There were at least three or four variations of American culture on display this weekend in New York, on Friday at Fashion’s Night Out and Saturday in the various ceremonies and protests around September 11. Friday night’s festivities spotlighted the culture that has emerged and become dominant over the course of several decades—a consumer culture that is paced by fashion’s cycles of instant gratification and planned obsolescence.
What has become the dominant American and global culture is a completely commercialized culture based in artifice, frivolity, and disposability, traits which the fashion world has always exemplified to the point of self-parody.Fashion makes the human necessity for clothing into a commodity fetish, thereby mocking the notion of use value in favor of pure exchange value inflated to spectacularly outrageous prices.
Today's fashion world collapses the conflicts that characterized the culture wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, and yet it is unabashedly elitist and exclusive, restoring an aristocratic culture of idol worship for celebrities and their lives of leisure. Though not democratic, it is certainly diverse, a culture that celebrates difference and ambiguity, especially in matters of gender and sexuality. Its aesthetic standards of beauty are synonymous with youth, and embodied by women with notoriously freakish genetics. Fashion is therefore at the center of capitalism’s consumer culture, and it is fueling the cultural changes that multiply the potential postures for individual identities, bodies, styles, and sexualities.
The following day, America’s residual cultures reemerged and argued tirelessly with each other in the streets of New York to commemorate the ninth anniversary of September 11, and to protest, and counter-protest, the proposed construction of a Mosque/Islamic cultural center near the original site of the World Trade Center. The area around Ground Zero became a political, religious, and ideological warzone engaging evangelical Christians, defenders of civil liberties, right-wing tea-baggers, left-wing conspiracy nuts, Muslims not only from the Middle East but from New York ghettos, apocalyptic doomsayers, xenophobic nationalists, and liberal multiculturalists into a bewildering fray of endless argumentation and accusation.
Forgive me for sounding like a Hilton or Kardashian, but one thing all these groups had in common was their lack of fashion and general unattractiveness. Caroline and I were secretly curious to check out the anti-Mosque crowd, and after having been at Fashion’s Night Out on the previous evening, one couldn’t help but notice how white, old, frumpy, and ridiculously out-of-place in New York City these people looked in comparison. The sense of fear and ignorance was overwhelming and made me angry after only a few minutes, but the crowd also provoked some unexpected feelings of pity within me. I mean, these people were just so ugly, and they looked so outdated in every way.
A number of journalists have written about how the Tea Party movement is recruiting among people who have lost their jobs and/or their homes in the economic recession and are pissed off but confused about who to blame. Walking with them on September 11th, I wondered if there wasn’t also a story about how they had also been rejected and rendered useless within the symbolic economy of fashion, consumption, and the body. The crowd waved their flags and bared their crosses in a predictably ugly manner, and they also carried a palpable sense of persecution and melodramatic claims to victimization—Caroline’s favorite image was of Jesus’ nailed and bloody wrist with salt being poured into the open wound, while mine was a tee-shirt that claimed the WTC site was “sacred ground” and implied that building a Mosque would make it a “symbol of conquest” for Islam.
In general, their ideological complaints about government, President Obama, Islam, terrorism, and the alleged persecution of Christian Americans are far too illogical, unfounded, and incoherent to be analyzed on their own terms. The feelings they express, on the other hand, are very clear: anger, fear, and an overarching claim to victimization. These people are yesterday’s news, and at some level they seem to know it. Their patriarchal institutions of marriage, family, and compulsory heterosexuality have collapsed from within; their “traditional” values are routinely violated by their most vocal proponents; their investments in God and country are rapidly losing their value under global capitalism; a generation of capitalists have stolen their money while openly mocking their work ethic; their ideal of small-town community has been reduced to nostalgic simulation.
There was a wide-ranging sense of paranoia and apocalyptic fantasy on all sides on September 11th, with the exception of the police and fire departments that clearly enjoyed their day of recognition and ceremonial tribute. We stopped to watch what sounded like an argument between a guy in a “9/11 Truth” shirt and an anti-Mosque tea-bagger over whether September 11 was the inside work of the Bush administration. Their vocal exchange had the loudness and ferocity of an argument, but it also looked like an emotional bond was forming between these men as they each mourned the growth of omnipotent powers and made their claims to victimhood.
And the tea-baggers weren’t the only ones clinging to outmoded values and obsolete ideas, either. Liberal defenders of multiculturalism, civil liberties, and religious freedom formed a counter-protest of their own with a predictable mix of signs, slogans, and passé style. These people clearly hadn’t learned the lessons of Fashion’s Night Out: their ideals of democracy, citizenship, and political activism are irrelevant in the global capitalism of the twenty-first century and amount to little more than decidedly unglamorous styles of posing and posturing.
Returning home to Caroline’s place at 141st and Broadway took us into West Harlem and yet another enduring form of American culture, one that has been shaped by poverty, violence, and widespread social deviance since masses of black people starting coming to New York during the Great Migration of World War I. Outside the window of Caroline’s apartment, we watch elderly Puerto Rican and Afro-American men playing dominos and heard them yelling at each other in mixtures of Spanish and English as money was won and lost. Groups of dark-skinned youths openly smoke blunts in the street without giving a second thought to getting busted. Young children yell and run up and down at the street at 2 o’clock in the morning with minimal parental supervision.
For nearly one hundred years, this neighborhood has nurtured and preserved a culture of defiance that white authorities have treated as pathological insofar as they have been unable to completely domesticate and assimilate its impoverished inhabitants. Today, the signs of gentrification are only just beginning to appear: one minute Caroline and I are watching a young man clowning in the streets to a beat that only he seems to be able to hear, and the next minute we are approached by a white woman walking a golden retriever who asks if we’ve seen the litter of poor little kittens scampering around the street lately.
With its beats, rhymes, and air of defiance, the street culture of Harlem is in a far better position to be recognized and integrated through commercial exploitation into the symbolic economy and culture of our future. The occasion of September 11th summoned the anger and fear of a people in decline, but if the tragedies of the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that we must beware of the ugly little people in decline who come outfitted in flags and crosses to cover over their secret racial fears and sexual hang-ups. These people who literally feel “left behind” have fantasies of the apocalypse on their collective mind, and although they are probably destined to become the laughingstocks of history, we shouldn’t doubt their resolve to turn their version of the end of the world into a reality before they slide, kicking and screaming, into social insignificance.
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