Hillary hatred

I am on record as declaring that HRC's post-hostage crisis presser was "not hateful." High praise indeed, no? But this in all fairness was what I felt. Usually, I start cringing three words in to one of her speeches, sometimes sooner. What is it exactly that seems to affect me so deeply? I continually obsess over this, primarily because (a) I feel I shouldn't dislike her with the intensity that I do and my own dislike perplexes me; (b) it's likely that I am going to have to vote for her in the general and, even more likely that she'll win so I'd like to work through this dislike and come to some sort of accommodation with the idea of her.

[Warning: this post, as most others on the topic of "Hillary hatred" is based on subjective truths, truths of perception.]

Since this is about subjective truths, I'll note from the outset that I am a woman (important fact I suppose), educated, feminist and post-feminist all at once, reasonably knowledgeable about domestic and foreign affairs, and sympathetic to progressive and liberal political movements.

Let's just get this out of the way first: Iraq. Iran.

Also, my antipathy for HRC has something to do with my antipathy toward the DLC. This is obvious and doesn't need that much elaboration. I hate the cowardice, passivity, and ambiguity of what we call centrism, the third way, etc. It's so utterly accommodating of neoliberal power that it makes my head spin. Scratch that: it doesn't just accommodate; it produces.

What follows is an antipathy toward the practiced, calculating aspects of HRC's campaign. We saw it from Bill but he could always soften the cold-blooded calculation somehow. Or perhaps it was that he was less apologetic about it. He gutted welfare -- unapologetically -- and signed NAFTA -- unapologetically -- and there was the sense that he almost really believed in these decisions. I have yet to get the sense that HRC and her campaign believes anything that hasn't been poll-tested into oblivion. If I am missing something, some real sense of conviction about some aspect of policy, foreign or domestic, I hope someone can point it out to me. I would want and need concrete specifics on this point.

Then again, and this is somewhat of a paradox, I would trust her with Supreme Court justice appointments, or at least one aspect of them: I don't think she would ever nominate someone who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Hence, my eventual grudging acceptance of her as president.

But I have to get back to the subjective part of it: what is it exactly about her that I don't like? I want to say something about her being moralizing and even unpleasant (stick up the bum even) and so it strikes me that on the whole I don't like her voice -- the tone and persona that she has crafted for herself. I think she has made the mistake that many professional women make (myself included on occasion) and that is to substitute severity for seriousness. When one does this, any attempt at levity is going to seem calculating and false. If your seriousness is a performance then your levity is going to be a performance as well, hence the serious discomfort when HRC tries to crack a joke.

OF COURSE it is all performance. Yes, of course I know this. But there is a gendered dimension that one has to think about, that everyone continues to think about. I think at core that HRC has yet to perfect, may never perfect, probably in the end does not care to perfect, the public persona that is at once gendered and gender neutral. Angela Merkel has done it and I think HRC's image advisors would be well advised to study her public appearances for tips. The problem is that I don't think HRC can perform femininity -- that is, soften her moralizing, calculating, sternness -- all that easily, nor do I think she cares to. But there is pressure on her to do so and then all of a sudden she's baking some cookies or throwing "as a mother" in sentences where that phrase makes no coherent sense. Better, perhaps, to go for the Iron Lady act, which is probably closer to HRC's being anyway, and let everyone respect you instead of feel warmly toward you. But she can't, because in American public life it's all about feeling and because when Oprah is batting for the other team, one has to get down to it and start demonstrating some empathy.

But maybe not. Maybe HRC can just be professional, competent, lucid, and engaged, like she was in the press conference a couple of days ago and we can all relax because she won't try to get us to like her: she'll just be doing her job and making us feel comfortable because she is handling the situation with a minimum of fuss and bother. This is what one wants from a woman president, any president.

Then we can get down to business and start articulating our dissent about substantive policy matters.

Planting questions

The unfolding news about the planting of questions by HRC -- I guess we are to call her "Hilary" now -- or her campaign has two interesting aspects:

First, we want to believe that there is in fact a material and philosophical difference between the dems and the Bush administration. Staging town hall meetings, holding fake press conferences, planting reporters and planting questions: these are the theatrical tools of the Bush administration. Dems, we believe, have a greater authenticity; their convictions are sincere and even pure; they mean well; they're earnest; and, going back a few decades, they want to change the world for good, etc. We have to believe Dems would never succumb to the recent tactics of the right. We love a show much as anyone or any political party -- Clinton was nothing if not good political theater and of course there is Obama '04 -- but these performances are real, staged, perhaps in the case of the latter, but didn't they somehow reflect a core integrity and sense of conviction? Oratory and rhetoric, in our credo, always works to the good, for the greater good. (My pronoun shifts from "they" to "we" reflects an ambivalence of identification of course.) Dems put on a show but our shows are authentic. Or at least this is what we want to believe, a belief that these recent revelations puncture. That's why it's not interesting to protest the coverage by saying, 'after Jeff Gannon, you expect us to get upset about staged questions'? The shock is that perhaps there is in the end no difference between the sides: we're not as pure as we would like to think.

Second, the planted questions in the case of this particular campaign -- Hilary's instead of Obama's or another's -- does reinforce the contrast between Hilary and Bill and is in fact doing her no favors. We're already told she's stiff, essentially wooden; we know she's moralizing from her past alignments with Lieberman et al on the issue of video games and violence; and the contrast between her and Bill in dual appearances is quite dramatic. (Note the Coretta Scott King funeral.) If she has to have questions planted, her being is going to seem all the more false because of the imaginary of Bill and crowds that we all seem to have. I would think that her campaign in particular would go out of its way to make her seriousness into a virtue and would explicitly avoid the faux folksiness that these questions in particular tried to convey.

Trader Joe's: The Wal-Mart of grocery stores

What does it mean when "organic" garlic bulbs, "organic" frozen broccoli florets, and "organic" black beans in the can come from a country where we have no FDA inspections? What does organic mean in this instance? No one within the jurisdiction of the FDA has used pesticides in the production of these products?

More to the point: why does someone in California need to have her garlic imported from China? It's one of the state's main crops; it's no less expensive to purchase two bulbs at $1.99 at TJ's then it would be to buy it at another grocery store. At a standard farmer's market, it goes for .75-1.25/bulb, depending on size. This means of course that TJ's pays Chinese agricultural businesses (large or small? who knows) on roughly the same pay scale that Mattel is using for its toys. All those TJ-label products are coming from China or some other emerging market and marked up exponentially. Note that TJ's is owned by the German company Aldi, which is known as 'the German Wal-Mart' for good reason.

Americans demand cheap goods and they insist that they be cheap, ergo the shelves full of plastic shower rings, plastic toys, and all else besides. But we're getting no deal on our groceries from TJ's and there are real environmental, social, and economic costs to their business practices. Moreover, we might think we're avoiding corporatism in some form by shopping at TJ's but it is in fact a big box like all the others. It's akin not only to Wal-Mart but also to Home Depot. We think we're getting a deal because the physical store is relatively plain with somewhat of a warehouse feel. But that apparent simplicity, like the faux-cool of the dominant motif -- the island, the palm trees, the Hawaiian shirts the employees will still ocassionally wear -- masks corporate business practices like any other. Plus I'd rather get my cereal from the midwest; why have it shipped from China, where the wheat gluten might still be poisoned and the workers are not unionized?

TJ's: it's no less expensive than any other grocery store and most of its goods are imported from China. What is the appeal for the bourgeois consumer? Aren't they, we, trained to shop smart, to be green, to consume responsibly?

Curious timing

A list in progress of remarkably timed news events:

1. Senator Craig announces his imminent resignation on Saturday of Labor Day weekend;
2. Bush makes a "surprise" visit to Iraq on the very day that the British withdraw from Basra, pushing news of this pullout, and critical remarks from British army chief, below the fold;
3. Said visit also comes ahead of the official release of the GAO report, which notes that Iraq "fails 11 of 18 key targets";

...

Airport bathrooms

Senator Craig will, I suspect, be gone within 48 hours. The scandal is above the fold not simply for the usual reasons -- "gay sex!" "sex in the Senate!" "pages (again)!" "Republican hypocrisy on all this faith-and-values nonsense!" "Republican hypocrisy on Clinton!" -- but also because the sex, or the promise of sex rather, was located in an airport bathroom.

First we're back to the fear of bathhouses: it's 1987 all over again. Cue all our phobias about the transmission of AIDS, anonymous sex, and gay underworlds unlegislated and seemingly unaffected by all the social mores so rigorously enforced in our public discourse.

We have heard this summer about sexual solicitation in park bathrooms: remember Bob Allen? That story did not have the traction I predict this will because there are fundamental differences between a bathroom in a public park and a bathroom in an airport. Park bathrooms are already disconcerting, even taboo, for the middle classes, places one frequents only if absolutely necessary, only as a last resort. The very existence of public bathrooms is highly contested as we know, as is the case for most public institutions in our neoliberal era. Public bathrooms are apparently not to be supported any more than the parks themselves: is it still Santa Monica's claim to fame that it provides facilities for the homeless? Thus is it the case that public bathrooms seem rarely, if ever, to be attended, cleansed by hosing, and of course devoid of toilet paper. Think of the "dangers" associated with public bathrooms: needles, waste, an actual encounter with a homeless boogeyman. So it's somehow less scandalous to be caught soliciting in a park bathroom: these spaces are contained, cordoned off, already coded as dangerous and illicit.

Airport bathrooms, on the other hand, are most often steps away from Starbucks and thus in the very heart of the American consumer soul. They exist where we eat and drink; they are integral to the lives of nearly everyone who passes by. Does not everyone use the airport bathroom before a flight? The alternative is of course worse: the airplane bathroom. Airport bathrooms are places to frequent as often as possible precisely to avoid the alternative. Parents can be seen letting their kids go in alone: we're all one big happy family now that the DHS has screened out the bad guys and made airports protected spaces. Is it not the case that we surrender our water bottles and submit to full body searches so that we can regard airplane terminals -- and their bathrooms -- as safe, quasi-domestic public spaces? They contain all of the comforts of home and many comforts not at home: you can after all get massages in terminals now. And let us not forget the shopping for goods for our homes.

To have such a space punctured by sex seems slightly shocking. We expect and even accepted that airplane bathrooms are places for sex. Any mention of the "mile high club" gets the old wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But this might be because they are contained, encapsulated. Airport bathrooms, on the other hand, while they may be part of the general capsule that is the airport itself, are not so enclosed. We think of them as safe and protected spaces and I am even inclined to think they have a bit of that good will and friendly feeling one associates with the public square in a Capra movie: we are all sharing the same experience of travel after all and all the frustrations and joys that come along with it. We're all late, tired, too early, harried, annoyed, delayed, especially delayed, and a certain commiseration and even community, however tenuous, results from this shared experience. There are always kids and grandparents; within a certain class, and even beyond it, there is a significant cross-section of the population on the move. For the bathroom, the one place you can go to wash off the grime of the plane, to be permeated, punctured, for some violated by the thought of sexual solicitation is going to be too much for the American psyche. Janitorial closets in the airport (Six Feet Under) are one thing; the bathrooms another. To think that there is a whole subcultural communicative code at work right at our very feet will be just too much. In fact, there's the thing: straight America is going to have to confront the fact that there is such a code, that gay networks operate, literally, next door.

If Senator Craig had solicited sex in a park bathroom, I'd be inclined to say he could hold his seat and then retire in 2008. Because it was an airport bathroom, I give him until the end of the week, with a resignation timed to coincide with the Labor Day weekend.

Administered improvement

Of course, there is another way to think about the exponential growth in the cosmetic surgery industry: not in terms of self-help but in terms of administered improvement. Extreme makeover programming -- whether it be for body or home -- provides a perfect instance of teamwork culture. I do not have any one network or show in mind; the Extreme Makeover teams are the most obvious perhaps but the old show The Swan had the same structure ('meet the team of makeover specialists!), as do all the home improvement shows on Bravo, HGN, and so forth. Also, let us not forget Queer Eye, a makeover team Village People style.

My sense is that extreme makeover programming is illustrative of a new expert culture no longer legitimated by professional institutions and disciplines and by specialized knowledge but by results. This new expert culture is determined not by the individual (or, lone ranger) but by the team and thus emphasizes collaboration, interaction, and performance management. In Extreme Makeover itself, the entire team comprised of doctors, lifestyle coaches, aestheticians, consultants, and media workers assesses its object and prescribes the course of treatment that would realize the collective vision of a final product. However, the noted moment of the final unveiling of the remade body in front of friends and family functions as the substitute for the real outcome, which is the reinforcement and reproduction of the new expert culture. Essentially, Extreme Makeover is outsourced self-help, simultaneously voluntary and interventionist. The women and occasional man seem to have a vague idea of their “problem,” which is written under the sign of beauty, but require the team’s diagnosis of the problem’s precise components. This is not self-fashioning, but expert and administered improvement, paradoxically illustrative of both the logic of mass production, with its emphasis on sameness, and the logic of post-industrial production, with its emphasis on individual tailoring and customization.

9.1+ million procedures

Dermatologist waiting rooms are becoming an interesting site for ethnographic research, what with all of the beauty junkies and the nipping and tucking and feeling bad about necks. Almost 11 million cosmetic procedures performed in the U.S. in 2006, no doubt up a good 6-7% in 2007, unless of course the drying up of home equity stabilizes those numbers. More than 9.1. "minimally invasive procedures" performed, including of course all the peels and the fillers and what not. Even assuming a sizable number of those procedures were part of a comprehensive treatment plan, extreme makeover style, that is quite a few people in the waiting room. Hence, this is a good site for some participant-observer research.

- There are of course those on health plans waiting to be treated for suspicious moles and varieties of skin infections. They tend to be older, or, rather the older people in the waiting room are presumably not there for cosmetic procedures. Unless of course they are wearing pant suits, in which case see below.
- Primarily one sees scores of women of indeterminate age waiting for procedures that seem quite mysterious. The flaws they are there to correct, in other words, are not really visible across the room. Sometimes they come out holding ice packs to their faces; sometimes they come out looking exactly the same as they did when they entered.
- The relatively new thing: men in their 40s clearly there for cosmetic work. These men are are either entirely casual about the whole thing, with no doubt whatsoever as to the significance of their attention to appearance, or somewhat sheepish. In a few months the latter will morph into the former.

What I find remarkable almost above all else is the fact that so many people electing for these procedures are self-diagnosing. The evidence is there in the waiting room: piles of health & beauty magazines for nearly all demographics with some discussion of cosmetic work in all of them; brochures from old and new pharmaceutical companies advertising procedures I had never heard about, all of them meant to be taken home by the patients and discussed with friends and family; the ubiquitous "as seen on" and "as seen in" stickers attached to the OTC products for sale at the desk. It's the old story: first create needs, then help. But it's also a new story: don't trust the experts, trust yourself. Don't visit a dermatologist to ask for help with a skin condition you don't understand but that you suspect might be dangerous in the long term; visit a dermatologist so s/he can perform the very procedure you demand, because you have spent endless hours online researching nasolabial folds and know precisely how your problem is to be cured.

At any rate, shows like Extreme Makeover might lead us to think that an expert culture persists -- what one seems to need is an entire team of specialists working on one's body and face -- but in fact we are deeply skeptical of professionals. We're been trained not to trust institutions, to think that we, the amateurs, are best capable of self-assessment, diagnosis, and improvement. Is this not the essence of self-help? So dermatologists might advise and consult, but in the end I suspect many decisions about cosmetic procedures are made before people even enter the waiting room. Hence, too, the rise of non-medical or even "medical" spas, where one can get any number of non-invasive cosmetic procedures performed by a nurse practitioner or aesthetician -- in other words, by an amateur. If even aestheticians are not to be trusted, there is of course a whole range of products for cosmetic "improvement" available over the counter: DIY cosmetic treatments.

Better living with media: Rule no. 1

If one consumes, one must produce.