PrettyFakes

So you might think that, with the Alito confirmation and all, I’d be worried about our gradual slide—well, with Bush it’s more of a faux-folksy amble—towards a totalitarian police state. And I am, I am. But then again, I’m from a small town in the South, and let me tell you, the denizens of Fairwood, MS could run a clinic for the nefarious agents of Big Brother. Walker Percy once argued that the reason white Southerners reacted with such revulsion to school desegregation was that the South had no concept of a distinction between public and private space, so that allowing a black person into your classroom was just like allowing one into your bedroom. I find Percy’s take pretty persuasive. At least in our town, that public/private divide was still mostly nonexistent. The (private) school and the church were simply extensions of the home and the family—it wasn’t uncommon to be taught physics by a friend’s aunt and Sunday school by one’s own mother, for one’s older sister to date the new coach, and so on and so forth.

When the family’s gaze is that widely dispersed throughout the community, surveillance is just a way of life. My mom was our church youth group leader (mostly because we had a van) and a chaperone on nearly every school field trip, so the notion of trying on new selves during brief jaunts away from home was really pretty much out of the question. Here’s a question: is it more embarrassing to pass out during a visit to University Medical Center because you see them doing brain surgery on a rat, or to have your mom be the one to catch you when you pass out? And to think I once wanted to be a doctor.

(I also passed out when Contessa and I went to get our blood test for our marriage license. As I was slipping out of consciousness and sliding out of the chair—and Contessa, in a gesture of great sympathy, was fully occupied trying to rein in her deep guffaws—the nurse kept asking “Are you a diabetic? Are you a diabetic?” until I finally responded, just before I blacked out completely, “No ma’am, I’m a Methodist.”)

Although I think most everyone felt the burden of this inescapable surveillance, my mother was an especially enthusiastic eyeballer. She regularly opened up the mail I got from summer camp girlfriends, which had a rather chilling effect these budding relationships, in addition to the fact that, once back in my normal surroundings, my letters were likely coated with a film of nerd-sweat that had been only barely concealed by liberal doses of mosquito repellent. She sometimes listened in on my phone calls, which drove me to the eventually expensive lengths of calling girls from the payphone at the Super Stop. Expensive, yes, but absolutely worth it, since it meant that mom didn’t get to listen in during the call when one short-term girlfriend broke up with me by getting her sister to imitate her voice while she fed her lines (“It’s not you, it’s…huh? It’s her. I mean me.” Cyrano it weren’t. Hell, it wasn’t even Roxanne.) And, just because sometimes life hands you metaphors that would never work in fiction, she was in charge of videotaping all our football games from her roost high on a homemade deer stand.

The irony here, as you longtime PF readers know, is that I’m not really the one who needed watching. As Michel Foucault teaches us, the one surveilled eventually internalizes the mechanism of surveillance, so that I always perceived myself as being watched even when I wasn’t. This kept me out of a lot of trouble, in that I was overcome with crippling guilt even just being around friends who were sneaking a beer, while my brother, who is dead inside, was meanwhile sacrificing kittens to dread Cthulu in exchange for a ride to the pawn shop.

Of course, looking back, it’s easy to see that my parents were simply surveilling out of love and concern; though my stomach always tied itself in knots whenever my dad drove up to watch our football practice, the fact is that it was nice that he was able to come, and that he was interested in the first place. And a lot of the time I liked having my parents involved in my life, even if it felt suffocating on occasion. That tension is something that Eudora Welty catches beautifully in so much of her work—the way that in a small community, your life is never wholly your own, that every day you delight and disappoint a dozen different people simultaneously and wholly unconsciously. There’s no such thing as a personal moment—all is public. This point was driven home clearly for me when my grandmother died recently; my mother got more than one call from a “friend” who was distraught, not that my mom had lost her mother, but that she hadn’t called to tell them directly.

This is probably why I cultivated so many private hobbies: computer games and comic books and fantasy novels, pursuits that came with their own specialized vocabularies and secret geographies. So I spent a lot of time tunnel-running the mazes of the Great Underground Empire or hanging out in the Justice League satellite. If my parents asked what I was doing, the answers were usually so incomprehensible to them that they were likely to leave me alone. (The fact that I was doing something “on the computer” meant that it must be educational, and that was often a cloak of invisibility that gave me a +2 on my throwing save v. spells of location).

Um and anyway—this started out as a brief digression in a post about Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s ambivalently received mini-series Seaguy. The title character is a bland-blonde hero in a post-heroic, end-of-history type universe, where the Manichean struggle of good versus evil has given way to an eternal present, an empty time where acts of heroism have been replaced by acts of diversion, and where a global corporate entertainment-surveillance network called “Mickey Eye” maintains a tedious and profitable peace. It’s a world where the mythical, the strange, and the idiosyncratic are quickly being commodified, as exemplified when Seaguy makes the startling discovery that the moon is actually a tomb constructed by an immortal Pharaoh—and that this new wonder of the world has been purchased by Mickey Eye and is being converted into a theme park and upscale housing development. The tagline of Warren Ellis’s Planetary is “It’s a strange world; let’s keep it that way”; in Seaguy, Mickey Eye is determined to un-strange the world, to blast lofty peaks and fill in bottomless trenches, to perform a great leveling and promote a new depthlessness that will facilitate the easy management of capital and people. Timely, yo.

The plot of the story turns on Seaguy’s attempt to perform a truly heroic act to impress sword-wielding superheroine She-Beard, who is exactly as hirsute as advertised. He thinks he sees his chance when he discovers that the ubiquitous new foodstuff Xoo is alive, and he and sidekick Chubby da Chuna set out to rescue it from its cruel fate. The agents of Mickey Eye of course do not take kindly to his attempt to disrupt the status quo, and by the end of the story, Chubby is dead and Seaguy is back exactly where he started again, playing chess against Death with a new lifelong sidekick. Seaguy seems different though—seems to be aware of what he’s gone through in his adventures with Chubby and Xoo and the Wasps of Atlantis and so on. Morrison seems to be suggesting that attempts to suppress difference and maintain the status quo are doomed to fail because something always slips through the cracks, a kernel of idiosyncrasy that resists being assimilated, a bit of chaos kicking against the pricks of order.

But—is there an actionable politics in Seaguy? Is there any sense of a strategy for resistance to a surveillance state? Xoo is able to escape (by transforming into something more monstrous) because the head of security for the Eye is too preoccupied with She-Beard to properly manage things, and so Seaguy has an opportunity to experience a life that no longer seemed possible. Is Morrison saying that the very human concept of erotic desire gums up the otherwise smoothly working machinery of capitalism and control? That seems a bit naïve, given how easily the erotic gets flattened into the pornographic, though the security chief’s name is Lotharius, suggesting a lusty nature. He’s as amply bearded as She-Beard, so is it narcissism? Is it possible that she’s his daughter, and he’s actually sowing a bit of discord in his otherwise placid world so that he can find someone who lives up to her heroic ideal and thus offer her a bit of happiness? Given Morrison’s comments about how Seaguy embodies a turn towards a kind of progressive sentimentalism in his work, perhaps that’s the answer. (Seaguy was planned as a trilogy of mini-series, but DC is apparently not going to publish the others, so we may never find out).

The last option is the one that bother me least, though since it’s the one for which we have the least evidence, maybe it’s silly to stake my hopes to it. But with options one or two, I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha’s discussion of colonial discourse in The Location of Culture. Bhabha argues that the goal of colonial discourse is to reproduce itself, to make colonized people in the images of their colonizers; however, it never works, because there is always a slippage, something that resists assimilation—there is always the need on the part of the conoizer to introduce difference, to create a “mimic man,” lest he produce too good a copy, one that would be exchangeable/interchangeable with himself. Anyway—the point is, Bhabha doesn’t offer any grounds for resistance besides hoping the colonial discourse will always produce a slippage, an excess, and deconstruct itself; what agency then for the colonial subject who wants to resist? Patient waiting? That’s what we seem to have at the end of Seaguy, as he goes back to playing chess with death (where we find him when the series opens as well) and gives us a wink.

It’s not a very encouraging answer, and though cultivating an obsession with Incofom text-adventure games is a good way to survive junior high, it doesn’t really help you if the NSA comes knocking on your door. Being surveilled in small-town Mississippi was tolerable because it was always understood to be finite; I don’t have the feeling that being surveilled in Bush’s America comes with the same affection and tenderness that motivates my parents or (perhaps) Lotharius. Scary times.

Have you ordered your Jujitsu for Christ yet? You need to. Alibris or ABE are more than willing to help you.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Comixx, In Mississippi, In the Nation, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.