The 1980s and the End of Modernity

If the symptoms of postmodernity surfaced in the period after World War 2 through the expansion of the consumer economy and the embrace of synthetic modes of living, the 1980s saw the death throes of modernism.  The appearance of the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the emergence of a visually saturated media have all made it possible to live in the world without being of it.  

In fact, artifacts from the 1980s seem to posit their creators’ own awareness of the liminal qualities of that decade: take the self-consciously hip and spare quality of much pop music, for example, or elegies to a not quite vanished past in songs such as the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  The abandoned post-industrial landscapes of steel and polluted ground made it onto many an album cover.  It’s as though popular culture acknowledged even before Fukuyama that we were at the end of history, or at least about to enter into an age dramatically different from what we had known before. 

In the United States the 1980s also saw the “Reagan Revolution,” the paradigmatic political symptom of a culture losing its grip on reality.  The more recent elections of George W. Bush are a continued example of the same tendency.  Everything has been thrown into doubt: the meaning of torture, scientific evidence, historical fact, and plain language. I’m not the first to observe that the recondite theories of language deriving from poststructuralism, which first became popular in the American academy in the 1980s, have strangely become the currency of political conservatives.  Taken to its extreme, Derrida’s “free play of signification” becomes absolute relativism.  Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous statement about weapons of mass destruction (“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”) sounds not only like something one would read in a graduate student seminar paper on Deconstruction, but a rejection of inductive reasoning itself.

None of us would want to turn back to 1979, when we faced many of the same problems that we do today: inflation, soaring oil prices, and Middle Eastern conflict.  I wonder, though, if we might be on the brink of a new age once again, this one defined by a recovery of reason.  The end of the age of Bush is a good start.

Whither Global Warming?

According to a 60 Minutes piece aired last night, Al Gore plans to persuade the American public of the importance of global warming through a series of television advertisements.  Just days ago I wondered whether or not he might emerge as a candidate for the Democratic nomination at what may be a divisive Denver convention; now I know why he won’t be.

 As privatization has swept the county, and each of us is carried by the tide of self-promoting business interests, the appeal to civic duty has lost whatever sway it once had.  Gore’s plan to make the public aware by means of corporate-controlled channels strikes me as the best strategy to force our attention to an issue more important than any other.  It’s a shame that we can’t pull together to ameliorate the problem because an elected leader has urged us to do so; even more shameful is that none of the major candidates, Democratic or Republican, has made climate change a major campaign issue.

Of Beer and Authenticity

Barack Obama recently campaigned in Pennsylvania and admitted to having a few beers with Bob Casey before going bowling.  Clearly he delighted in this admission, with the half grin of a child who has been caught doing something wrong but wants the world to know his naughtiness at the same time.  Compare it to John Kerry’s Ohio hunting escapade, or even Michael Dukakis’ tank ride.  It’s the desire to look authentic in the eyes of potential voters. 

In the canon of classical rhetoric, the appeal to ethos is the appeal to authority or credibility.  Generations of teachers have told students that establishing credibility means establishing your own expertise on a given subject, or calling upon the expertise of another to support your own argument.  In the campaigns of recent Democratic presidential candidates, the appeal to ethos has been reduced to gun toting and beer swilling.  While I have no objection to either of these, particularly the latter, it seems to me that we have lost the ability to measure our candidates’ abilities on the square.  Rather, if he’s not too atilt after 6 Rolling Rocks, he’s good enough for me.

For whatever reason, Republicans seem automatically to pass the authenticity test.  Could it be that Democrats are trying too hard?  And could we get on to the serious business of addressing issues instead of stumping to the imagined constituency that honestly believes you were half-cocked before taking bowling lessons from an eight year old child?