From
the Web: Then and Now.
McCarthyism Today1
Mary Beyer
and Michael Beyer
(Chicago,
Illinois, USA)
The fusion of
ideas and power can produce dramatic results, but not all
have favorable outcomes. Looking back at recent history, an
example of this would be the McCarthy era of the 1950s, in
which the paranoid ideas and abuse of power by a few in the
Senate fostered national insecurity. But to argue here in
too great a detail whether or not this was necessary isn’t
the primary concern. A cause for alarm was warranted due to
tensions and threat of possible nuclear war between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Sounds serious, doesn’t
it? Certainly, but were the reactions of Joseph McCarthy
necessary or were they just a nuisance? With these events in
hindsight we can see that McCarthyism was a misfortune that
restrained artistic freedom, turning neighbors against one
another due suspected communist leanings, and brought
unnecessary fear to the nation, causing bomb shelters to be
built in basements. Today this is easily comparable to the
current war on terror; citizens are told to buy duct tape
and plastic to build bio-forts in their homes, artists are
arrested for dabbling in biology3,
and anybody who speaks up against the president’s policies
can be labeled as unpatriotic and locked away. Today is
comparable to the McCarthy period because we are being
gripped by a fear and we can’t tell whether it’s justified
or not. A main reason for this is because media images
prevent us from knowing the facts.
We cannot ignore
terrorist threats, yet the present state of fear that the
government has placed on American citizens is unnecessary. A
large part of the success of this fear is the use of the
media. News channels, newspapers, and talk radio all
reinforce and increase the present state of fear. Society is
finding itself in a devastating time of political upheaval
and downright corruption. It is also disturbing that all
“facts” that society retrieves come through filtration
sources such as the media. Jean Baudrillard’s 1984 lecture
The Evil Demons of Images5
has never seemed fresher or more real.
Baudrillard was
attempting to describe how, in the Postmodern era, images
have developed into conquerors, succeeding where military
might has failed. Baudrillard asserts that we have
spontaneous confidence in the realism of images, but we are
wrong. The essay was published in 1984, an ill-omened year
to be writing on such a topic, when many were assuming
Postmodernism was a theory here to stay, for a few decades
at least. Yet currently you can argue two things:
Postmodernism is at an end, or it has never really begun and
simply operates as an extension of Modernism. If you assert
the former then it can be argued that we have entered a new
realm of the Postmodern media in which the subjective or the
personal are the only possibilities, whereas a pure,
neutral, or objective perspective is seen as impossible.
In Mapping
the Postmodern Andreas Huyssen argues, “it is certainly
no accident that questions of subjectivity and authorship
have resurfaced with a vengeance in the postmodern text.
After all, it does matter who is speaking or writing”.6
Two current examples of this are Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11 and the general phenomenon of
conservative talk radio, where the truth is openly and
unapologetically slanted in favor of a cause or a movement.
However, the
current problem in the media is that many people can
distinguish subjectivity and are weary of it, but are not
adept at interpretation. Baudrillard believed in 1984 that
events no longer had meaning because they have been
“preceded by models with which their own process can only
coincide.” Therefore, they have come to rely on an emblem,
or a political figurehead they identify with, to tell them
which sources they should trust and which they shouldn’t. An
example of this is the coverage of the Iraq war, where news
anchors were shown embedded with military units, offering a
“reality” television version of the news. Baudrillard
writes, “war becomes film, film becomes war, and the two are
united by their mutual overflow of technology.” This
intimacy with the war and its coverage has led many people
to feel personally involved and thus dependent on coverage
of this issue. Baudrillard suggests that images are immoral
but there is a brute fascination and primal pleasure with
them. As a result, they allow themselves to be co-opted by
this present fear. Much like the bomb drills that saw school
children diving under their desks in the 1950s, we now have
multi-colored terror alerts from Homeland Security:
The true irony
of Postmodernism is that is has been replaced by a yearning
for the apparent innocence of the Modern agenda of a pure
aesthetic.
And this is where one might
choose to argue for the latter theory of Postmodernism,
where it acts as an extension of Modernism. In such an
instance, Postmodernism becomes a release for Modernism when
it finds itself in a rut – much like Romanticism and
Classicism, where culture fluctuates between yearning for
the past and looking forward to the future. In America today
we await a politics to come while considering the striking
coincidences with the politics of the past.
There is a fierce irony here: the irony
of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing
terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any
political substance – and going so far as to turn on its own
population. Is this a remnant of the Cold War and the
balance of terror? But this time it’s a deterrence without
as cold war, a terror without balance. Or rather it is a
universal cold war, ground into the tiniest interstices of
social and political life.9
Mary
Beyer and Michael Beyer
are Chicago based writers.
Endnotes
5
Jean Baudrillard. The Evil Demon of Images.
(c 1984). Sydney: Power Institute Publications,
1987. (This was the text of Baudrillard’s “Mary
Kitna Memorial Lecture” in Australia in 1984).
6
Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping
the Postmodern". In Charles Jencks (Editor). The
Post-Modern Reader. New York: St. Martin's,
1992:40-72.
8
The book Cohn is holding is now available as:
William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell and Peter Robinson.
McCarthy and His Enemies. Washington:
Regnery Publishing
(Reissue edition), 1995.
9
Jean Baudrillard.
The Intelligence of
Evil Or The Lucidity Pact. New York:
Berg, 2005:119.