The Peril-Lax View: Unmoved Movers of the ‘Blank Generation’

© Hemdale Films

It’s people like you that are sending this country down the tubes. No sense of pride. No sense of loyalty. No sense of NOTHING, man.
—Layne, River’s Edge

We deep schoolers are not known as a particularly excitable generation. In fact, much has been made of our lack of affect to historical events that should, instead, elicit profound emotional responses. So, to the extent that the election of Barack Obama did, indeed, cause a “stir” in our otherwise purportedly staid generational psyche, this is cause for reflection. The two of us got into a discussion a week or so back about this disquieting side of the deep school. I found myself reflecting on various instances of what I’d tentatively call the “Peril-Lax” view(s) of Generation X, a nod to the 1974 film The Parallax View, which, while more post-JFK than post-Watergate, I liken to a description by its writer of the 1986 film, River’s Edge:

The movie is more about the post-Watergate world teen-agers are growing up in than it is about teen-agers. . . . It’s not that we question authority—we mistrust it. We have no set of ethics we’ve inherited. We have to create our own as we go along. . . . This movie portrays a sad time in which apathy is the rule rather than the exception.
—Neal Jimenez, in San Jose Mercury News (CA) May 22, 1987 Section: Weekend Edition: Morning Final Page: 1D

In his 1993 work, Without Conscience, famed psychologist and researcher into psychopathy, Robert D. Hare, found in this film a realistically drawn world of “members of a ‘blank generation’.” Inspired by the true story of the killing of a teenage girl in Milpitas, California, by a classmate in 1981, the ’86 film depicts the almost casual, detached ‘field-trips’ by the killer’s classmates—himself leading the way—to view the body and their failure for days to report the crime. Hare describes the movie this way:

[C]hildren drenched in television violence form a secret underworld while their parents struggle to make ends meet and their lives spin out of control. Distracted and distressed by the grind of daily life, at best the parents in the movie manage to shout, ‘Is that you?’ to their children as they pass in and out of the house and go their separate ways.

One of the movie’s most powerful scenes shows a teacher, still able to care, trying to get through the ‘cool’, ironic style that masks these kids. He asks, then practically begs, the class to say something about how the loss of their dead classmate affected them…Desperately seeking some evidence that he’s reaching his students on a meaningful level, the teacher turns to one of them, a girl named Clarissa who was one of those who finally told the authorities of the murder: ‘Say what Jamie meant to you…’ The response, even from this girl, is a flat empty stare….

The absence of empathy, compassion, or even comprehension of loss drives this teacher into a fit of fury: ‘Nobody in this classroom gives a damn that she’s dead…. It gives us a chance to be morally superior but nobody in this classroom really gives a shit that she’s dead. Because if we did we wouldn’t be here, we’d be on the street half-crazed from lack of sleep tracking down the guy who killed her.’

—Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, pp. 178-79

With its many allusions to nuclear dread and the apparent failures of social reform of the 1960s, Hare leaves out allied candidates beyond entrenchment in television to account for this generational ‘blankness.’ But he does make a demanding case that, whatever the reasons, traits which he marks as of the psychopathic continuum are revealed to an unsettling degree in this generation. Is this what’s been going on, or something else?

Like the empathy test of Mr. Burkewaite, the teacher in River’s Edge, there are more formal “compassion batteries” administered to subjects in films such as the so-called Voight-Kampff test in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the “personality inventory” in The Parallax View. By point of comparison, what’s interesting to me here is that, essentially, both the latter tests are used to mark out not human beings, but imposters of humanity—that is, “people without conscience.” Both the Voight-Kampff in BR and the Parallax personality inventory are essentially fictional precursors of Hare’s own Psychopathy Checklist, devised in 1991.

When I think about these empathy tests meant to, in the first instance, detect murderous androids, and in the second, recruitable assassins, I can’t help but wish to follow the graver assessments of this generation to their logical conclusions, if only as a means for better identifying its own redemptive responses. (For now, I’ll fudge my motivations a bit.)

“It’s just a movie, true,” says Hare of River’s Edge. “But the portrayal…of a society where emotional poverty, impulsivity, irresponsibility, self-aggrandizement, and self-gratification are the norms rings frighteningly true.” (Hare, Without Conscience, p. 179.)

Parallax is defined as “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.” While making no apologies for aspects of our shared generational psyche that might bear the earmarks of pathology, I do wonder whether we can speak of the parallax view, or “peril-lax view” of Generation X? One due to certain forms of conditioning, be they social, biological, etc., that shift (and perhaps shift back) our sense of, call it, “respectable reactivity.” That is, there seems to be some self-awareness—within our very cultural expressions—that we slide in a kind of greasy, back-and-forth migration, from something like irony or detachment to at least an awareness of and tension with that irony. The philosopher Richard Rorty once said that no group of people could live so thoroughly in irony in any permanent fashion. But I wonder? Or is this, in fact, not “living,” after all? Hmm… Is the peril-lax view (and the parallax view) a way, or set of ways, of being in the world whereby we somehow carry around with us, right along with our detachment, an awareness of how we would (should?) react in a given situation if only social scandals weren’t—as my colleague put it—so “expected, assumed, and downright naturalized” to us? Do we see ourselves in different reactionary positions given our ironic pitch at a given moment? Is this a generational form of good ol’ Du Boisian “double consciousness?”

In The Parallax View, it is unclear whether Warren Beatty’s character, Joseph Frady, is more like the human beings who are properly scared shitless that someone is out to get them or like the assassins in the ring he is trying to infiltrate in order to expose. At certain points he seems the one, at others the other. At one point in the film, he has successfully prevented a plane from being bombed in mid-flight. Back on the ground, after the plane has been evacuated and he himself is walking (not running) from the jetway, he wears an expression of detachment that doesn’t suggest even an ounce of satisfaction, but only the most casual acceptance of ‘events’. He is not merely “being cool.”

© Paramount Pictures

He seems to have achieved the same measure of dis-engagement (even as he works to find answers) as the very psychopath he secretly employs to take the Parallax test for him in order to penetrate the group.

The flyer advertising for the Parallax battery strikes me as a shadowy, tales-up, signifier of just the kind of potentially borderline-pathological, extracurricular, aptitudes of psychic dislocation that Joe Frady himself manifests. The same can be argued about Clarissa’s “educated detachment” in River’s Edge, and, also, of Rick Deckard—the detective played by Harrison Ford—in Blade Runner.

© Paramount Pictures

The gauntlet, then, is thrown down before us: Is this an advert for pathological hired goons, or just for slackers with “brains”?

In closing (for now), I’m reminded of an appearance by David Duchovny on The Tonight Show some years ago now when The X-Files was all the rage. In his botched reaction shot to the flukeman in the infamous episode, “The Host,” Duchovny provides an apt description of what is perhaps the “reaction shot” of a generation that grew up so acclimatized and, yes, traumatized by betrayals of all sorts within its own national household:

Jay Leno: ‘Cause on your show I know, I notice, well obviously, they bring in a couple of monsters or something or aliens. I assume when you’re doing those scenes, that stuff’s added later.

DD: Well, sometimes it is because of the nature of the schedule. I get a six foot inch—a six foot intestinal worm, if you could imagine that, and uh, he was strapped in a tube and I had to have a reaction shot for this. There’s a guy, well he was hot in the suit, so he got precedence over me, so he got to go home and get out of his rubber suit, and I had to react to an empty tube. So, not wanting to overplay it, I kinda went like, ‘Mmmhmmm (nods head).’ And then later on, here’s this SIX FOOT INTESTINAL worm and I see it and it’s the most amazing thing and there’s no way in the world…(he re-enacts the reaction shot). ‘Hey it’s another one of those goddamned six foot intestinal worms.’ (Laughter)

Flukeman? Meh.

Talk about a peril-lax view of the flukeman.

das ^§

Cyber-Brownface & The Scapegoaticons

The Scapegoatissons

…'[W]atcha doing to mi wifey, no checky her papeles. she no legal, but she havey benifit card.’

A response, which carried a Homeland Security Internet protocol address, read: ‘That sounds like my boyfriend. Leave him alones and get your own. My boyfriend works sometimes but he is really good at getting FREE benefits from the Federal and State government.’

“Racist Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security” | New York Times

Michael Bay’s travesties and gross disservices notwithstanding, fans of the only serviceable Transformers film, i.e., 1986’s “Transformers: The Movie,” will remember with illicit fondness the dread Quintessons.

The Quintessons

With their inverted and Draconian legal logic and their 5 rotating heads (of Rage, Laughter, Bitterness, Doubt, and Death) all floating on a beam of light, the Quintessons served – like a many-headed cybernetic Hydra – as the cruel juridical arm of the world-eating planet Unicron (voiced by one George Orson Welles, apparently in his last role). The verdict was always the same with them: “Innocent.” Which, of course, meant instant execution.

Now, when I read a story like this in the New York Times, in which anonymous people sitting behind the computers of a government agency are performing “cyber brownface” in order to provoke racist sentiment through public instruments of the civic realm, there’s something I need to know first and foremost: How far does this go? The article gets into certain specifics as, for example, those concerning “longstanding tensions in Wayne County, where farmers and laborers have accused immigration officials of using heavy-handed tactics like racial profiling and arbitrary or unjustified detentions…Such tactics, the farmers say, have scared Hispanic farmworkers from the region just as growers are preparing for the harvest.”

But the report also states that investigation of the e-mails sent from the Department of Homeland Security that further inflame this situation can neither be confirmed nor denied. This bodes so ill for me because we are living in an era where the “Few Bad Apples” defense has, time and again, been shown up for the cruel joke that it is. The torture at Abu Ghraib was supposed to have been the result of such rarity. But are we to forget that it turned out not to be? That it turned out to be far more systemic than we dared fear it was? Along with this, are we to forget the plausibly deniable reports of British troops/agents performing in “Arabface” in Basra back in 2005 when they were apparently caught and jailed by Iraqi police before being sprung by the forces of the “Coalition of the Willing?” Are we going to fail to recall the story by Pultizer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb on the blackface placed on the venerable “War on Drugs” in America?

Of course, on their own face, these traced e-mails reported by the New York Times about immigrant workers appear much more, dare I say, “Innocent,” than those other forms of racial “scapeface.” And the temptation (indeed, desire), even on my part, is to see them as the, um, quintessence, of “isolated incidents.” But given the torture memos recently released, penned by learned men in the highest offices, who would be the fool here? The curious or the satisfied?

I fear that while we debate this, the Scapeface of stereotypes begins to turn again.

das ^§

Gates, Obama, & the Tao of “Your Mama”

I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three – what I think we know separate and apart from this incident – is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact. (GO)

–President Obama

You can read the full story, “Mass. policeman who arrested Gates won’t apologize,” filed by Bob Salsberg of Associated Press (7-23-09) by clicking “GO” above.

But this blog entry is about something else. It’s about an exchange that, in my view, does not need defending, but that may – to the uninitiated – deserve explication, which allegedly occurs just prior to Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr.’s feckless arrest. (By the way, I want this on a T-shirt like lots of other people. But because it is deep, not shallow.) Police Sgt. James Crowley reports:

As I began walking through the foyer toward the door, I could hear Gates again demanding my name. I again told Gates that I would speak with him outside. His reply was ‘ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.’

This is an example of what in the African American tradition is called “signifyin’”. And it both constitutes and reflects a profound and complex aesthetic that is mostly lost in the commentary discourse out there surrounding this basic example. Signifyin’ exists in Black life everywhere, from “playin’ the dozens” on the stoop with your friends, to the subtlest forms of the most intricate jazz music. It was present at the creation of the universe and it will be present at its destruction. And, by the way, so will your mama.

If you get what I meant by that—if you get what I just “did” to you in grievous affection for you, o’ gentle reader—then you have a handle on what Gates was really saying when he said what he said to the police. He was not (just) “doggin’ the cop.”

In an article I wrote a couple of years back I said the following, using—it turns out—racial profiling as a case in point:

An everyday example of Signifyin’ in this sense can be drawn from what DuBois would have called a “twice-told tale” of African American experience, particularly that of black males, in a recalcitrant culture of racial profiling and surveillance. Such a young man, we imagine, perceived as he is by a passing white patrol officer as “not belonging” in a certain area of town is stopped and asked snidely (it being obvious that the officer harbors no real concern for the young man’s welfare), “Evening, there. Say, are you lost, son?” Without missing a beat, the young man casually replies, “This is America, officer. Of course I’m lost.” The officer mumbles an obscenity and drives off.

As an example of Signifyin’ we notice several things here. The youth has just “signified” on the officer. Here there is a Signifier and a Signified(-on). The officer may himself have expected to be the former but ended up being the latter. The youth was expected to return information and not formation (of his character/identity). Here the youth connotes his feeling of being insulted rather than denoting it. He connotes, rather than denotes, his intelligence, his somebodiness, as well as the ignorance of the flummoxed officer. The youth “tropes-a-dope,” doing so by both repeating as well as revising the cop’s denotative linguistic sign: the word “lost.” The semantic register of the officer’s key word is transformed and re-figured, repeated with a difference which makes all the difference.*

Now, of course, when Gates allegedly said, “ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside,” he meant to be about the business of doggin’ the cop. He was doing that, too. But he was also signifyin’ on him and by extension on the whole legacy of what Obama accurately described as the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” Word. So, if y’all think that “mama” didn’t specify a whole lot of other things besides that poor police officer’s actual, biological mater familias—not the least of which are all those higher authorities to which even Officer Crowley and the hegemonic apparatus he represents must also answer, then you have surely missed what Gates was up to.

Meh. It happens. Looks like some others missed out, too.

das ^§

‘You-Shaped, No.1’ (American Gothic 2.x)

'You-Shaped, No.1'

1978: “I Grooveallegiance to the Flag?” P-Funk’s White House ‘Zone of Zero Funkativity’

Iwo Jima Memorial & Funkadelic Album Cover (detail)

My colleague and I (quite unbeknownst to each another at the time) were both just starting 1st grade when, in September of that year, Funkadelic released what would become their most popular album, “One Nation Under a Groove.” We were both six years old and likely being taught in earnest for the first time to recite the pledge of allegiance as a habitual part of our formative curricula.

I myself don’t remember learning the pledge. I have no recollection of struggling to memorize it through the prompts of my teacher—whom I do remember (Mrs. Daken). Like the proverbial back of your hand that you don’t realize is there until you have need it or are otherwise reminded of its indispensability, I just one day, as so many of us did…knew it like that.

But maybe there are some things—subtler things than even the hidden awareness one has of the back of one’s own hand—that under forms of duress you get to know even more keenly than it. And so, paradoxically, you are even more oblivious of its attachment to you and your indebtedness to it? Does that make sense?

See, there’s a track on the album called “Grooveallegiance,” that I do remember hearing for the first time when I was quite young. And, vaguely, I understood that when one “grooves allegiance” (as distinct from? pledging it), one does so to the funk (rather than? along with? of? the flag). And it is to the United Funk of Funkadelica, and to the funk of which stands, that one grooves allegiance, indivisibly, under a groove.

What is funk, you ask? I’ll post some links in coming days. Look out for them. But let me say here that for those who grew up viewing it the way the rest of We-the-People tend to view Old Glory, the absence of funk is a tragic thing. Indeed, it is a catastrophe that bears the marks of apocalypse. Without it, there is left only bereft humanity, what Shakespeare called that “quintessence of dust,” and what the Bard, P-Funk’s Pedro Bell, called the (Dead) “Zone of Zero Funkativity.”

Indeed, one theorist of P-Funk cosmology diagnosed the entire “earth [a]s the ‘Unfunky UFO’” and that, among other things, this was due to the “unfunky operations of the White House,” which for many who practiced or could simply understand grooving allegiance to the funk, was the very epicenter of the Zone of Zero Funkativity.

I wonder, then, are we to say that the White House today remains a Zone of Zero Funkativity? Is it now, at long last, possessed of some modicum of “supergroovalisticprosifunkstication?”

To those who bear allegiances to the “Cosmic Slop” of all that is funky and funktified, these questions can orient a much needed kind of discourse.

das ^§

Obama’s Speech from Ghana

Here is the video of President Obama’s recent addresses to the Parliament of Ghana in Accra. Delivered on July 11, 2009, it is titled “A New Moment of Promise.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

“President Obama Speaks in Ghana“, posted with vodpod.

Call for Papers

“Generation X” is a cohort whose fuller significance is only now emerging. Coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, we now constitute the rising voice of political and cultural analysis; the growing dominant constituency within politics; and the ascending class of societal “power brokers.” To the detriment of our social fabric, however, we remain a misunderstood force in the contemporary United States.

Our perspective on race and race relations in the United States offers one avenue toward greater understanding. As the most educated generation in U.S. history, this perspective is at least partially rooted in our formal educational experiences. Clearly, it has also been accentuated by the alternative educational context in which we came of age: an era shaped by the rise and decline of race-based movements for rights; the disillusionment in government institutions inspired by the Vietnam War and Watergate; the ubiquitous fear of humanity’s demise suggested by the threat of nuclear war and AIDS; an incipient technical culture of self-expression in personal computing and urban musicality; and the realignment of the Reagan Era and the rise of the “New Right.” Constitutive of both our formal and informal “schooling,” particularly on race and racism, these myriad forces have shaped the ways of knowing that we bring to the present moment, forging our generational distinctiveness as an immanently critical modality.

With this notion of a critically and diversely schooled generation as a starting point, the editors seek proposals for contributions to an edited volume on “Race in the Obama Era.” We invite submissions from members of this generation who have a perspective to offer on recent political and cultural events inspired by and/or relating to Barack Obama. Whether as the dawn of a “post-racial America” or an era of “identity-politics,” the election of Barack Obama has inspired an assortment of debates on race, racism, and American society. Conscious of the ways our generation sees and interprets the world in distinct ways, we invite essays confronting “race” from new perspectives. We welcome submissions on a range of topics including, but not limited to, race as incarnated in the recent election cycle, the inauguration, or the Obama Presidency in its infancy. Similarly, we welcome projects seeking meaning and (mis)understanding in the present moment; probing the possibilities and limitations of racial discourse and politics; or discussing the  relationship between themes and the priorities of the Obama administration, in particular those considered representative of our generation.

To these ends, the volume seeks to provide a vital occasion for applied work in the assessment of a generation’s critical identity. The editors wish to capture this unique generational voice in a wide variety of formats. Submissions may take the form of scholarly articles, rooted in a given disciplinary or interdisciplinary methodology; or non-scholarly pieces written in the first-person, in the style of testimonial or personal reflection. We also welcome creative endeavors which might broaden or challenge our scope.

We ask interested writers, scholars, and public intellectuals to send a one-page (no more then 300 word) abstract describing their proposed contribution. We also ask you include a brief biographical statement (name; age; profession/vocation; ethnic/racial background; place you call home). All submissions will be expeditiously reviewed and formal invitations will follow shortly.

The submission deadline for the above materials is Wednesday, September 30, 2009.  Proposals should be sent via email to deepschool@gmail.com.

Proposal queries may be directed to either one of the project editors, Darryl A. Smith (darryl.smith@pomona.edu) or Tomás F. Summers Sandoval Jr. (tfss@pomona.edu).

What is the “Deep School”?

Welcome to “Lessons From the Deep School,” the online home of the book Lessons From the Deep School: New Perspectives on Race and the Obama Era, edited by Darryl A. Smith and Tomás F. Summers Sandoval Jr., both professors at Pomona College.

Our book–currently in development–will center the voices of members of “Generation X” as they present essays on issues of race and racism inspired by, and often relating to, the political rise of Barack Obama.

We use the concept of the “Deep School” to suggest both the formal and informal ways our generation has been educated about race and racism. As the generation which came of age in the “post Civil Rights” era, we have also been shaped by rhetorics and ideologies relating to the Cold War and Vietnam; the threat of AIDS and nuclear war; and the rise of the “New Right.”  Unique in our cultural experiences, we also witnessed the mainstreaming of digital technologies and the seemingly rapid decline of the manufacturing economy.  These are just some of the way Generation X is unique in its lived experiences.

We hope our “Deep School Project” will provide a virtual space for us to engage in dialogue on these and other related issues in the months ahead.  Furthermore, we hope it can serve as a starting point for the larger goal of gathering, promoting, and reflecting on our “generation voice” on matters facing us as individuals, communities, and as a globe.

Welcome to the Deep School!