In 2005, Factory School published a book by Francis Shor, a professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. Entitled Bush-League Spectacles: Empire, Politics, and Culture in Bushwhacked America, it brings together some of the entries that Shor wrote between 2001 and 2005 for such liberal news/commentary "blogs" as Common Dreams, CounterPunch, The History News Network and Bad Subjects. The book is divided into four parts, all of which consistently refer to the "spectacle": "The Spectacles of Empire" (essays about international events); "The Spectacles of Politics" (domestic events); "The Spectacles of Culture" (domestic pop culture); and "Countering Bush-League Spectacles" (domestic political action). Shor begins his collection with a preface that, in its turn, begins with a quotation from Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle: "The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized." But what Shor says right after this epigraph proves that he doesn't really understand Debord. To him,
Spectacles have played a significant part of empires and public life throughout history. From the circuses of Rome to the Nuremberg rallies of Nazi Germany, the staging of public events for mass mobilization has served the interests of the ruling elite. However, in this era of the society of the spectacle where images dominate beyond just the media environment, the spectacle is even more integral to the functioning of society.
But Debord's "society of the spectacle" is not a trans-historical phenomenon: it can be dated fairly precisely (capitalist society since the 1920s/1930s). As a matter of fact, Debord's society of the "integrated spectacle"[1] has only existed since the 1960s! And the integrated spectacle -- dominated, as it is, by atomization, separation and privatization -- is obviously quite different from the "concentrated" spectacle of Nazi Germany (public events for mass mobilizations, etc). As we will see, Shor realizes this, too. But he's not concerned with appearing incoherent, and he need not be. His book is not a serious work about the society of the spectacle, but a collection of topical and thus highly perishable essays about the spectacle of the Bush Administration. It needs nice "fresh" packaging a lot more than it needs theoretical coherence.
Underneath the packaging is a very well-intentioned but ultimately inconsequential writer, who takes positions -- indeed, the "right" positions, morally responsible positions -- on controversial issues of the day, but who has no strategic overview and no real plan of action. Note, in this regard, his "sensitive" but rather naive and superficial remarks on Abu Ghraib:
Only our callousness and denial, characteristics built into the political culture of empire, prevent us from effectively countering the gruesome spectacle of Abu Ghraib and what it represents. One does not need a radical imagination to break free from such horror; just a sense of common humanity. But to recognize that common humanity requires overcoming ethnic, religious, and national prejudices that also inform the political culture of empire.
In a certain way, Shor represents everything that is wrong with the left-wing of the Democratic Party (his list of additional resources include such anodyne liberal stuff as Air America Radio, Code Pink, Move On, United for Peace and Justice, etc). Ironically, though Shor is quite clear about his beliefs that "George W. Bush and his right-wing cabal" stole both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, he is not the type of person you would want next to you at the barricades. Note his great reluctance (indeed, inability) to name his enemy, even when it is right in front of him:
Perhaps it may be time to raise the whole matter of the "F" word. It certainly seems reasonable to call this erosion of liberties and rights creeping fascism, albeit a postmodern fascism that does not need to rely on mass mobilization [hic] for realizing a proto-fascist agenda. In one of the most brilliant analyses of everyday life in Nazi Germany, Detlev Peukert devoted a whole chapter to 'The Atomization of Everyday Life' in his Inside Nazi Germany (236-242). Combining a form of psychic numbing with political numbing, many Germans just retreated from any public political life and took refuge in their own isolation. Since there is much evidence to support the tendency towards atomization and privatization of everyday life in the United States, it may not require utilizing any reference to fascism, whether postmodern or not. On the other hand, when an administrative authority relies on the militarization of everyday life to pursue a repressive and aggressive agenda, it may be necessary to raise the specter of fascism.
Such hemming and hawing! But fascism is precisely what is materializing in America today. Earlier in his book, Shor (in less of a mood to beat around the bush?) had said,
Of course, the racism that led the U.S. military to see every 'gook' as VC in Vietnam has also re-appeared in Iraq. According to one British commander in Iraq, American troops often saw Iraqis as 'undermenschen -- the Nazi expression for sub-humans.' Although embedded U.S. reporters rarely provided an isight into the racist mentality, Mark Franchetti of the London Times quoted one U.S. soldier as asserting that 'Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy.' And with chemotherapy if the sick person dies it was only to help cure the person.
This certainly sounds like fascism, like "classic" 1930s-era fascism, too! But Fran Shor simply doesn't want to face it, much in the same way that -- even though he believes that "certain players acted out of their own personal interests at the expense of the safety and security of the nation" -- he stands by the ridiculous idea that "to suggest that the Bush Administration arranged the 9/11 tragedy is to resort to wildly speculative conspiracy theories." Shor wants to restrict himself to discussing the Republicans' defensive tactics, and does not want to talk about their offensive strategies. Peculiarly, he also does not want to think about anything that took place prior to 1960:
To view the Bush regime as an aberration in U.S. politics, notwithstanding the electoral shenanigans of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, is to neglect the right-wing trends in American life during the last 30 years. These trends have been part of a reaction to the democratization fostered by the movements of the 1960's and the crisis of U.S. hegemony in the 1970s in the aftermath of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Starting with the Reagan Administration of the 1980's, attempts have been mounted at the national, state, and local levels to turn back the clock by repealing or undermining legislative advances made by minorities and women and to reverse environmental protections.
Don't you just hate hippies? They think everything that's being done today is in response to what they did forty years ago! But it is plain that the roots of the contemporary situation go back a lot further than the 1960s. It is also plain that the Bush Administration is employing something a lot more complex than a "strict father model of government." According to Shor:
To prove they have compassion, albeit constricted and exclusionary, Republicans mount high-profile campaigns such as their intervention in the Terry Schiavo case. Congressional Republicans obviously believe that they can play on the sentiments of a media-manipulated public, too busy or numbed to realize the details of their awful budgetary cuts. Furthermore, and most tragic of all, hewing to a strict father model of government, Congressional Republicans have arrogated to themselves the desire to play god, dispensing life and death according to their own narrow-minded whims and truly heartless politics.
It's a nice, easy and all-too-obvious set of analogies: strict father in the home (the Republican social agenda); "a strict father model of government"; above it all a strict God (presumably God the Father) who's entitled to "dispens[e] life and death." Let's call it authoritarianism.[2] But "authoritarianism" does not explain the full extent of Bush's fascism, that is to say, does not account for his murderous treatment of people who are outside of his (literal and metaphorical) "family," which is the international family of Judeo-Christian nations. Strict fathers do not capture outsiders and subject them to torture, or preemptively murder them abroad to prevent attacks at home (in Bush's case, the auslander are the "jihadist" or "fascist" Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, et. al). Strict fathers enforce the law, they do not act outside of it or suspend it due to an emergency.[3]
No, to really understand "the Bush doctrine," we must go beyond Francis Shor and read the work of the Italian philospher and professor of aesthetics, Giorgio Agamben, especially Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and State of Exception (2003).
[1] See Debord's Comments on The Society of the Spectacle (1988).
[2] A critique of "authoritarianism" is easily made these days by liberal Democratic opponents of President Bush: note in this regard John Dean's recent thesis about "the authoritarian personality" and the frequency with which he is called upon to apply it to Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, et al on MSNBC's "liberal" show, Countdown with Keith Oberman. See also Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswick.
[3] For a denunciation of "the liberal identification of totalitarianism with [mere] authoritarianism," see Hannah Arendt, "What is Authority?" in Between Past and Future (1961).