Suspension of Disbelief
There we were, watching the situation room, where the inner circle of the United States’ executive branch and military command was watching the virtual assassination of someone deemed eligible for assassination because he is technically not a leader of a “state” and because “we” said so. We were watching this days after we watched the President release his birth certificate–the object of the most popular of the many conspiracy theories vying to rise to the top of the Conspiracy Theory Charts–and then, at a banquet meant to celebrate political journalists but filled with entertainment celebrities he humiliated a virtual presidential candidate who was actually a real estate developer whose main source of income was probably from being the host of a “reality” show called The Apprentice.
These were startling coincidences that required what Hollywood used to (and still does) call “suspension of disbelief.” Its roots go back to Romantic poets trying to create a space for enlightened readers to accept or even believe supernatural narratives. What happened at the centers of the corridors of power in the Western world (the Situation Room, not «the situation») shows how far we have traveled from the Age of Enlightenment.
By pulling the trigger on this search and destroy spectacle Obama has invited a flood of new conspiracy theories about whether or not the act actually happened, whether or not there was a firefight, which one of his wives or daughters had witnessed the act, whether the original motive was death and not capture, whether the burial at sea was an honest attempt to honor Islamic beliefs or an excuse for not producing the body, habeus corpus, hay cuerpo? es lo que preguntan.
Have we entered the age of the conspiracy theory as the dominant driver of political discourse? It’s possible to conceive that they aren’t conspiracy theories at all, but just truths suppressed by the “ruling class” to mask the contradictions of exercising political power. They offer a narrative convergence between the extremes of right and the left, and while it can be reassuring to dismiss them, it’s possible to feel like you’re looking the other way, ignoring uncomfortable truths if you don’t consider them.
Richard Hofstader saw this all coming in 1964 with his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. In it, he ties together McCarthysim, anti-Masonism, anti-Catholicism, and Populism as willful participants in creating all-powerful menaces and threats to the Real America. It was the manifestation of a virulent streak of Puritan paranoia. Following the New Deal, the modern era of paranoid conspiracy theorists began isolating the income tax structure, the idea that President Eisenhower was connected to the Communist Party, and the UN as targets of their conspiracy theories. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to connect the dots with the Tea Party and birtherism. Even a young Cuban-American, has joined the fray by echoing alarms about a conspiracy by the richest people in the world to enforce population control (no wonder Cathie Black made that ill-conceived comment).
This hegemony of conspiracy theory discourse is the climactic phase of a crisis in authenticity. It is symptomatic of an inability to get meaning from a shared narrative, which is the source of the construction of our identity. So it’s an identity crisis, too, like when media commentators agree that more “Americans” trust comedy shows like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” to be more truthful about the news than the mainstream media. And when both Stewart and anti-reality reality show queen Sarah Palin both call for the release of the Bin Laden death photos. Have you re-tweeted this yet?
As actors in the marginalized world, we often look to the center, which is no longer the center of commodity production, but the center of media production, to set the stage. The location and authenticity of the Bin Laden cuerpo is just as much the subject of debate as what Ana Cacho told El Nuevo Día and El Vocero today, the bochinche speculation about what family member of what powerful family was in the room with Lorenzo and how La Comay can actually drive a virtual protest rally like a reality show truck through la Ponce de León just days after real students were arrested at the real University for real political and economic reasons.
The truth is as Puerto/Diaspo-Ricans we had figured this out thirty years ago when we were dancing to “Plástico,” the most important song on Willie Colón/Rubén Blades’s Siembra (not “Pedro Navaja”). Paraphrasing: Los que vendieron su razón de ser vivían en un mundo de pura ilusión. Se ven las caras, pero nunca el corazón. In a sense it wasn’t really that big a revelation because everyone from Rafael Hernández to Arsenio Rodríguez and Maelo had been telling us the same thing for years, it’s just that the message needed to be reinforced in the center of media production at the dawn of the postmodern age.
I was thinking about this while chatting with Frances Negrón Muntaner in a café across the street from Columbia University, where she is the director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. While her most recent book–None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era–a collection of essays by scholarly contributors that she edited–does point out that our consumer identities help to mitigate the angst of our colonial identity, the central message is clear. “Boricua everyday practice is constituted less by an overwhelming acceptance of colonial impositions than by an impressive capacity to circumvent or re-signify the state laws.”
The clearly farcical aspects of Puerto Rico’s colonial free association and its citizens’ pseudo-citizenship has made “suspension of disbelief” irrelevant for us, and freed us to move on to other things. The crisis of authenticity does not afflict us–it’s just another tiresome display of gringería. The New World Order is nothing new, and as Frances and I discussed everything from Arturo Schomburg’s Masonic leanings to the reasons for the mixed reaction to the Radical Statehood Manifesto, Osama bin Laden didn’t come up once.
Calma pueblo, whatever. We know that Via Verde is neither “green” nor “natural” and our Iphones cannot be traced because there aren’t enough cell phone towers in El Yunque to trace us (this is because of the extra-terrestrials that have a base there). No matter how many times you see Tomás Rivera Schatz en la televisión, por aquí todavía se ven las caras y el corazón.