AUTO-DA-FE

The public coma is itself a mysterious phenomenon.  The induction of a peculiar alienation from self interest—in America and in Europe the middle class was induced to vote against its own interests to essentially impoverish itself in a kind of auto-da-fe of moral rectitude. We must suffer.  We have been self indulgent.  We have been liberal and we have lost our values.  We are no longer self-reliant, thrifty.  We care too much for pleasure.

Grotesque figures danced before the electorate as if a comic book version of neoliberal ideology had come to life—Joe the Plumber, Sarkozy, Cameron, Palin.  Like a medieval carnival visible by the light of the burning middle class.

But perhaps the carnival of austerity is coming to an end and we are entering an even more dire  field of conflict.  Symptomatic of this new era is the decline of the influence of terror, both as an issue of foreign affairs and as a domestic goad—the terror of the falling economy.

Internationally the war on terror proceeds and there is no reason to believe that it will ever end.  But it is perhaps in a lull and certainly the public, to the degree that it evidences interest, demonstrates a kind of terror fatigue.  The war on terror has become less visible, more autonomic (especially in the weaponry of drones) and now has become an unsettlingly perverse background situation.  America never bothered to understand why its empire arouses such animosity, and so in a sense has secured its destiny in episodic stupidity—the fate of all empires.

And the domestic terror of a cyclic economy seems to have lost influence as well.  Hence the Greek and French ‘no’ to austerity, and to the techno-economics of neoliberalism.  The electorate is perhaps suffering from austerity fatigue and hypocrisy fatigue.  But the forever played and unplayed card, the apparently inexhaustible card, is fear of the other, and in jingoistic America where zombie films and post-apocalyptic fantasies play in our summer multiplexes, we will always prefer to make our political movements unconsciously so as not to disturb our dreams.