic
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future is used to teach children to idolize their culture, their futures and above all
else, indoctrinate them into hegemony. Education is no exception to this, for
children every single situation is an educational experience, they don’t need
formal schooling to learn their culture but this formal structure provides a way to
standardize not only the imparting of knowledge but the absorption of culture. No
generation of children has grown to make the fantasmic future the fantasmic now.
However, education obviously contributes a great service to the progressive
present, I need no more proof of that than the fact that I can compose this work
and that you might read it. This amazing feat of the educational system, that I may
write and you may read, falls laughably short of fantasmic though. Neither you nor
I have perfected our culture, and with each imperfect generation the pervious
generation is forced to confront their disillusionment.
In “The Kids Are [Not] Alright” I discuss the ways in which the grandiose
promises made to children, such as “You can be President,” are essentially an uncashable promissory note. These promises are used to steer children into the
normative, and often away from anything that could be perceived as rebellious or
counter-culture. Institutions such as education, which are governed by legislature,
work to reproduce and ensure the sovereignty of hegemony; reproductive futurity
and the idea of the fantasmic future are of course bound up in the heteronormative
and is the means through which it ensures its perpetuation. Education is crafted by
administrators who often seem to keep in mind the past and the future but forget
the present. They create books and curriculums that they hope will drive students
towards becoming a fantasmic future, forgetting that these children will soon be
adults who must exist in the present.
This is particularly stark when one looks at the way the story of Rosa Parks
and the Montgomery Bus Boycott has been taught in elementary schools. Children
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are taught that Mrs. Parks is a important and brave historical figure. However, they
are not taught how her actions connect with a larger civil disobedience movement
or why that movement was so important. In She Would Not Be Moved: How We
Tell The Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Herbert Kohl
investigates the ways in which Rosa Parks’ story is altered for consumption by
children. Kohl states that “Racism … is an issue that is usually considered too
sensitive to be dealt with directly in the elementary school classroom… the
situation is routinely described as a problem between individuals” instead of as a
institutionalized problem with in our social system (1). Children in elementary
schools learn that issues like racism, are solved, and are simply things that
happened long ago between individuals—that their future will not be plagued by
it. They are not properly prepared to change the institutions of their society
because they are told all the problems have already been fixed.
While Kohl recognizes the complicated nature of discussing racism with in
an elementary school classroom setting, his analysis also suggests that side
stepping the discussion of racism as an on-going and historic problem in favor
speaking about it as a conflict between individuals which has long since been
resolved enables a continuation of institutionalized racism. In many 90s and early
2000s classrooms, “Rosa was tired,” despite being most American children’s
introduction to the civil rights movement, her depiction gave children “no sense of
the risk and courage of the African American” struggle for civil rights (Kohl, She
Would Not Be Moved 7). Instead the visualization given of Rosa Parks is “poor,
without education or sophistication a person who acted on impulse and emotion
rather than intelligence and moral conviction. There was no sense of her as a
community leader or as part of an organized struggle against oppression” (Kohl,
She Would Not Be Moved 6).
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This idea has permeated into representations of Mrs. Parks targeted at
adults as well, causing further mystification and misrepresentation of the
beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. Kohl quotes Robert Fulghum’s book
It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, which states “Rosa Parks. Not an activist
or a radical. Just a quiet, conservative, churchgoing woman with a nice family and
a decent job as a seamstress” (11). This inaccurate image presented by an adult,
for consumption by other adults is not at all far from that presented to children
however this misrepresentation has no guise of ‘for children’ to shield it. Rosa
Parks was an activist, and “one of the first women in Montgomery to join the
NAACP ” (Kohl, She Would Not Be Moved 13). Not only does Fulgham’s
misrepresentation teach children an inaccurate history, it leaves them totally
deprived of a real image of how and why a peaceful rebellion takes place. When
Herbert Kohl questioned the children he was observing while they were learning
about Mrs. Parks none of them understood the civil disobedience she orchestrated
as such; furthermore none of the children understood how Mrs. Park’s actions
helped to create the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To the students Mrs. Parks was just
a tired lady, who was a bit angry. and who refused to move from her seat. In their
understanding, she was not part of a larger movement and she certainly was not
seen as one of the key orchestrators of said movement. They do not understand
Rosa Parks as “a veteran activist whose defiance of segregation laws was not an
isolated incident but a life long crusade” (Dreier 88). The danger in that is not
simply a dishonor to Rosa Parks, her memory and the memory of thousands of
others who fought for civil rights. The dangerous thing about an incomplete
education is that oppression might go unrecognized, that it might be allowed to
continue, and that in the future people will not have background knowledge to
draw on when they decide a form of oppression has to stop. If we teach children
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that the world is free of oppression we have blinded them and we lead them into
oppression.
In Should We Burn Babar? Herbert Kohl writes about his experiences with
social struggle and says “I have been struck by the active role young people have
played and by the lack of credit they have received for their actions” (Kohl,
Should We Burn Babar 59). He notes that there are now a wide array of young
adult books which deal with social issues, however there is still an absence of
books “that question the economic and social structure of our society and the
values of capitalism” (Kohl, Should We Burn Babar 59). Are we only teaching
children to cope with things emotionally instead of change them for the better?
Kohl notes that most of the racial struggle seen in Rosa Parks’ is reduced to a one
on one conflict when it is taught to children (one person, or one small group, being
mean to one person based on race) rather than teaching racial oppression as a part
of wide spread social inequality. These books depict individuals over coming
things like poverty and social inequality but they never show these things being
over come collectively, suggesting to the child that these are not wide spread
problems within society. Teaching social inequality as an already overcome
individualize problem is an active hindrance to recognition of problems and the
progress against these inequalities. This is one way in which the idea of the
fantasmic future is able to hold action that could take place in the progressive
present in a bind, halting it before it even has a chance to begin.
Hey Teachers! Leave Those Kids Alone!
Civil Disobedience has been part of many movements and revolutions in
American history. So, it is difficult to believe that the very form of rebellion that
has shaped our nation would be on that is taught so vaguely to children as is seen
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in Kohl’s research of the telling Rosa Parks’ story. More surprising still is that in
October of 2014 the school board in Jefferson County Colorado attempted to
revise the Advanced Placement History course to “ promote ‘citizenship,
patriotism, and the benefits of the free-enterprise system’” as well as “respect for
authority and respect for individual rights” (Brundin 1; Goodman and Moynihan
1). Officials also said that the history class “should not ‘encourage or condone
civil disorder,’” “’social strife or disregard for the law’” (Brundin 1; Healy 1).
The board has voted 3-2 to “reorganize its curriculum-review committee” despite
the fact that drastic changes to the curriculum would mean a deviation from the
Advanced Placement’s college approved curriculum and therefore the class could
no longer hold the title or be taken for college credit by students (Healy 1).
It seems that the Jefferson Co. school board wants their student to walk
away feeling that America is perfect, all thanks to capitalism. In short, it sounds
eerily similar to a song by Tom Paxton entitled “What did You Learn In School
Today?” In the song a child recounts the many propaganda things his teacher has
taught him, things experience has taught us to be false. He learns that everyone is
free, “soldiers seldom die/... justice never ends/… policeman are my friends/…
our government must be strong/ it’s always right and never wrong/our leaders are
the finest men” (Paxton 1). The National Coalition Against Censorship, the
American Civil Liberties Union and “eight other national groups sent letters to the
school board condemning the proposed curriculum review” (Goodman and
Moynihan 1). As reported in an article by Democracy Nation the ACLU has
stated:
It would be nearly impossible to teach U.S. history without reference
to ‘civil disorder,’ which is appropriately discussed in connection
with the American Revolution, the labor movement, civil rights and
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gay rights activism, U.S. entry into World War I, voting rights
protests, public demonstrations against the war in Vietnam,
opposition to abortion, government surveillance, and countless other
significant events in U.S. history. Telling schools that they cannot
use materials that ‘encourage or condone civil disorder’ in
addressing these and other historical events is tantamount to telling
them to abandon the teaching of history (Goodman and Moynihan 1)
In protest and in an ironic and wonderful show of civil disobedience, students
walked out of class by the horde, and teachers staged a several days of ‘sick-outs,’
one sign at a protest read “Don’t Make History A Mystery.” Senior in Jefferson
Co, Ashlyn Maher who took AP US History before the changes were proposed not
only recognizes that “disobedience is ‘the foundation of our country’” but she is
also quick to say that she feels like she was only presented with historical facts
and made her own judgments based on those (DN). Despite the fact that Maher’s
high school career is drawing to a close and she has already taken the class in
question she still feels a duty to the community and the progressive present. She
says “This issue does not stop affecting me when I graduate. I have a little brother
and a little sister who will grow up in the JeffCo community, and I want them to
have the best education possible” (Goodman and Moynihan 1) This bright young
woman realizes that her generation is not just composed of her alone and if she
hopes for it to succeed (and for the future to be bright) she needs to advocate for
not only her own education and the education of her grandchildren but of those
nearest to her in age. While the fantasmic education the school board would have
them receive is one that blindly insists that the free-market system and social
structure are fair and have never left anyone oppressed, Ms. Maher has acted in the
progressive present to protect against what she sees as a threat to the near future.
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The Good Lie?
If given their way it seems that Jefferson County curriculum changers
would happily see all of history told the same sanitized, mythologized way that
Mrs. Rosa Park’s role in the bus boycott is being taught. It seems that proponents
of the proposed changes to the Jefferson County Advanced Placement History
course are in favor of the teaching of social myth in lieu of history. They feel that
the curriculum changes would foster a more patriotic future and they may very
well be correct. In Jonathan Gottschall’s Storytelling Animal he suggests that
national myths serve the role of creating and sustaining social cohesion within a
large group (122). Social cohesion is defined as “the willingness of members of
society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper” (Stanley 5).
Gottschall cites historians Howard Zinn, and James Loewen’s arguments on the
dramatic whitewashing of American history texts, so changed in fact, that “they
don’t count as history anymore” (Gottschall 124). These texts become something
much closer to a romantic idealization of events suggests:
determined forgetting—an erasure of what is shameful from our
national memory banks so that history can function as a unifying,
patriotic myth... The men at the center of these stories are presented
not as flesh-and-blood humans with flaws to match their futures but
as the airbrushed leading men of hero stories. The purpose of these
myths is not to provide an objective account of what happened. It is
to tell a story that bins a community together—to take pluribus and
make unum. (Gottschall 124)
Replacing history courses with an ‘edited’ version which ignores or attempts to
smooth out it’s problematic aspects creates a greater degree of social cohesion in
the form of patriotism, obtained through a sense of superiority over other nations.
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While patriotism is often praised, it acts in ignorance of the progressive present
avoiding even the idea of a need for major changes to the socio-political system in
the present or near future; deeming those who see falls and desire change
‘unpatriotic’. One sees this all too clearly in the debated over the Jeffco Co
curriculum, educators and students who want to maintain a more balanced and
critical view of the events that have shaped American history are called “punks”
by host Gretchen Carlson of Fox News (Holden 1). The danger, of course, goes
much deeper than simple dissent, it is one that has seemed to be a recurring theme
throughout this thesis: young adults coming of age and suddenly being confronted
with a reality that has no resemblance to the America they were told awaited them
after high school or college. Young adults are suddenly staring down inequities of
a social, economic and political nature that they do not understand fully and
because of the perpetuations of a national canon of social myths they are, as
Herbert Kohl’s studies point out, totally unacquainted with social disobedience
this leaves young adults at a great handicap to bring about change to their society.
The teaching of social myth as history instructs the child to believe that
their society is perfect, and therefore in inequities they face must be like Herbert
Kohl suggest, on an individual basis. Children are taught that there are no
systematic oppressions with in their society and therefore those with enough
privilege not to face those oppressions never know to look for, fight against and
not participate in those oppressions. Likewise, those who are othered are given the
message that their disadvantages are due to individual shortcomings rather than
oppressive factors built into the social structure resulting in micro-aggressions,
discrimination, hate crimes and murder. The national myths taught in schools and
circulated through out the media suggest to the American people that the nation
was created perfect, and any flaws we have created in the present will be corrected
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in the fantasmic future through the achievement of the American Dream. The
present is left hobbled and bound by these notions, deprived of the knowledge of
social inequities and dispossessed of the knowledge of social disobedience;
without these tools the present is left at what seems to be a drastic disadvantage
for enacting positive change in the progressive present.
So What? And Other Unanswered Questions
It’s relatively easy to sit by and critique your culture, your country, your
economy, and your educational system. No harm has come to me in the writing of
this thesis, other than a few sleepless nights spent struggling with wording. I’ve
not placed myself in any abundantly precarious situations. I’ve not spent any
nights cold in a tent on Wall Street’s sidewalk. I haven’t dropped acid with
Ginsberg. I’ve never been faced with the choice to comfortably compromise my
principles and ride the bus or walk many miles every day of the year. I didn’t
stand in Washington with thousands of others to hear Martin Luther King Jr.
speak, nor could I weep when he died. I’ve never resided in North Carolina and no
one has ever mucked with my internal organs without my consent. If I’ve
ventured fairly little, what is gained?
Hope. My desire is that you have gained some hope from this. Hope, that
will stand in the stead of blind faith in a culture that is flawed and unjust to many.
It is my wish that at times you were angry (and not simply about my frequent
comma splices). I want you to be angry about the things people have done, in the
name of children, to people. I want you to be angry about the victimization of
those who are not children anymore, but who surely once were. I want you to
realize with me that we are part of a culture that we didn’t create, and that doesn’t
reflect us; it does not in any way encapsulate us, and yet we participate in it and let
71
its ideals steer us instead of steering with our own. While some may still want an
American Dream, I want to know what we are going to do while we are awake.
What about me? What about you? What about your parents and grandparents?
How are we all going to get along and be okay? Who defines okay? What the hell
does okay even look like?
I didn’t write this thesis to panic you about your car payment that’s coming
due, that retirement fund you’ve really been meaning to start, or the fact that you
still haven’t been to the dentist (when was your last cleaning anyway?). No, the
things that niggle at our minds always will, there will always be something left to
do. In many ways those little worries are luxuries. We are probably not worrying
if we will eat tomorrow, if we will we be safe tonight, or if our child will commit
suicide because no one will accept a boy who prefers to wear dresses. But these
are the worries of many. It is my hope that this thesis spurns recognition that the
time to recognize and to address those worries is not tomorrow. They will never
be rectified if we do not act collectively in the present for progress.
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May 12, 2015
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