(delayed) response to romney's coming-out

Music: The Smiths: Louder Than Bombs (1987)

I've just returned from a visit to Denton, where I saw Karlyn Kohrs Campbell deliver an inspiring (and biting) talk on women and the presidency. I'm always wowed by her talents as a speaker, and particularly awestruck by the way in which Karlyn's passion is palpable in a room when she speaks. Standing ovation, of course, and well deserved. I'll have more to say about Hillary and the hatred she invites in future blog-posts because this election is going to be downright nasty. Everyone brace yourselves, cause you're gonna hear crap come out of the mouths of pundits you've never heard in years past, not even from Ann Coulter. Romney's bowing-out speech, which he delivered at a conservative politico or "CPAC" meeting last Thursday, is a good predictor.

The graduate students at the Denton conference were a buzz; they thought the speech was something like a reveal, a sort of fascist coming-out party, while others characterized it as simply nutty. Murphy isolates this line as particularly strange:

The attack on faith and religion is no less relentless. And tolerance for pornography—even celebration of it—and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today’s grim realities: 68% of African American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45% of Hispanic children, and 25% of White children. How much harder it is for these children to succeed in school—and in life. A nation built on the principles of the founding fathers cannot long stand when its children are raised without fathers in the home.

John comments that "in Mitt's world, pornography and welfare are indistinguishable and they cause illegitimacy. Oh boy." He then takes issue with the characterization of the "founding fathers," many of whom Murphy underscores were pretty naughty. What interests me, however, is the porn and implicit racism of linking it to African American children: what is the underlying warrant, the reasoning linking the claim that tolerance of pornography and promiscuity leads to high single parent household rates among blacks and Hispanics? Of course, it is the racist bromide that African Americans and Hispanics are fucking machines, animals that cannot control their desires. Uh, hello? Are rhetoricians the only folks in the United States that can speak the subtext? If Obama is the dem candidate, we're in for something very nasty this fall.

Of course, Romney's racist speech is rife with other –obias and –isms that lurk in its wordy preconscious, all of them linked to sex---and I mean that in both senses. To get at the sex in Romney, it's helpful to take a peek at the argumentative structure of the speech:

• "America" is great because of its culture.
• "American" culture is distinguished by three values: (1) hard work and the economic opportunity made possible by a good education; (2) belief in deity; (3) a commitment to sacrifice for the greater good.
• American culture is threatened by three corresponding challenges: (1) welfare programs, which create dependency; (2) attacks on faith, which are fundamentally pornographic; (3) attacks on the family, which are fundamentally pornographic.
• The consequence of these threats can be seen in Europe, which "is facing a demographic disaster."
• American greatness is also challenged by "economic competition" in the world and threatened five things: (1) energy dependency; (2) government spending; (3) the erosion of the nuclear family; (4) the size of the government payroll; and (5) taxes.
• Finally, the "greatest challenge facing America . . . : the threat of radical, violent jihad."

Romney, of course, concludes the speech by suggesting if he doesn't drop out, Clinton or Obama will win, and thus, so too will the terrorists.

I guess I'm not as alarmed as my colleagues by this speech, which could be seen as a very basic "conservative" speech playbook. First, you begin with the cultural issues (which, you'll see, is buoyed by the economic: America is great because of the ability to accumulate property, which God wants us to do). Then, you shift to the economic issues. Finally, you conclude with the fear. This is the very basic G-Dub speech structure; we're all familiar with it, down to the shout-outs to Jebus.

What is new here is the discussion of porn and the fear of pleasure. Pornography is synecdoche for libidinal desire itself, or better, for pleasure beyond bounds, jouissance, enjoyment beyond or irrelevant of the law, broadly conceived. Look at the logic of the argument he offers: America is great because of a culture that is founded on a family structure, which is threatened by the promiscuity encouraged by pornography. If you look more closely you'll see that Romney virtually collapses the "family" with "faith in deity." So what you have here is a sort of contest between the law and unbridled desire, the chaos of a state of nature (orgiastic anarchy) staved off by faith in the law represented by . . . yup, you guessed it: the (primal) father. Desire run amok is the cultural dynamic here that Romney suggests we should fear, and that the Republican party can help to stave off.

What's fascinating to me is that Romney's not really talking about pornography, but the cultural shift toward public enjoyment that we've witnessed in the last decade. The Mormons give him a certain vocabulary for discussing it, including the racist one: his "for example" of black people is certainly part of an icky American tradition, a kind of "fear of the primitive" reference. But we can use other vocabularies to discuss the same thing, of course, vocabularies that do not pose exclusion or hatred as a response.

Romney is right: pornography is becoming much more permissible. But porn is only a conspicuous symptom of something larger. Is the issue really porn, or rather, the logics of publicity and consumption fueled by enjoyment---capitalistic logics that urge us relentlessly, throughout the day, to enjoy! enjoy! or else? Have a coke and a smile. Eat a burger. Drink a beer. Buy this iPod, stick it in your ear, and drown out the social world! Here's a fleshlight: put your dick in it. Behind all porn is a machine, it's called capitalism, and it doesn't draw the line in front of opportunity when hits up against something called a family. In fact, one might argue pornography and "family" are mutually constitutive via various logics of secrecy.

Nevertheless, if we think about Romney's reference to pornography as simply transgressive consumption, I think he's kind of right. I think we are living in a time in which the ideology of publicity has hooked-up with the demand of capital in such a way that we are tempting a kind of social psychosis---a infinite spiral of narcissism that reduces the social to the logics of consumptive accumulation: how many friends can I collect on Myspace.com?

Religions have always dealt with psychotic threats by recourse to a father figure, both literally (a pope, a preacher, Joel Osteen) and abstractly (Mac Daddy Deity, God, Jehovah, the Big One), but this is no different than society as such, as Frederick Engels argued over a century ago. The family is an artificial structure first created for economic and libidinal reasons (e.g., Pateman's The Sexual Contract) and is now challenged for the same. Romney's diagnosis of cultural threat is correct, but his answer---reinforce familial structures by putting a lid on enjoyment---is sort of like too little too late.

I reckon that is what "conservative" means in today's political libido: hold it in, go back, retreat. Look you conservatives: it's too late, we're much too much permissive (which is why we're so hung-up here in the states, of course). You're playing a lost game: zero zero, party over, out of time. And I'm not so sure the Right will win this time with the Daddy Appeal, the "oh isn't that porn terrible??!!" when you and I are nevertheless glued to the set watching Dateline NBC catch teen predators. The question the Left needs to answer is: what rhetorical substitute for the father figure can "we" offer? How do we, in our current mediated climate, integrate the paternal metaphor in a way that staves off psychosis? Campbell's talk about women and the presidency defined the problem in terms of the double-bind women are put into: you must be tough and never cry, but if you are tough and never cry you are not properly maternal and therefore not a woman. Hillary's difficulty, in other words, is that she must offer herself as a paternal figure to succeed. "The real question is," said Campbell, "are we ready for a womanly president?"

We've never tried a womanly president. This is one of the reasons why I'm in favor of Obama.