Essays by Wallace Shawn

Author:Wallace Shawn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Late September—Autumn Begins

Not unlike those unfortunate individuals who have somehow become addicted to pornography on the Internet, a frightening number of Americans seek temporary relief in nationalistic fantasy from the unsatisfying incompleteness of their daily lives—and then become hooked. It’s been going on for years. Their particular dream is not about sex or pleasure, it’s not even a dream about beautiful fields or ocean waves—it’s a dream about blood that flows from the wounds of the enemies of the nation. And just as the male heterosexual pornography addict identifies with, and revels in, the exploits of the triumphant naked male in the pornographic scene, the American nationalism addict identifies with the soldier, the bomber, and above all with the president. The end of the Cold War was a moment of anxiety for the American nationalism addict. Pornography privileges were suddenly withdrawn. The apparently implacable Soviet leaders, sitting perennially in a row in their uncomfortable-looking uniforms and suits, disappeared from the television screens, along with the trudging, raggedy armies of “Marxist guerrillas” in various countries around the world, and so, just as ex-alcoholics (like President Bush) are nonplussed or worse by the sudden disappearance of their necessary substance, nationalism addicts in the 1990s experienced serious depression if not desperation. But in 2001, the emergence of “the terrorists” finally brought relief. In fact, “the terrorists” were an improvement, as the Russians had never actually attacked the United States, nor had their statements expressed visceral loathing against us.

One of the peculiarities of heterosexual pornography made for men is that so much screen time is given to the penis, and one of the peculiarities of nationalistic fantasy is that so much of the dream is about the wonderfulness of the national self as the blows are being struck, while little curiosity is directed to the characteristics of the bleeding victim/enemy. The mental camera focuses on the noble intentions and plans of the slaughterer, while the supposedly once-dangerous victim offers up blood and cries but apparently possesses no intentions, thoughts, or feelings at all.

The eighteenth-century figures who devised the theory of modern democracy, not to mention the ancient Greeks, had something else in mind. The American theorists thought that citizens would live and vote based on a rational consideration of their own interests. A political speech might, in the imagination of these practical philosophers, convince its listeners through a persuasive marshalling of evidence and inferences. But to put a drug into someone’s drink, knock them out, and carry them home is not a form of seduction, and to paralyze a listener’s brain with fantasy—whether injected by a needle through the skull or poured into the ears through the spoken word—is not a form of rational argument, nor any basis for what those theorists would have called “democracy.”

Residents of mental institutions are not usually brought by their keepers to the voting booth on Election Day. They fall too far short of the image of the citizen/voter that inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers. And yet

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