January 2009: In a reflexive public gesture, the U.S.'s first
African-American President-elect, the ectomorphic Barack Obama,
retraced Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural train route (1865) to the
capitol, two hundred years after the birth of the similarly
ectomorphic Lincoln. In another reflexive echo of a turbulent past,
as the bloated and behemoth U.S. economy wobbled, cold-turkey, in
withdrawal from its macro-economic drugs of choice, easy credit and
unbridled consumption, Obama faced a dire economic and social
configuration similar to that which confronted Franklin Roosevelt in
March of 1933. Hemorrhaging jobs, personal and institutional debt
while spewing endemic mortgages defaults, the U.S. faced its most
severe legitimacy crisis since the late 1960s.
As a marker that the past sins of slavery and segregation could be
jettisoned in favor of meritocratic ascension, there could be no
better legitimation symbol than Barack Obama. Articulate, attractive,
with an understated ironic tone, and often frank in discussing
personal failings, Obama simultaneously signified the ultimate
success of a new African-American class of elites while buttressing
faltering cross-ethnic, cross-racial and cross-generational
allegiances to the tattered tenets of the American Dream. Exemplified
by street artist Shepard Fairey's red, white and blue iconic poster
of Obama's upturned visage, the human heart's desire for "Hope"
(often embodied in ideological allegiances) became thoroughly
conflated, through Fairey's composition, with Obama's message and
image. Fairey's widely reproduced icon was a masterful and thoroughly
intentional gesture in the aesthetics of politics, praised both by
the original Associated Press photographer, and by Obama, himself.
Yet what has happened to Fairey, in the wake of this representational
triumph, may be instructive. Two weeks after the Obama inauguration,
Fairey was simultaneously threatened with a lawsuit by the Associated
Press (which claimed a violation of their Intellectual Property
rights) over how he appropriated some elements of a 2006 AP photo,
just as he was arrested on graffiti charges, in Boston, on the
opening night of his first major formal exhibit ("Supply and Demand")
at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The AP's legal threat, Fairey's
simultaneous arrest (combined with the non-starter drug-use
revelations in Obama's autobiographical Dreams From My Father and the
likely and significant reduction in the U.S.'s broad and expensive
incarceration of non-violent drug users) arguably signifies a
transition in the objects of Prohibition, as the portion of the
generation-long War on Drugs that has targeted recreational users
ratchets down. This downshift occurs just as the Baby Boomers retire,
en masse, accessing expensive entitlements, and as state governments
find that they can no longer afford to house, feed, clothe and
provide Federally-mandated medical services for aging inmates, many
who were given long prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses.
<http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=607>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/06/domestic-wars-redux-obama-digital.htm>monochrom
at 6/28/2009 04:25:00 PM
