An undercover reporter takes a cruise sponsored by the National review with a group of conservatives.
I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
I am getting used to these moments – when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”
I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.
From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.
Read the rest of the hair raising article here.
July 15, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I find it best to avoid The Independent unless you are having an OK day. If you catch it on a bad day you may just off yourself. It routinely reports well on the issues the other major newspapers in the UK relegate to a minor paragraph hidden deep within the paper. Still Johann Hari isn’t known for his subtlety. Not that I think he is making any of these quotes up, but ever since his initial support of the Iraq war and his review of Zizek I distrust him.
God, that article is depressing.
July 16, 2007 at 10:13 pm
I recently saw a Dutch documentary about an American Christian fundamentalist family who specialize in gay bashing. At the moment I do not have the link to the show, but it’s available online and I will send it soon.
The Dutch reporter, who lived with the family for some time in reality TV format, kept asking provocative questions, to which the family gave fundamentalist answers, but whenever the subject would be changed to something mundane like going for a picknick or discussing where the reporter could sleep, the family would suddenly switch to this extremely polite, really charming middle class all-Americana mode, all white picket fence and roses, and if you didn’t see the parts where the Christian issues are being discussed, you’d think they’re really nice people. But what’s really interesting is that the whole thing was a queer performance – the mother a character out of a John Waters movie, the daughter a cross between Kelly Bundy (from ”Married with Children”) and Saffron (of ”Absolutely Fabulous”),the father something like a David Lynch psychopath.
You could tell from the way these people performed for television that they’re media savvy – they kept smirking in a knowing fashion as if to imply that it’s all a performance, as if the horrible things they think and do would be rendered mundane and even cheerful. This is essentially the strategy of any queer parody: simultaneously endorsing & ridiculing domestic stereotypes. Only problem is that it was no soap opera, but a documentary.
This raised a number of questions for me:
(1) only a decade ago, queer parody used to be a leftist / subversive style; now it seems as though the characters out of those movies came to life! Because, these people seemed like 2D parodies of real people. Why and how did this happen?
(2) that the rise of Christian fundamentalism may be related to the failure of queer politics to provide an answer to identity politics; and I am really wondering what Lacan and Deleuze would say about that
(3) I thought a lot about roleplaying, which always seemed a distinctly American pastime to me. It was fascinating to perceive how these people observe their domestic life and their fundamentalist activities equally as a kind of a roleplaying game. Now I wonder if this is an example of how bipolar psychosis might be the only way to survive in communicative capitalism!
I am raising these issues in the desperate hope that of earning the Parody Center the 19 000 clicks we need to compete with Larval Subjects!
July 16, 2007 at 10:28 pm
this is the link to the show: The Most Hated Family in America