Over at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg has two fascinating posts. Although Paul has them as two separate posts, IMHO he is exploring different parts of the same dynamic in those posts.

The first post – The Birther Mythos – he discusses the profoundly jarring and bizarre video in which a woman confronts Rep Mike Castle of Delaware about Barack Obama’s supposed non American identity. I’m reposting Rosenberg’s transcript of the exchange (the video is readily available):

REP. MIKE CASTLE ®, DELAWARE: This lady in red has had her hand up for sometime.

LADY IN RED: Thank you. Congressman Cartle. I want to know-I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen with a seal on it, signed by doctors, with the hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, and the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20th, and I want to know, why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am American. My father worked – fought in World War II with the greatest generation in the Pacific Theater for this country, and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

CONGRESSMAN CASTLE: I have only one comment… (GARBLED) . If you’re referring to the president there, he is a citizen of the United States. … (GARBLED, but is clearly trying to call on someone else)

LADY IN RED: For all the men and women who died for this country in 1776 until the present time. I think we should all stand up and give pledge of allegiance to that wonderful flag, those people that sacrificed their lives for our freedom. Everybody stand up and say…

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Pledge allegiance!

CROWD: (Begins to say pledge of allegiance out of phase with one another and with considerable cross-talk at first, mostly inaudible, but one man’s voice is clearly audible–”You probably don’t even know it”–though it’s entirely unclear who he’s addressing. Some people are already all the way to “America” when a loud male voice–it sounds like Castle’s–starts at the beginning, and everyone falls in with him.) I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands – one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

CASTLE (Then says something faintly audible about the need to get back to discussing health care, and the need to call on some folks who haven’t been heard from.) (END VIDEO CLIP)

The whole exchange takes some two minutes or so and is a jarringly surreal performance. Rosenberg argues that the woman in red, waving a ziploc baggy containing (so she asserts) her birth certificate, a small US flag, and a lot of anger and pain is enacting mythos – a series of symbolic assertions and claims about her identity:

The woman stands up with what she purports to be her birth certificate. What rational difference does it make whether or not she has her birth certificate? Clearly, none at all. But as a piece of mythos performance it is very important, “evoking… a sense of sacred significance.” She is not merely proclaiming her citizenship verbally, she is demonstrating it by holding up her birth certificate and talking about it. This is ritually establishing her claim to be an American-and by implication denying that President Obama is an American. As a matter of pure fact, she almost certainly goes on to lie, saying that the certificate says she’s an American citizen. Since any child born in America is an American citizen, explicitly stating that is entirely superfluous, and though I’m not an expert on birth certificates, I have seen several, and none of them make any mention of citizenship. However, it is ritually important that this lady present the implicit fact as an explicit one, and so she makes the claim, regardless of whether it’s true or not. [snip]

The Birther’s own birth certificate is not evidence in the sense of logos, it is a talisman, a symbol of her authentic identity as an American, and once she has established that identity, all it takes is her word as an American to cast The Other out. (And, of course, there is no doubt that Obama is The Other after all, he’s black a Kenyan citizen! And probably a Muslim terrorist, to boot!) This is why she doesn’t offer any evidence that Obama is a Kenyan citizen, but instead simply asserts that she’s an American. Well, that proves it! Not according to logos, of course, but according to the Birther mythos it damn sure does!

Paul offers another, devastating observation:

When the Birther lady concludes with her cri de coeur, “I want my country back!” can there be any doubt that she’s speaking as a white woman? A white woman from a military family? A white conservative woman from a military family whose mythic existence seamlessly melds into Pat Buchanan’s fantasy of a nation built by white people (look ma, no slaves!) with a virtually all-white military? Of course that’s what she means-her entire performance was nothing but an act of meaning-making. An invocation of mythos, all the more necessary since every last shred of white conservative logos lies shattered in a thousand pieces after eight long years of Bush/Cheney/Rove.

(Emphasis added)

The Bush era from beginning to end revealed the massive wholes in conservative ideology. Bush cut taxes and wrecked the budget. He talked tough and waged war and broke the army and made the world more dangerous. He was a reliable shill for abstinence only education and teen pregnancy, abortion and STIs increased. Bush’s administration and its willing accomplices in Congress, followed the conservative script. His administration acted as conservatives wanted it to act and the results were disastrous. Conservative ideology lays in wreckage, demonstrably unfit for the actual tasks of governance. Go back to Open Left and watch the video – listen to the woman’s voice when she cries “I want my country back.” It’s a kind of cry from the depths of her soul – an unreasoned barbaric yawp (props to Whitman for that phrase!) of pain. This is a woman who feels she has lost her nation – that it has been taken over by alien forces. She’s not trying to engage in some of sort rational dialog, she is trying to wrench the attention of the audience and the congressman to the deeply symbolism of “real America.”

As Paul points out, she isn’t delivering a rational, reasoned argument, she’s not analyzing issues. She’s enacting a series of symbolic gestures – including demanding everyone pledge allegiance (and I wonder how she’d feel if she knew the pledge was originally composed by a socialist?) – all of which serve to establish a sacral space of American-ness. She calls the crowd to join in the pledge not as an affirmation of patriotism but as a ritualized invocation of identity, as a ritual prayer of American-ness. The whole video is bizarre from beginning to end precisely because it is not about logic or reason or even an attempt at rational exchange. The women in red is engaging in symbolic narrative – like a dream narrative. Her words do not make literal sense, her actions do not make literal sense. Instead, from the radical weirdness of holding up her birth certificate to her demand that the crowd join in the pledge, her claimed connection to ‘the greatest generation’ and her invoking of 1776 is entirely symbolic – it is the logic of the subconscious of dreams.

Fundamentalism is in love with the past – namely the notion that people were better “back then” than we are now. The “greatest generation” – that is the generation that fought in World War Two – seems to have become a symbolic representation of the true meaning of patriotism, of Americanism. True Americans were part of the greatest generation and we are their fallen sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters. The actual facts be damned, they seem to have become a totemic symbol for all that was good and right and which has supposedly been tarnished and lost. As religious fundamentalists see in the past a morally defined world and yearn for it, so so Americanist fundamentalist see in our past a morally defined world in which we are good and the bad guys are out there and we will defeat them if we can recover the characteristics of the greatest generation.

The woman waves around a little American flag – her language deliberately conflating flag and nation – in which the symbol becomes the whole. I know there’s a psychological term for that dynamic but I can’t remember it. The flag/nation confusion is an act of pure symbolism.

Think about this with me. This woman heard about a town meeting about health care. She girded herself for battle – gathering her symbols of her in-group identity – her documents in a ziploc, her flag, and she went off prepared to do battle. She confronted the congressman with her claims – which are nonsensical in the extreme, shanghaied the entire townhall and forced everyone there to participate in her ritual of Americanism. She surrounded herself with symbols – with talismans of identity – and used those symbols to invoke and lead the crowd in ritual and then, simply sat down. Rosenberg repeatedly points out that as a matter of Enlightenment rational discourse, this woman’s public performance is simply incomprehensible. She is wrenching from public discourse a symbolic ritual. One might even suggest she is attempting some sort exorcism. By leading the crowd in the pledge she is chasing out demons of insufficient patriotism, she’s enacting a ritual whose sole purpose is to force the crowd to declare they are loyal and like devout believers anointing the seats in Congress she is trying to bring a spirit into the crowd. (Google it if you don’t believe me.)

This is not patriotism, this is not Enlightenment rationalism. This is religion dressed as patriotism (or maybe vice versa).

Which brings me to Paul’s second post about the centrality of identity politics to conservatism. In this post, Rosenberg examines the way which issue by issue self-identified conservatives actually hold both moderate and liberal positions and yet vote for politicians who do not share those positions because those pols claim to be conservatives.

I think about my grandmother. She was a Roosevelt Democrat, married to a union member, and yet would in many identify as a conservative. I can imagine her concern about having a man named Barack Obama has president. He does not look like the authority figures she was raised to follow. She was horrified to the core of her being that Bill Clinton had an affair (nevermind that almost every 20th century president was unfaithful to his spouse). In her eyes, society unraveled all around us and few of us seemed to care. The core of a successful conspiracy theory is that few of us can actually perceive it and those who see it can’t understand how the rest of us can’t. For conservatives generally, the social changes in the US in the last 50 years feel like a storm destroying everything in its path and few of us seem to care. For the Birthers, Barack Obama represents a disastrous attack on our identity; he is not by color, by name, by family background, “one of us” and they see the proof that he is not legitimate and cannot see how the rest of us can’t. Faced with facts being stubbornly against them, they are left with desperate and dire symbolic performances to hopefully and somehow invoke real Americanism and turn back the tide. The war is on between the symbolic and the logical. Symbols matter and they mean something.

The woman in red brandishing her birth certificate (let’s assume it’s not just a bunch of papers she stuck in a bag) is engaging in a full on assault on reason, on logic, with the only weapons she has – a fistful of symbols and a gut deep scream of pain.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Demographics are catching up to the American right and its crypto-racism (and not so crypto – see, Supreme Court Hearings, Sotomayor) and religious fundamentalism are increasingly out of step with the nation. The mythology of American conservatism is cracking into pieces all around us as America changes. It will not go gently into that good night. For some people, it will explode into violence for most however like the woman in red it will be in a haze of pain as the world she wants to believe in recedes further from the world she lives in every day. Her pain is real even if the source of her pain is a dying myth. Logic, reason, education, study are all called for in shaping a new world; we need the smart people to be smart but we have to build bridges to those who see their world slipping away. Nobody said it would be easy but at the end of the day, a hurt to one is a hurt to all.

•