ART
Art in the Dark
/ Alan Gilbert
06.21.06
A couple nights after the close of the most recent Whitney Biennial, the Dixie Chicks were interviewed on Larry King Live. Reveling in the successful release a week earlier of their latest album, Taking the Long Way, the Dixie Chicks displayed their trademark mixture of brash and demure honesty that was abruptly politicized in March 2003 when lead singer Natalie Maines declared during a concert in London: “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” In the States, Maines’s comment led to widespread public scorn (and some support), instantly declining record sales, banishment from country music radio stations, hate mail and even death threats—all of which led Maines to apologize, and she made a loosely contrite appearance a month later on Primetime with Diane Sawyer. But with Taking the Long Way opening at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 (making them the only female group in commercial music history to debut three #1 Billboard albums) apologies were mostly retracted, and “no regrets” was the theme for King and his audience.
At one point during the interview, when King opened up the phone lines, a caller commented that despite lingering public animosity, the Dixie Chicks were willing to field live phone calls, whereas a prior interview with Donald Rumsfeld had been for King’s prerecorded show, and consequently didn’t allow for potentially hostile questions from the general public. Somewhat missing the point, King said there wasn’t an opportunity for questions because the show was prerecorded, to which the caller replied: “Yes, well, I would like to observe that the Dixie Chicks have guts and integrity, and Donald Rumsfeld has shown he’s a coward as well as a liar.” (And some critics say that the mainstream media is only good for brainwashing the masses!) With King getting impatient, the caller asked the Dixie Chicks what they think of Rumsfeld. Member Emily Robison responded: “He weaves around questions better than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Cue, not footage of Rumsfeld’s equivocations, but Anderson Cooper in New Orleans previewing his upcoming show on the race to rebuild the levees at the start of the hurricane season.
So maybe the mainstream media isn’t quite up to the challenge of critique after all. But maybe poetry is. Donald Rumsfeld’s poetry, that is. Or more specifically, verbatim excerpts from Rumsfeld’s press conferences transcribed as poems by journalist and humorist Hart Seely, and published in a book entitled Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s answers to the Washington press corps’ probing as well as softball questions have become legendary for their obfuscating quality. Seely’s poetic renditions further emphasize this aspect. Here’s an example:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.
-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
When Seely first published a selection of these poems at Slate, he, too, described Rumsfeld as someone who “weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile.” All laughter and caricature aside, what’s important to realize here is that for Rumsfeld—and the Bush administration in general—indeterminacy is not incompatible with power. In other words, for Rumsfeld and company, there’s no paradox in believing continuous obfuscation depicts an accurate representation of reality.
This is a major political and epistemological shift in U.S. politics—or politics anywhere else, for that matter. Whereas before, an actual event was spun in order to justify a response (e.g., a possible encounter in the Bay of Tonkin between North Vietnamese naval boats and U.S. warships became a pretext for the Vietnam War’s escalation), these days the spin not only precedes the reality, it creates the reality. The chain of signifiers—9/11, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, invasion—and its complement of artificially generated visual spectacles is an obvious example. (Is it too perverse to point out that this type of logic is a form of poetic metonymy?) But before this chain can be analyzed and exposed, a new chain qua “reality” is produced, shifting critique from future-oriented progressivism and sporadic utopianism, to a past-inflected position of reactive rearguard maneuvers—a repositioning that mirrors the appropriation and deflation of its radical content.
At one point during the interview, when King opened up the phone lines, a caller commented that despite lingering public animosity, the Dixie Chicks were willing to field live phone calls, whereas a prior interview with Donald Rumsfeld had been for King’s prerecorded show, and consequently didn’t allow for potentially hostile questions from the general public. Somewhat missing the point, King said there wasn’t an opportunity for questions because the show was prerecorded, to which the caller replied: “Yes, well, I would like to observe that the Dixie Chicks have guts and integrity, and Donald Rumsfeld has shown he’s a coward as well as a liar.” (And some critics say that the mainstream media is only good for brainwashing the masses!) With King getting impatient, the caller asked the Dixie Chicks what they think of Rumsfeld. Member Emily Robison responded: “He weaves around questions better than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Cue, not footage of Rumsfeld’s equivocations, but Anderson Cooper in New Orleans previewing his upcoming show on the race to rebuild the levees at the start of the hurricane season.
So maybe the mainstream media isn’t quite up to the challenge of critique after all. But maybe poetry is. Donald Rumsfeld’s poetry, that is. Or more specifically, verbatim excerpts from Rumsfeld’s press conferences transcribed as poems by journalist and humorist Hart Seely, and published in a book entitled Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s answers to the Washington press corps’ probing as well as softball questions have become legendary for their obfuscating quality. Seely’s poetic renditions further emphasize this aspect. Here’s an example:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.
-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
When Seely first published a selection of these poems at Slate, he, too, described Rumsfeld as someone who “weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile.” All laughter and caricature aside, what’s important to realize here is that for Rumsfeld—and the Bush administration in general—indeterminacy is not incompatible with power. In other words, for Rumsfeld and company, there’s no paradox in believing continuous obfuscation depicts an accurate representation of reality.
This is a major political and epistemological shift in U.S. politics—or politics anywhere else, for that matter. Whereas before, an actual event was spun in order to justify a response (e.g., a possible encounter in the Bay of Tonkin between North Vietnamese naval boats and U.S. warships became a pretext for the Vietnam War’s escalation), these days the spin not only precedes the reality, it creates the reality. The chain of signifiers—9/11, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, invasion—and its complement of artificially generated visual spectacles is an obvious example. (Is it too perverse to point out that this type of logic is a form of poetic metonymy?) But before this chain can be analyzed and exposed, a new chain qua “reality” is produced, shifting critique from future-oriented progressivism and sporadic utopianism, to a past-inflected position of reactive rearguard maneuvers—a repositioning that mirrors the appropriation and deflation of its radical content.