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26 June 2009 8:42 AM
Interview with James Poulos, Part III
(Parts one and two of my interview with James Poulos.)
Q. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about my favorite phrase you've coined --
"The Pink Police State." To what are you referring? And why should it
worry us?
The Pink Police State is a more extreme version of a regime I use to
taunt my libertarian friends in my essay on 'The Sex Vote' that's just been published in Doublethink. I worry, and I think we should all
worry, about the way cultural libertarianism is snowballing while the
snowball of political libertarianism rolls deeper into hell. I'm aghast
at the shrug with which many self-styled libertarians greet massive
government, so long as it's run by people with 'enlightened' attitudes
about pleasure-seeking. It's not death to the state these libertarians
want, it's the state as cool parent, with a stripper pole in every pot.
I've actually had one good libertarian friend argue straight-faced that
the solution to the drug problem is a monopoly partnership between
Washington and Walmart. Well, with solutions like that, who needs
problems? And of course you get that kind of institutionalized approach
from fans of legal prostitution. It's almost as if libertarians are
willing to let the state regulate everything so long as everything's
decriminalized.
On top of this, we all know how intimately sex -- or at
least images of sex and talk about sex, alas -- has become a part of
everyday life. What gives me fear is the idea, which large numbers
of people seem to be buying into, that a growing sphere of
libertinistic freedoms compensates (or more than compensates!) for our
shrinking spheres of political liberty and the practice of citizenship.
You can guess what I think about 'liberaltarianism'.
That's the background brief on the Pink Police State, a vision
which came to me courtesy of one of the most visionary videos of the
1990s. I'm talking about Marilyn Manson's "The Dope Show," off 1998's Mechanical Animals.
I know it's a bit odd for a conservative cultural critic to praise
Manson as a brilliant genius, but before the Columbine aftermath
unfairly derailed his career and life Manson was firing on all
cylinders, and Dope Shows' incredible 'live performance' sequence
[2:15-3:00], in which an all-male body of riot police wearing
head-to-toe pink uniforms are inspired to make out, was deeply
prophetic, in an as-yet symbolic way, about the manner in which our
manufactured contradictions and desires are apt to show forth in
contemporary life.
"Cops and queers," Manson sings on that track, "make
good-looking models." We should all ruminate on that lyric to better
understand the uncannily dovetailing fantasy of administrative
omni-competence in official life and sexual omni-competence in unofficial
life. I'll simply link to my related invectives against Dov Charney and Sasha Grey
-- blase, barbarian avatars of the banality of evil who are as much the
heirs of de Sade as Bill Kristol is the heir of Winston Churchill.
So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects)
are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for
more and more cultural or 'personal' license. And the government of a
Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative
control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people. This
tradeoff has a creepy economic component. Already, in places like
Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Singapore, we see the machinations
of a new 'laboratory of autocracy', as oppressive regimes grant wealthy
residents de facto privileges to all the sin money can buy. As I've
asked in our own context, however, how many hipsters are too poor to party?
Next to the al Qaeda neanderthals, the harbingers of the Pink Police
State pose a far more frightening and serious challenge to the Western
model of social order. Nobody frets, like many of our intellectuals did
over Stalinism, that maybe Osama got it right. There's more to worry
about when we see China's youth consent en masse to equality in
servitude in the shadow of Macau, Earth's biggest gambling mecca. Of course the freaky environs of Dubai
are a stone's throw from the real Mecca. The secret depths of
perversity and abuse at the 'frontiers of the West' -- pent-up porn,
sex slavery, the whole network reaching from the Baltics through the
Balkans, down into the Gulf, and out to Indochina -- really needs to be
told. But our rapt attention is held instead by Bruno.
Comments (1)
Comments on this entry have been closed.
The paragraph beginning "So citizens of a Pink Police State"---well, aren't they just enjoying the glories of what unfettered capitalism is offering and making big bucks out of? Your insinuation that only "hipsters" (my God, were you born in the 60s?) are doing the consuming is simply "stupid". Now, I do not suggest that the dumbing of the populace --whether in Pasadena or Peoria-- is a desirable development, but to pop the whole blame onto the "liberals" is worse than naive; it is a symptom of what you deplore--
thinking like an octopus through its own ink.