Pop War

By Crispin Sartwell

The great American essayist Randolph Bourne died very young, but not before he - like many Americans of many different political persuasions - lodged a protest about American involvement in World War I. Various eminent American dissidents (Eugene Debs, for example) were imprisoned, others (Emma Goldman) were deported.

As soon as war is declared, said Bourne in an essay left unfinished in mid-sentence at his death, people swing into line. "With the exception of a few malcontents [they] allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation."

"War," concludes Bourne, "is essentially the health of the state."

Indeed, the people who have decided to wage the current war would have us believe that agreeing with their decisions is a duty of all Americans, as though it wasn't specific people such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who decided to attack, and as though we lived in a society in which free expression could be forbidden, or was not itself a duty.

And the scary thing is not that Rumsfeld demands our allegiance for a policy of destruction, but that we accede, that we have the vague sense that it is our obligation to appear unanimous.

Bourne says that war infests "all the environments of our lives," and our appearance as an idiot unity is currently spearheaded by the most trivial zones of pop culture. In ads for the movie "What a Girl Wants," starring the Nick chick Amanda Byers, she was shown standing between two London Beefeaters, flashing a peace sign. It was a sweet little image, and no one claims actually to oppose what her gesture denoted. In fact Colin Powell, perhaps rehearsing for a postwar career in standup, has taken to saying, to the Iraqi people, "we come in peace."

But evidently peace is controversial enough to compromise the guts of studio executives, who edited out that portion.

Madonna, who before the war had filmed a video that seemed to amount to a criticism or perhaps a whimsical physical attack, on George W. Bush, pulled it after the war began. At first she had defended the video, saying she hoped it would provoke discussion, and that "I am not pro-Iraq; I am pro-peace. I am grateful to have the freedom to express these feelings and that's how I honor my country."

A few days later she had changed her tune: "Due to the volatile state of the world and out of sensitivity and respect top the armed forces, who I support and pray for, I do not want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video."

No doubt the likes of Byers and Madonna drew their lessons from what happened to the Dixie Chicks. After criticizing Bush, the country trio was boycotted and berated, and ended up issuing their own apology.

There are two kinds of consensus. One is a genuine confluence of opinion, in which a nation can come together to do what more or less all of us believe is necessary or just. But there is also a manufactured consensus, in which all of us ("with the exception of a few malcontents") pretend to agree with those who wield the power. The manufactured consensus is a formula for disaster, a way for all of us to become responsible for death and destruction we do not in fact endorse.

Popular culture becomes a key zone in which consensus is manufactured, through which dissidents and malcontents - even young ones who might attend "What a Girl Wants" - are made to feel weird, defective, or alone.

Movie studios and record companies can keep silent if they want. You shouldn't.