Obama, Anti-Dubya

By Mark Featherstone

I was interested to see Steve Bell’s Anti-Bush response to Obama’s victory (see previous blog entry) because it nicely captures the political iconography of Dubya and illustrates the essential ‘negativity’ of the utopianism of the new President-elect. But before I explain what I mean by this idea of the ‘negative’ utopianism of Obama, let me set-up the notion of political iconography.

It is possible to make the claim that the first political icons can be traced back to pre-history and the kind of totemic symbols Sigmund Freud wrote about in his famous book Totem and Taboo. The same logic underpinned Thomas Hobbes’ early modern image of the ‘Leviathan’. In Hobbes’ image, the King, or big man, is comprised of lots of individuals who come together to form political society. Thus political society, or what social theorists call the body politic, is represented by the symbol of the King who embodies the will of everybody. But what was the purpose of these images? Clearly, the image of the totem or body politic was not meant to undermine the leader, but rather to boost their power in the eyes of the masses. All of this changed with the emergence of the mass media and in particular the printing press because it was now possible for revolutionaries to oppose the official view of power with satirical illustrations that exposed the ridiculous or grotesque dimensions of those in positions of authority.

One of the first examples of this new symbolic critique of power took place in 18^th century France and played no small part in undermining the authority of the French monarchy in the eyes of the masses. Of course, this new form of revolutionary symbolism never completely overtook the old method of imaginary boosterism. By the time the Bolsheviks sought to realise Marx’s vision of a completed-revolution in feudal Russia, the totemic strategy was back on top. We have all seen images of Lenin striding across the Russian landscape and many of these symbols were realised in statue form. We also know that later on Stalin made use of the Leninist cult of personality to cement his own position, but that he was never able to embody the Marxist utopia in the ways in which Lenin was in the 1920s. It is similarly well known that Hitler was successful in simultaneously presenting himself as a living God and demonising the European Jewry in Nazi Germany with catastrophic results. However, thankfully the authoritarian, or totalitarian, attempt to totally control symbolic, or imaginary, politics was never feasible in western democracy and, despite notions of ideology and hegemony, the symbolic critique of power has continued to thrive.

In the second half of the 20^th century, and particularly in America, one of the homes of modern democracy, the symbolic critique of power expanded in line with the enormous expansion of the mass media and the emergence of the image-obsessed society sociologists refer to through the term, post-modern. The problem of political critique in post-modern society is not so much one of the ability of openly expressing critical views, but rather of making these views heard in a blizzard of opinions, views, and what has come to be called info-tainment. By the 1980s, when French post-modern theory began to reach America, commentators started to critique the post-modernism of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Although it is possible to claim that JFK was the first mass media president, it was Reagan who became the original post-modern president, simply because of the ways in which he embodied the American mythology of the west through the conflation of his political and B-movie personas in a new form of post-modern totemism.

Although this mythic persona made Reagan immensely popular with the masses, it also opened him up to elite critique based on the view that there was no real substance to his politics. For example, the American writer Neil Postman famously wrote that America was ‘Amusing Itself to Death’ under Reagan. Similarly, the political analyst Michael Rogin said that America had evolved a new form of political demonology based on the Republican administration’s use of mythology to separate good from evil and justify a new form of hyper-moralistic, quasi-religious, foreign policy. Beyond these elite critiques, which did not really touch the masses, popular critique savaged the great communicator. Grotesque images of Reagan mercilessly depicted him as senile or literally Brainless. Following Reagan, George Bush Snr was similarly mocked. He was represented as a Satan figure on the basis of CIA connections. In much the same vein, Bill Clinton was symbolically lambasted for his womanising. However, I would argue that it was not until the rise of George Bush Jnr, Dubya, that a President was almost completely constructed through grotesque imagery that variously depicted him as a drunk, a draft dodger, a complete idiot, and a chimpanzee.

But whatever reality conditions the construction of the political iconography of Dubya, whether he truly conforms to every stereotype which has come to define his character or we must seek deeper reasons for the grotesque imagery that surrounds him, I do not think that it is any stretch to say that this imagery has largely come to symbolise everything ‘we’ collectively think is wrong with America today. In many ways, then, the image of Dubya captures the idea of the idiocy of America, explaining fundamentalism, excess, and irresponsibility, and encouraging the deep paranoia that somebody else must really be running the show. Thus, I think that the image of Dubya, perfectly captured by Steve Bell’s chimpanzee, represents the dystopic face of America. In response to this image, Obama, whose presidential campaign has been conditioned by ideas of ‘change’ and ‘hope’, remains a blank canvas waiting to be illustrated. As such, Obama currently represents utopia negatively, by virtue of the fact that he is not Dubya, and like all real utopias, or utopian figures, before they are painted and fleshed out, he embodies the promise of a better future for everybody. Unfortunately, this pristine unreality cannot endure and we will not be able to maintain the empty image of the Obama utopia as negative expression of Bush dystopia for much longer than it takes for the comic fool to hand over the presidency to new pretender. Whether Obama can deliver on his promise of ‘change’ will rely on his ability to flesh out his negative critique of the Bush dystopia with a positive, realistic, imaginary of his own.