"Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks": What World You Livin' In? (01/31/2002)
In his essay on Guillermo Gomez-Pena's perception that there are five-worlds, not three, that constitute the socioeconomic reality of contemporary life, Thomas Foster ("Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gomez-Pena's Five-Worlds Theory," PMLA 117 (1) 2002: 43-67) expresses the opinion that Gomez-Pena's virtual reality performances on the Internet make an obvious point that "virtual reality offers no escape from the limitations of real life" (62). The issue at stake, if there is one, in Foster's commentary seems to be that the existence of racial or ethnic identities in real life can be erased completely in the virtual space of the electronic world of the Internet because no one can see the physical features of the person, or people, who are producing this or that statement. In a context where a speaker can remain completely or relatively anonymous, if he/she chooses to do so, the audience is left with little, or no, recourse but to read that person's racial or ethnic identity out of the statement the person makes and not out of the physical features that person conceals. Starting from the assumption that electronic communication can be, and usually is, devoid of racial identity, Foster claims that Gomez-Pena intentionally "reracializes" his own identity. Foster says that "reracialization is a commentary on the popular utopian rhetoric of cyberspace as a place where bodily limitations are meaningless, a simple repetition of the traditional logic of the public sphere and the ideology of abstract citizenship" (63).
What interests me in this statement is the notion Foster expresses here that a place, even if only one characterized as a "virtual reality" in cyberspace, can become identifiable as "utopian" precisely on the ground that it excludes considerations of race or ethnicity as qualifications for membership in the ranks of those who inhabit it. This is surprising since perfection, especially the kind envisioned as utopian, with its social, political, and economic arenas and agendas, has always and traditionally been perceived as a place exclusive of difference and not inclusive of multiracial or multiethnic populations. In other words, Utopia is a place where the Other is not only ignored but also violently excluded from participation in the value system that defines its borders and limitations.
There are two possible reasons for Foster's assertion that Utopia can only be achieved if race and ethnicity are excluded as considerations for entry into the closed society of the collectivity. Initially it seems likely that Foster uses the term in the loosest possible sense of its meaning, as an afterthought almost, because he does not pursue the ideology of Utopia anywhere else in his essay and makes no effort to link the idea that cyberspace holds out some essential promise of utopian realization in the absence of visible "bodily limitations" to other specific sources in or out of the popular imagination. The fact that it is possible to hide or conceal racial or ethnic characteristics in cyberspace does not mean that everyone in the arena does so, or might do so. There is certainly no agreement among participants in cyberspace that they will, or should, conceal their real identity behind a mask fashioned out of the "virtual." A second possibility is that Foster has simply refashioned the meaning of Utopia, from its traditional sense of exclusivity, into one that embraces the notion that such a place can only be and exist if it is predicated on the ground of inclusivity, even to the point where all difference and diversity must be erased before the ideal state can be achieved. It might also be true to say here that utopia as a place that excludes difference is a conservative perception and that the opposite position tends more toward a liberal ideology. In other words, what constitutes a utopian perfection is wholly within the political eye of its beholder.
A recent and uncomfortable example of how the ideology of utopia functions in the political arena, where it has always had its roots, has surfaced in George W. Bush's State of the Union address on January 29, 2002. Several statements he made in the course of his remarks about our present condition and the prospects we can expect in the future reach down to the level of utopian aspirations, ones which never get called by that name, but which are nevertheless just precisely that. He noted for instance that North Korea, Iran and Iraq, have come together in some shady coalition to form what he called an "axis of evil." He also stated that there were "tens of thousands" of terrorists, trained by Osama bin Laden, waiting out there in the world to attack American interests. He said that the attacks of September 11th proved that "evil is real" and that it must be opposed. Someone, a news commentator, offered the opinion that Bush's message sounded like things that were said at the beginning of the Cold War. People in the Islamic world, as one would expect, have reacted to Bush's statement with shock and dismay, surprised and troubled, if not angered, by the fact that he has escalated his war against terrorism to include virtually any state that does not do his bidding in curtailing the "evildoers" harbored in their populations. People in Europe and Asia are equally concerned with the escalation they see in his rhetoric.
Bush's strategy has two parts. His first goal is to frighten Americans by claiming that a large contingent of individuals ("tens of thousands") are in place around the world with both the means and desire to inflict heavy damages against America and its interests and its people, that new plans of attack are already in place and will be launched against us in the near future, that these attacks will involve weapons of "mass destruction." In other words, according to Bush, we can expect one of our city's to be destroyed by a nuclear attack in the next few weeks or months. Donald Rumsfeld, in a statement quoted in the NY Times ("No New Warnings Received, Officials Say," David Johnston and James Risen, 02/01/2002), has reinforced Bush's dire predictions by noting that "as they [terrorists] gain access to weapons of increasing power - and let there be no doubt but that they are - these attacks will grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered several months ago." The article states that Rumsfeld did not elaborate or provide any evidence to support his claim that Al Qaeda agents actually are securing more powerful weapons. Bush's plan to prevent a nuclear strike from happening has a number of elements. He intends to increase military spending back to the levels that existed during the Cold War when we were fighting the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union. One aspect of that spending will be the creation of a missile defense system to protect us from the treat posed by North Korea's supposed arsenal of nuclear missiles. As any number of thoughtful people have pointed out, the more likely delivery system for a nuclear device will be a cargo ship docking at one of our ports with a suicide bomber aboard with a detonation device in his/her hand. How a missile defense system will prevent that from happening is one of the most profound mysteries confronting modern science. Bush's intention seems to be to launch preemptive strikes against any country he thinks might be harboring cells of terrorists. Exactly how he intends to determine which do and which don't is a question he has not addressed. The total failure of our intelligence gathering agencies prior to September 11th suggests such efforts are likely to fail as well. In the same article quoted above, the authors pointed out that a new warning about possible attacks against nuclear power plants in the US was issued on January 23rd. After eight days someone realized that the information used as the basis for the new warning was exactly the same intelligence that prompted a similar state of alert three months earlier. Also true is the fact that, if these terrorist cells really do exist in virtually every country in the world, Bush has a long list of potential targets for his preemptive strikes.
His second objective falls under the heading of Homeland Security. It is in this area that I see the emergence of the ideology associated with Utopian aspirations. The first step will be to build an impenetrable wall of security around America. He has already ordered an increase in border patrols meant to exclude aliens from entering the US from all foreign countries. Exactly how such patrols can detect "evildoers" and exclude them has not been explained but in the past that problem has always been settled on the ground of things like skin-color, national origin, religious affiliation, or political ideology. After the wall has been constructed, of course, the next logical step will be to begin the process of weeding out any undesirables that might have gotten past the security portals before the wall was completed. The same criteria will be used to identify those people considered to be dangerous individuals. Some of the measures that were enacted immediately after the attack on the WTC have already established the ground for denying basic civil liberties to anyone suspected of terrorist leanings. With the level of fear Bush has created with his constant harping on the thousands of terrorist cells already in place, and with constant states of alert, some even generated from recycled intelligence, few Americans are likely to object to the treatment our free and open government inflicts on anyone it deems undesirable or dangerous. Eventually the government will run out of aliens to persecute and will turn its attention to any American citizen who disagrees with its policies.
The Bush strategy, even for a perpetual re-election if you will, is to generate a climate of fear in America that knows no previous parallel in our history, to identify the source of that fear-inspiring danger as an "axis of evil" that is essentially nameless, even if he occasionally refers to it as Korea-Iran-Iraq, so amorphous and faceless that it exists everywhere and at ever moment in our future lives, and is always ready to launch an attack against us with the most terrible weapons imaginable. What Bush has accomplished in his first year as President is to start us collectively down a road of perpetual fear and hatred that knows virtually no limit, one that is predicated on the existence of a core of evil so pervasive and universal that we must guard ourselves against our neighbors, our friends, our families, against anyone who might exhibit the slightest difference from an essentialist, but nonexistent, norm, against anyone who expresses a dissenting view from our own or from our government's. The sad and dangerous fact is that "Christian" America has always been willing to support anyone in authority who identifies the Other as evil, so long as that evil is clearly defined as alien to basic Christian values and so long as it can be shown to be guilty of committing crimes horrendous enough to score in the upper range of whatever arbitrary hierarchical scale exists at the moment to measure such things. Extreme fundamentalist members of Islamic terrorist networks fit that bill of goods perfectly. Any means necessary to destroy such pockets of anti-Christian evil, as we have seen in Afghanistan, and as we will see elsewhere in the future, are acceptable as long as such actions seem to insure our collective safety.
What Bush's policies and statements have generated up to now is a seige-like mentality in a nation paralyzed by fear and locked away from the rest of the world behind the illusion of an impenetrable wall of security that guarantees no one's civil liberties beyond a single occurrence of being accused of terrorist sympathies from which this country's military will strike out, even at random, to destroy and ravage any other nation that seems to harbor this or that faceless enemy of the moment. Worse still is the fact that we will never know why this or that nation has been chosen over any other because such decisions will be made under strict and impenetrable cloaks of national security. Bush has committed us as a nation, as a people, and as far as the eye can see into the future, to a path that Israelis and Palestinians have been following for the last fifty years. One act of terrorism breeds a retaliatory act of revenge. That in turn breeds two more acts of terrorism that spawn a redoubling of revenge. In time everyone comes to live in real terror that no wall can keep at bay. According to Middle Eastern voices that have already been heard and recorded, the only thing Bush's war against terrorism has accomplished is to increase the number of people there who are willing to die in the effort to destroy America. The problem is George W. Bush's white/black, good/evil perception of reality, which works well, and always has, in the closed and tightly sealed box of fundamentalist ideology. In the real world, however, especially where your enemy sees everything in exactly the same terms, if primarily reversed, pursuing a holy war of your good against their evil will result in an endless conflict of carnage and death that solves no issue and changes no fact. If Bush and his advisors do not learn to hear Islamic voices, our children and grandchildren, and theirs, will be fighting this same war a hundred and a thousand years from now. In the white/black world Bush seems to inhabit total annihilation of the other is the only road that leads to peace. As a native American I know that to be true because the only reason we have given up fighting the white man for control of our land is that there are so few of us left.