Geert Mak's 'Grote verwachtingen' 31

Serge Guilbaut, emeritus hoogleraar Kunstgeschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Brits Columbia in Vancouver, kwam in het laatste hoofdstuk van zijn boek How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (1983) tot de slotsom dat: 

Freedom was the symbol most actively and vigorously promoted by the new liberalism in the Cold War period. Expressionism stood for the difference between a free society and a totalitarian one. Art was able to package the virtues of liberal society and lay down a challenge to its enemies: it aroused polemic without courting danger. And so Pollock too was transformed into a symbol, a symbol of man, free but frail; his work came to stand for modern anxiety. Alienation was intrinsic to both abstract expressionist art and to the ideology of The Vital Center. Freedom, Schlesinger maintained, was impossible without alienation and anxiety:

‘Thus freedom has brought with it frustration rather than fulfillment, isolation rather than integration. “Anxiety,” writes Kierkegaard, “is the dizziness of freedom”; and anxiety is the official emotion of our time.’

True freedom, according to Schlesinger, can be recognized by the anxiety and frustration that the individual feels when faced with a choice. 

In zijn boek The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949) verdedigde de ‘Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’ de ‘liberal democracy and a state-regulated market economy.’ Ter verduidelijking: 

Schlesinger's argument runs as follows: modern man has been detached from his moorings by capitalism and technology. Searching for a new solidarity, he finds this in communism, but it has been really a totalitarian military dictatorship run by the Communist Party since Lenin ‘exposed Marxist socialism to the play of... influences which divested it of its libertarian elements.’ Instead of this totalitarian road, a strong and interventionist liberalism is needed, New Deal-style, in the tradition of American leadership in the liberal world order and of the national reforms of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. This would be practical and anti-utopian, and would ‘restore the balance between individual and community.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Center 

Hoewel dit de theoretische rechtvaardiging van de liberale ideologie gold, was in de praktijk zowel de Amerikaanse buitenlandse- als binnenlandse politiek regelmatig even totalitair als die van de Sovjet Unie, zoals de Amerikaanse omverwerping van democratische regeringen elders en het hysterische Mccarthyisme thuis demonstreerden. Zolang de economie bleef groeien en de VS in een consumptiecultuur veranderde, leek er niets aan de hand te zijn. Maar omdat de kapitalistische leer uitgaat van eeuwige groei en daarmee almaar toenemende winsten, ontstond begin jaren zeventig een fundamenteel probleem toen tegen het eind van de Vietnam Oorlog bleek dat de VS failliet was, en iemand de rekening moest betalen voor alle overzeese gewelddadige interventies, georganiseerd door Washington. Daardoor zocht de elite haar heil in het neoliberalisme met zijn dogma van de terugtredende overheid. De staat moest dereguleren en privatiseren, terwijl tegelijkertijd het bedrijfsleven de arbeid in toenemende mate begon over te hevelen naar goedkope-lonen landen, en de financiële macht zijn kapitaal in belastingparadijzen parkeerde om maar zo min mogelijk belasting te hoeven betalen. Hoewel dit neoliberalisme een logisch gevolg is van het liberalisme, staat het desalniettemin loodrecht tegenover Schlesinger’s ‘liberal democracy and a state-regulated market economy.’ En aangezien ‘de democratie,’ waarbij de meerderheid de koers bepaalt, nu een wassen neus is drijft de consumptiemaatschappij stuurloos richting de afgrond. Het grote probleem vandaag de dag is dat de neoliberale maatschappij geen samen-leving is. Zij kan dit niet zijn omdat de wezenlijke drijfveren van het neoliberalisme egoïsme en begeerte blijven, die empathie met de medemens, noodzakelijk voor de vorming van een samenleving, onmogelijk maken. Het is slechts een kwestie van tijd voordat dit bestel zichzelf van binnenuit vernietigt. Daar komt nog een belangrijk probleem bij, zoals al vanaf de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw wordt gesignaleerd, namelijk dat wat ook Schlesinger signaleerde, namelijk dat ‘de moderne mens wordt verteerd door vervreemding’ en ‘angst’ vanwege het feit dat hij eenzaam en ‘feilbaar’ is, en op zichzelf is aangewezen in een oneindig, raadselachtig, universum. Guilbaut voegt hieraan toe dat:

the free world offered the exuberant Jackson Pollock (invloedrijke Amerikaanse schilder. svh), the very image of exaltation and spontaneity. His psychological problems were but cruel tokens of the hardships of freedom. In his ‘extremism’ and violence Pollock represented the man possessed, the rebel, transformed for the sake of the cause into nothing less than a liberal warrior in the Cold War. 

Without really wanting to, the avant-garde lined up behind the ideology that had only recently become dominant. What the avant-garde did not realize was that the postwar world had caught up with their radical wartime political stance. By 1948 their once disturbing vision could be integrated into the new anti-Communist rhetoric. Avant-garde radicalism did not really ‘sell out,’ it was borrowed for the anti-Communist cause. Indeed, the avant-garde even became a protégé of the new liberalism, a symbol of the fragility of freedom in the battle waged by the liberals to protect the vital center from the authoritarianism of the left and the right: 

‘A free society must dedicate itself to the protection of the unpopular view. It is threatening to turn us all into frightened conformists; and conformity can lead only to stagnation. We need courageous men to help us recapture a sense of the indispensability of dissent, and we need dissent if we are to make up our minds equably and intelligently… And there is a ‘clear and present danger’ that anti-Communist feeling will boil over into a vicious and unconstitutional attack on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our democratic strength.’ (Schlesinger. The Vital Center. pagina 57)

Abstract expressionism had successfully transformed anxiety and alienation into creativity and was thus the perfect answer to Arthur Schlesinger's preoccupation: 

‘The new radicalism derives its power from an acceptance of conflict — an acceptance combined with a determination to create a social framework where conflict issues, not in excessive anxiety, but in creativity.’ 

Niet links, niet rechts, maar een ‘Vitaal Centrum’ moest volgens Schlesinger de verlossing bieden voor de door angst en vervreemding gepijnigde, moderne, massamens. De veronderstelling was dat in dit proces het abstracte expressionisme in de beeldende kunst het voortouw had genomen. Ondanks de onvermijdelijke beschavingsziektes bood Schlesinger’s algemeen aanvaarde theorie toch een optimistische kijk op het bestaan, want de angst en de vervreemding zouden door de creativiteit van de avant-garde geneutraliseerd worden. Hoe dit precies in zijn werking zou gaan, maakte de Amerikaanse historicus niet duidelijk. Dat kon hij ook niet, omdat de werkelijkheid een heel ander beeld te zien gaf. De massa was niet geïnteresseerd in de creativiteit van de beeldende kunst, maar in de uniformiteit van de kapitalistische consumptiecultuur, met haar reclameboodschappen en flitsende televisiebeelden. Deze ‘verborgen verleiders’ zorgden ervoor dat de angst en vervreemding niet af-, maar juist toenam. De reclame zorgde er niet voor dat mensen tevreden waren met wat ze al hadden, maar dat zij zich bewust werden van wat ze nog steeds niet hadden. 

Onophoudelijk wordt ingespeeld op de begeerte en het egoïsme van het individu. In 2008 stortte dit, met niet bestaand geld overeind gehouden uiterst wankel bouwwerk ineen, en kreeg niet de corrupte financiële wereld hiervoor de rekening gepresenteerd, maar het publiek dat tijdens de jaren van overvloed de voorstelling had mogen bijwonen. Ineens zag het honderden miljarden aan belastinggeld naar corrupte bankiers verdwijnen om op die manier het vertrouwen in hen te herstellen. Sindsdien is het geloof in de elite in een versneld tempo afgezwakt. Hoewel de mainstream-media het deden voorkomen alsof het fiduciar geld ‘was verdampt’ lukte het de eveneens corrupte journalistiek ditmaal niet om deze wisseltruc aan het grote publiek te verkopen. Mede door de opkomst van internet was sprake van een cesuur, te vergelijken met die na de introductie van de boekdrukkunst, die de aanzet gaf voor de reformatie, aangezien de christen nu zelf, zonder tussenkomst van de geestelijkheid, God’s Woord in zijn eigen taal kon bestuderen. Dankzij internet kan de westerse burger nu, zonder tussenkomst van de mainstream-journalist, zelf de bronnen bestuderen, en zelfs veel meer bronnen dan waarover de journalist doorgaans beschikt. Zo heeft de ‘corporate press’ het monopolie op de waarheidsvinding verloren, en dit feit vormt een even grote bedreiging voor de elite als destijds de boekdrukkunst was voor de clerus. Het is daarom interessant om te lezen hoe in de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw de invloedrijke opiniemaker Walter Lippmann de situatie van de massamens beschreef in zijn essay The Disenchanted Man (1925). Als spreekbuis van de Amerikaanse elite stelde Lippmann:  

The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back  row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to  keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected  by what is going on. Rules and regulations  continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. 

Yet these public affairs are in no convincing  way his affairs. They are for the most part  invisible. They are managed, if they are  managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a  private person he does not know for certain  what is going on, or who is doing it, or where  he is being carried. No newspaper reports his environment so that he can grasp it; no school  has taught him how to imagine it; his ideals,  often, do not fit with it; listening to speeches,  uttering opinions and voting do not, he  finds, enable him to govern it. He lives in  a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct. 

In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern.  Contemplating himself and his actual accomplishments in public affairs, contrasting the influence he exerts with the influence he is supposed according to democratic theory to  exert, he must say of his sovereignty what Bismarck said of Napoleon III: ‘At a distance it is something, but close to it is nothing at all.’ When, during an agitation of some sort, say a political campaign, he hears himself and some thirty million others described as the source of all wisdom and power and righteousness, the prime mover and the ultimate goal, the remnants of sanity in him protest. He cannot all the time play  Chanticleer who was so dazzled and delighted because he himself had caused the sun to  rise. 

For when the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed, his own  part in public affairs appears to him a pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty,  nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it,

met als resultaat een mentaliteit, die een combinatie is van vervreemding, angst, onverschilligheid, cynisme en razernij. Lippmann:

It is well known that nothing like the whole people takes part in public affairs. Of the eligible voters in the United States less than half go to the  polls even in a presidential year. During the campaign of 1924 a special effort was made to bring out more voters. They did not come out. The Constitution, the nation, the party system, the presidential succession, private property, all were supposed to be in danger. One party prophesied red ruin, another black corruption, a third tyranny and imperialism if the voters did not go to the polls in greater numbers. Half the citizenship was unmoved. The students used to write books about voting. They are now beginning to write books about nonvoting. At the University of Chicago Professor Merriam and Mr. Gosnell have made an elaborate inquiry into the reason why, at the typical Chicago mayoral election of 1923, there were, out of 1,400,000 eligible electors, only 900,000 who registered, and out of those who registered there were only 723,000 who finally managed to vote.

Lippmann wees erop dat tenminste ’70 per cent,’ van de niet-stemmers, ‘representing about half a million free and sovereign  citizens of this Republic, did not even pretend to have a reason for not voting.’ Gezien het hoge percentage van stemgerechtigden die niet kwam opdagen, betekent dit dat de democratie in de VS ook toen al haperde. Door een aanzienlijk aantal burgers werd de ‘liberal democracy’ als een schijnvertoning gezien, niet de moeite waard om aan deel te nemen. Keer op keer benadrukte Lippmann dan ook het belang van de elite om continue propaganda te verspreiden, of zoals hij het in The Disenchanted Man verwoordde: ‘The need in the Great Society not only for  publicity but for uninterrupted publicity is indisputable.’ In hoofdstuk XIV van zijn boek The Phantom Public merkt hij op dat ‘The public must be put in its place,’ zodat ‘each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.’ Door de elite werd en wordt nog steeds ‘het publiek’ gezien als een wilde kudde die elk moment op hol kan slaan, en daarom permanent door de ingewijde woordvoerders van de elite moet worden bewerkt. De massa moet  voortdurend ingeprent krijgen wat de juiste opinies zijn. In de ogen van de macht en de mainstream-pers geldt namelijk het volgende: 

The fundamental difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders. Their relations to a problem are radically different. Only the insider can make decisions, not because he is inherently a better man but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land. In short, like the democratic theorists, they miss the essence of the matter, which is, that competence exists only in relation to function; that men are not good, but good for something; that men cannot be educated, but only educated for something. 

Education for citizenship, for membership  in the public, ought, therefore, to be distinct from education for public office. Citizenship involves a radically different relation to affairs, requires different intellectual habits  and different methods of action. The force of public opinion is partisan, spasmodic,  simple-minded and external. It needs for its direction, as I have tried to show in these chapters, a new intellectual method which shall provide it with its own usable canons  of judgment. 

Kortom, omdat in de visie van de elite en haar liberal woordvoerders als de media-ideoloog Walter Lippmann, de wereld alleen bestuurd dient te worden door een kaste van politici, technocraten en rijke geldschieters, die weet wat goed is voor de mensheid, kan er geen sprake zijn van een ware democratie. In een ‘democratie’ beseffen de kiesgerechtigden namelijk domweg niet wat goed voor hen is, waardoor het resultaat alleen maar chaos kan zijn. In deze zienswijze is het de taak van de commerciële massamedia om de macht te blijven legitimeren. Vandaar het belang van de Makken, Heijne’s, Smeetsen en Buruma’s om de ‘juiste’ opinies erin te hameren, en de ‘juiste’ vijanden aan te wijzen, zodat de interne cohesie, die in een snel veranderende wereld altijd onder druk staat, gered kan worden. Overigens was er, volgens Lippmann, een eeuw geleden al niets:

particularly new in the disenchantment which the private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the head of the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading speeches and documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which he is denounced. I shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot  find time to do what is expected of me in the  theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political  science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent (in staat alles te doen. svh) citizen. 

De lezer zal weliswaar van een journalist dan wel politicus — of welke andere zelfbenoemde autoriteit dan ook — zelden tot nooit vernemen dat ‘the public must be put in its place.’ Toch is deze elitaire opvatting wijd verspreid onder de falende pleitbezorgers van het neoliberale kapitalisme, zo weet ik uit ruim een halve eeuw ervaring in de journalistiek. De meeste journalistiek van de mainstream-media is propagandistisch, en dat is het gevolg van enerzijds de belangen van de elite en anderzijds datgene wat Lippmann aldus formuleert:

The force of public opinion is partisan, spasmodic, simple-minded and external. It needs for its direction, as I have tried to show in these chapters, a new intellectual method which shall provide it with its own usable canons of judgment.

En die ‘usable canons of judgment’ oftewel de ‘bruikbare leerstellingen betreffende hoe iets beoordeeld moet worden,’ zijn in de praktijk niets anders dan propaganda voor de status quo, waarbij de belangen van de elite worden veilig gesteld, en ‘het publiek zijn plaats wordt gewezen.’ Maar de opkomst van het ‘populisme’ laat zien dat deze propaganda niet meer werkt bij een toenemend aantal burgers. De Amerikaanse journalist en auteur Chris Hedges schrijft in zijn boek Death of the Liberal Class (2010) in dit verband :

The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weimar Germany, the former Yugoslavia, or the United States, was intimately tied to the rise of a culture of permanent war. Within such a culture, exploitation and violence, even against citizens, are justified to protect the nation. The chant for war comes in a variety of slogans, languages, and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials, campaigns of ethnic cleansing, or Christian crusades. It is all the same. It is a crude, terrifying state repression by the power elite and the mediocrities in the liberal class who serve them, in the name of national security. 

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, that killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, movements that held great promise in the early part of the twentieth century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The same prolonged state of permanent war killed the liberal classes in Israel and the United States. Permanent war, which reduces all to speaking in the simplified language of nationalism, is a disease. It strips citizens of rights. It reduces all communication to patriotic cant. It empowers those who profit from the state in the name of war. And it corrodes and diminishes democratic debate and institutions. 

‘War,’ Randolph Bourne (Amerikaanse journalist) remarked, ‘is the health of the state.’ 

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable. 

The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock. 

Dick Cheney and George W. Bush may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, such distinctions do not matter. They get what they want. The liberal class, like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, can no longer influence a society in a state of permanent war and retreats into its sheltered enclaves, where its members can continue to worship themselves. The corridors of liberal institutions are filled with Underground men and women. They decry the social chaos for which they bear responsibility, but do nothing. They nurse an internal bitterness and mounting distaste for the wider society. And, because of their self-righteousness, elitism, and hypocrisy, they are despised.

Een deel mag zich dan wel hebben teruggetrokken in liberal dan wel sociaaldemocratische bolwerken als bijvoorbeeld de universiteiten, maar een ander deel, zoals Mak, Smeets, Heijne, Buruma, etc. aantonen, collaboreert met de heersende neoliberale en neoconservatieve macht en zijn, zonder het te beseffen, de wegbereiders van een opkomend fascisme. Zij begrijpen bijvoorbeeld niet dat president Obama door zijn leugenachtige, populistische campagne ‘change we can believe in’ de weg heeft geëffend voor de even leugenachtige, populistische president Trump. Doordat de kiezers van de Democratische Partij praktisch niets van Obama’s belofte verwezenlijkt zagen, stapte een aanzienlijk deel over naar de Republikein Donald Trump die beloofde ‘het moeras’ van Washington ‘te draineren,’ oftewel: de corruptie van de politieke en bureaucratische elite terug te dringen.  Ondertussen heeft nog slechts een klein deel van de Amerikaanse en Europese bevolking even weinig vertrouwen in de politiek als in de journalistiek, zoals uit talloze onderzoeken blijkt. Hedges waarschuwde een decennium geleden al dat:

The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities and government agencies to cultural institutions and the media. In their continued impotence and cowardice, members of the liberal class will see themselves, and the values they support, swept aside. 

The liberal class refused to resist the devolution of the U.S. democratic system into what Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin writes, represents ‘the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.’ Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new, revolutionary structures. They do not import new symbols and iconography. They do not offer a radical alternative. Corporate power purports, in inverted totalitarianism, to honor electoral politics, freedom, and the Constitution. But these corporate forces so corrupt and manipulate power as to make democracy impossible. 

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by ‘power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,’ Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes would. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that the courts, populated by justices selected and ratified by members of the corporate culture, rule that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. Corporations are treated by the state as persons, as the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court has more and more frequently ruled, except in those cases where the ‘persons’ agree to a ‘settlement.’ Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government without ‘admitting any wrongdoing,’ according to this twisted judicial reasoning. There is a word for this: corruption. 

Corporations have thirty-five thousand lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling, and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown, and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million in 2009, and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen, and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. The so-called health-care reform bill will force citizens to buy a predatory and defective product, while taxpayers provide health-related corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors, and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of regulatory control and civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and give lip service to burning political and economic issues. The liberal class is used as a prop (steunpilaar. svh) to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive. The Constitution, Wolin writes, is ‘conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its.’ 

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than authentically participating in power, are have only virtual opinions, in what Charlotte Twight calls “participatory fascism.” They are reduced to expressing themselves on issues that are meaningless, voting on American Idol or in polls conducted by the power elite. The citizens of Rome, stripped of political power, are allowed to vote to spare or kill a gladiator in the arena, a similar form of hollow public choice. 

‘Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,’ Wolin writes: It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash. 

Hollywood, the news industry, and television — all corporate controlled — have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism, as I illustrated in my book Empire of Illusion. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is the Tiger Woods sex scandal or the dispute between NBC late-night talk-show hosts Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien or the extramarital affair of John Edwards. We confuse knowledge with our potted responses to these non-events. And the draconian internal control employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the military, and the police, coupled with the censorship, witting or unwitting, practiced by the corporate media, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of prohibited books did in previous totalitarian regimes. 

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists, and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been banished or muzzled by corporate control throughout academia, culture, the media, and government. ‘It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,’ Wolin writes: 

‘Recall that an element common to most twentieth-century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility toward the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of “the left wing of the Democratic Party,” never of democrats.’ 

The uniformity of opinion molded by the media is reinforced through the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paint all dissidents as ‘soft’ or ‘unpatriotic.’ The ‘patriotic’ citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. There is no questioning of the $1 trillion spent each year on defense. Military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of the government. The most powerful instruments of state control effectively have no public oversight. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in U.S. history. 

And yet the civic, patriotic, and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the founding fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. 

The liberal class has aided and abetted this decline. Liberals, who claim to support the working class, vote for candidates who glibly defend NAFTA and increased globalization. Liberals, who claim to want an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue to back a party that funds and expands these wars. Liberals, who say they are the champions of basic civil liberties, do not challenge politicians who take these liberties from them.

Jackson Pollock in actie.

Zo is de cirkel weer gesloten, en keer ik terug naar de analyse van professor Serge Guilbaut, die in zijn studie How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, ondermeer opmerkt dat:

[i]t is ironic but not contradictory that in a society politically stuck in a position to the right of center, in which political repression weighed as heavily as it did in the United States, abstract expressionism was for many the expression of freedom: the freedom to create controversial works of art, the freedom symbolized by action painting, by the unbridled expressionism of artists completely without fetters. It was this freedom, existential as well as essential, that the moderns defended against the conservatives.

Maar deze weg uit de hel van de niet aflatende vervreemding en angst is alleen voor de kunstenaar begaanbaar, en niet eens altijd, al is het maar omdat de: 

brutality of the modern world can wear down the individual. Against this brutality the artist was supposed to be a shining example of the individual will to set against the dull uniformity of totalitarian society. 

The individualism evident in abstract expressionist painting enabled avant-garde painters to stake out a unique stronghold on the artistic front. The avant-garde tailored for itself a coherent, recognizable, and salable (verkoopbaar. svh) image that fairly accurately reflected the aims and aspirations of the new liberal America, a powerful force on the international scene. It was possible to combine political and artistic images because both artists and politicians were willing, consciously or unconsciously, to overlook large chunks of their respective ideologies in order to enlist the other group as an ally. The contradictions were passed over in silence, though artists, who had to face the situation every day, sometimes erupted in violent outbursts against what was happening. Clyfford Still, who refused to be coopted by the museums and the critical establishment but still wished to be perceived as a spiritual leader of the movement, is perhaps the best example of such an artist. In 1948 he wrote the following letter to Betty Parsons Amerikaanse kunstenaar. svh):  

‘Please — and this is important, show [canvases] only to those who may have some insight into the values involved, and allow no one to write about them, NO ONE. My contempt for the intelligence of the scribblers I have read is so complete that I cannot tolerate their imbecilities, particularly when they attempt to deal with my canvases. Men like Soby, Greenberg, Barr, etc. (New Yorkse kunstpauzen. svh)… are to be categorically rejected. And I no longer want them shown to the public at large, either singly or in group.’

Toen al werd duidelijk dat er een kloof bestond tussen ‘het grote publiek’ en de moderne kunst, en dat de massa een verlossing voor de moderne vervreemding en angst niet in de kunst zou vinden. En zo is het tot nu toe gebleven. Moderne kunst bevredigt allereerst en vooral het snobisme van het establishment, voor de rest is het een belegging, zoals blijkt uit het feit dat tot de moderne meesters alleen die beeldend kunstenaars worden gerekend van wie het werk het meeste geld oplevert. De moderne kunst is ideologisch misbruikt om de westerse bourgeoisie status te verlenen. ‘Art was able to package the virtues of liberal society and lay down a challenge to its enemies,’ dat wil zeggen ‘it aroused polemic without courting danger,’ aldus Guilbaut. Zodoende wist de moderne kunst een propagandawapen te worden in de eerste Koude Oorlog. Inmiddels is de Tweede Koude Oorlog door het Westen gestart. Vooral de televisie loopt hierin vooraan:

In Europa: De geschiedenis op heterdaad betrapt

De VPRO trekt samen met Geert Mak opnieuw door Europa en de Europese geschiedenis. 

Alleen al de bewering dat ‘de populairste geschiedenisleraar van het land’ de ‘geschiedenis op heterdaad’ betrapt getuigt van een verregaande infantiliteit. De dichteres Elly de Waard reageerde dan ook verbijsterd:

Ik zit naar Geert Mak te kijken In Europa, maar ik krijg gewoon sprookjes voorgeschoteld, ook op een kinderachtige toon. Dat kun je mensen toch niet voorschotelen, die infantiele propaganda?

Maar juist die infantiliteit is kenmerkend voor ook mijn generatie opiniemakers. Daarover volgende keer meer. 

Van Kunst naar Kitsch. Geert Mak in Actie.