As if irony has built-up over the last decade, the recent Republican Presidential Debate was held in the Reagan Library. There eight candidates stood at their podiums slightly beneath and behind the tail of Reagan’s Air Force One. How is it that the image of a suspended plane in a building comes so close to the anniversary of 9/11? How is it that the moment of penetration by aircraft is presented now as if a touch of reconciliation would be possible? This is more or less a play of a signifier yet the semantic meaning begs a mediation on justice.
If Reagan, as alleged by his supporters, “defeated communism” what 9/11 produced is all too familiar by way of policy. If communism was the abolishment of all private property the security apparatus that continues today erodes any possibility of private life. Heretical thoughts and general dissent are profanations. This releases a strain in our thinking which contributes to the popular if not synthetic screaming radicalism of the day. In an age focused on polar truths we are lost to articulate the similarities between worlds. We have yet to understand the presence of communism in an age of unfettered capitalism.
What was given the most applause in the debate is linked to this fact of the American Gulag. And the space between poles is where we find some way to ground the essence of the time. Erupting like a broken oil well spurting with great pressure, was the applause for Rick Perry’s confidence in retributive justice, that is, the 234 executions in Texas so far. All of these people are guilty. Perry’s tone brought a familiar gut-like confidence to his diction. Executing people in Texas is a perfect process. According to Perry we are not guilty for killing the guilty because “Americans understand justice.” The weird applause for execution was Perry’s moment. A moment whereby America is capable of correctly implementing justice. Yet we are still looking at the frozen moment of the execution of an attack, plane number 27000.
In a nation that is often thought the most religious we lack any understanding of reconciliation. Reconciliation would tell us that justice promises to conquer time, to go back to a space in some type of temporal order and mediate the moment whereby justice is the carriage or plane. It is to say, in the scenery of the debate, we are still lost in the image of justice from the excluded Middle East. And, of course, as the Arab Spring moves forward we can now understand something about the candidates themselves, at least their images on the stage and this idea of freedom. Perhaps a freedom from justice that was most easily understood in a bipolar world order, or the leaders who were never tried for their crimes, potential leaders who arrogantly sit in the frozen moment.
Yet this plane is empty save echoes of posturing moving through it. In particular the dialectical moment in the content of the debate. This moment came by way of John Huntsman who on the left end of the stage (if facing the audience) scolded (only when goaded by the moderators) the anti-science of Perry and Michelle Bachmann. This was a key moment. Perry struggled, he showed us what it means to be a stupid human. But herein lies the rubbery truth, which is the political thinking we have yet to understand, the silent pressure of posthuman politics makes affinities for idiots and saviors with a tendency to idolize the fool. What conservative means today is saving the bumbling human mind whose grasp of nature is expressed as gut-thinking thuggery. Fools are saviors for Republicans, it’s understandable why this is.
As for Mitt Romney, the once wooden man appeared to grasp the sharper focus of Huntsman. For both men understand that to win the election is to not go selective with science. One has to grasp the radical fervor of what will define conservatism in the future yet these men are sober. Perry believes in the invisible logic of economics, but denies climate change, denies evolution among other things. Perry himself, ironic as it is, is another appearance of Bush, the illness of human memory is the corrupution of incessant experience.
The moderate move in Republican thought is a sound one. It is John Huntsman who said it well “don’t run from science.” They would be wise to bring Romney and Huntsman together. That would be a good race against Obama. But for now their designated front runner is Perry and that may mean Republicans, or naive bio-conservatives, are only beginning to tell us more about the politics of the future currently obscured by nincompoop theology.
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Plane Suspense: A Comment on Debate Aesthetics
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