Postmodernism and the Republican Cult

In Songlines, Bruce Chatwin explores the world through the eyes of traditional Australian Aborigines. In a nutshell, Aborigines believe, literally, that the universe exists because we are here to imagine it. Without us, everything fades away. Our job, as humans, is to keep the universe going by periodically going around and singing it back into existence. The Australian continent is overlain by thousands of transects that are regularly walked (these days, sometimes driven) by the individuals and small groups responsible for keeping their little piece of the physical world in place. It's assumed that the rest of the world is out there because everybody else is doing their part.

I love this stuff. It is a very old vision of what the world is and what humans are for, and simultaneously the penultimate expression of postmodernism - if we don't make it up, it ceases to exist.

I had a waking dream about it a few nights back. Paul Wolfowitz was calmly walking through the Iraqi desert, burning vehicles and chaos all around, singing. He was singing the new reality into existence.

Here is the exquisite irony that progressives aren't understanding about the Bush regime:

After a generation of whining, moaning, and screaming about the corrosive effect of postmodern thinking in academia, and the breakdown in morality and decency that can presumably be traced to the idea that the reality of the world is shaped by the assumptions we make about it, Republicans have perfected the art of postmodern rhetoric. The progressives that are supposedly responsible for postmodern thinking have never understood how it gets used in real life - but the Republican spin machine is using it, every day, to create the reality that they desire. This is the core attitude so eloquently expressed by the Bush officials holding forth on how... irrelevant reality-based thinking is these days.

Another exquisite irony: This approach is actually working to shape the perception of the world among many Americans - but the rest of the world doesn't buy it.

Many bloggers and other commenters have repeatedly noted over the last year or so of twisted and increasingly deadly wackiness that the most bizarre aspect of it all is that science, reality, and verifiable history is being trumped, over and over again, by the endless insistence that the shape of the world is dictated by the president, not by the facts.

The creepy part is that it actually seems to be working here. But it isn't fooling anybody outside the immediate blast zone of popular US media. Our collective disconnect from the other 95% of the humans on this planet wouldn't really matter if we weren't so much better than everybody else at blowing things up. But as things stand, it makes keeping everything from slowly going to hell very dicey indeed.

I think that progressives can be smarter about this than the forces of darkness, and hold a coherent idea of what needs to happen next in the real world while simultaneously playing the postmodern game of shaping popular culture. We do it by succinctly jamming on what Republicans are putting out there, distilled to its most potent and toxic essence.

For example: Calling anything these clowns are doing "faith-based" is an insult to people of faith everywhere. These guys are literally part of an apocalyptic death cult, one that literally believes that we are at the end of history - that there is no future, because it says so in the Bible.

There is nothing "faith-based" about it. It is cult-based politics, and that's how we should always refer to it.