Risibility and Righteousness
Risibility and Righteousness
The story of how “Friendly Fire” Cheney and Cartoon Bomber “Tokyo Rose” shared a Danish down Texas way
Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it
Part I. Who is the joke on?
“Humans are the risible species,” Aristotle remarked. This is one of its distinguishing characteristics. We are the animals who are capable of laughing. An entire branch of the grammatical “we” tree is devoted to communicating about it.
Sigmund Freud was able to take up Aristotle’s observation from the standpoint of late 19th century neurological science and to note two things: in addition to the involuntary muscle reactions (as in hiccups, gag reflex, sobbing) there is a psychological component. The content is invariably childhood sexual association, when fantasy and impulsiveness ruled. The human species is rigged to undergo spasmodic jags from hmphs to chuckles to belly laughs due to the way it is called upon to reproduce itself as a species. Remove the urge to merge, remove the comedy routine surge. Spock knows that, for heaven’s sake.
Freud connected the peculiar ha-ha hee-haw reaction to repression: the repetitive convulsion is the simultaneous impulse to release, then not release, the unconscious thought into consciousness. Like shoving against an inner gate with strong exhalation. What is “comedic”, the joke, has this effect: by conjoining opposites, to simultaneously show – by way of picturing, or by acting-out -- what must not be said – concealed, censored, because it contradicts the ongoing reality assumptions of the conscious standpoint. This ongoing reality is the level of common conscious life mediated by learned language for sharing group content. It is marked “Public TokenSpace” in the psychosemiotic manual. It is the entity predicated on as “we”, by the power-possessing beings (government, authorities, law enforcement, health agencies, etc.). This entity exists only as the common “half” of each individual consciousness, its own “we” deriving from the historical memory each retains from womb-life as source of associations. This is “Private TokenSpace”; or, simply “TokenSpace” (since it includes Public TokenSpace as a separate domain under “we” use). The two segments of the single unity of consciousness under all sign uses weave, or twine, within the anatomical processes, first, through the unfolding of its gene-pool, through the phenotypes, determining the typology of reproduction; then, second, through the imprinting and patterning of neural-enviornmental responses beginning in utero, as we now know. The upper and lower triads of sign-use processing in the psychic apparatus correspond to these two sources of sign-uses – words, for communicating necessity through the upper triad, independent of experience; vrs. pictures, for communicating through the lower triad, carrying individual experience through deep waters, etc. That which communicates only through signs used as text, as in names and predicates to make sentences; numbers; logical syntax; determine the logical form of Public TokenSpace (PbTkSp). The only shapes, or pictures occurring in pure intellectual PbTkSp are geometric models and schema, for no pictures dependent on perceptual apparatus have objective necessity, only necessity relative to conditions of the apparatus (three dimensional, for instance).
Private TokenSpace (PvTkSp), by contrast, spans content from both triads, applies common abstract general ideas to objects of sense perception, when an existentially self-aware, religiously committed (let us say) person brings this completion of ego by consciousness as a unity for themselves. This is mentioned here, yet again, as background setting of the seven (7) token types of sign-uses spanning the universe of discourse of PvTkSp, because its sharp logical compartments are the only guide through the confusions sown by false twining “I”’s and “We”’s that don’t belong together into the same PbTkSp. In common terms, this amounts to being brought under someone else’s “God”, the way that natural human life is/can be brought under someone else’s “scientific” psychology as a control.
It is my contention here that the event everyone is dealing with now in the news, Dick Cheney’s shooting his hunting comrade in the face, carries an unconscious thought, in Freud’s terms, that can only be met with risibility – by arousing our species response of laughter at the comedic. I submit that to be a certifiable fact about the media coverage. “White House Shoots Foot”, was The NY Times editorial cheap shot. “May you go hunting with Dick” jokes abounded. An episode you would rather have missed, but since you didn’t, must grin, make fun of, and bear up under.
The psychodynamics are unmistakable. Cheney is the classic Dark Force of the group-unconscious (that which is censored from PbTkSp), psychologically identified with Bush’s “Father” figure (“the Emperor always stands behind Darth Vader”, George Lucas said). He represents everything about the Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned America against in his final presidential speech. Through his office, the “WHIG” committee coordinated Pentagon, media, political, secret agency operatives to bring off the war on Iraq. Having hyped the data to fit the policy, he has routinely condemned those opposed to the war as unpatriotic, soft-on terror, in bed with the terrorist enemy, etc. He has defended US torture policies, virtual al Quada terrorist supporters.
****
Risibility and Righteousness (continued)
Specific indications – symptoms – that Cheney was under the gun of the unconscious, so to speak, already abounded before 2.12.06.
Making most noise just the week before was ‘Scooter’ Libby’s reported grand jury testimony that he had received authorization (if not instruction) from his “superiors” to leak Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame’s CIA identity to the press in the ongoing hi-level scandal. This places him in the forefront of not just plotting a lying war but of attempting to silence or discredit whistleblowers through their family connections. Tracing the pre-conscious loop, this is almost as if the “leak” in the Plame case, leading back to his guilt, had been covered over – “doubled” – by the “leak” to the Caller-Times Corpus Christi press. It was first announced with “We would not have known about the shooting if one of the party had not called to leak the news”: something good to do. So the terms communicating the VP’s “bad”, “revengeful death-father” image, are overlaid with something it is OK, even right to do: get the word out to the press. Indeed, the pro-Cheney spinners talked about his “acting to get the administration’s case out to the public”, nothing wrong with that. This goes with the Rove strategy of making the best of the worst, jabbing at the tiger’s eye. The way the shooting incident got reported re-iterated that. This “doubling” of the same token font creates a two-sided text-switch mechanism in communication. The pro-Cheney conscious standpoint is given an excusing, vs accusing verbal path away from the crime scene.
Only a few weeks earlier, a picture of Cheney’s face had appeared on CNN marked over by a very prominent “X”. The was so striking it was posted by Drudge, and I downloaded it at Christmas to show non-newswatchers. A switch failed to go off or something, executives explained later; hi-tech glitch, not symbolic retaliation for his recent defense of torture prisons.
In another media incident, one CNN commentator’s remark “that’s bullshit” could be heard nationwide over the mic assumed to be shut off. (My friend has a copy),
These mark Dick Cheney as the ultra polarized and polarizing good-bad loving-rapist/killer Father. Those committed to following the path that he, Karl Rove, G.W. Bush and other major figures designed and followed, would see a virile hunter with comrades on a South Texas ranch. What dude wouldn’t want to go along for that?
The Speilberg camera shot would be the eager expectation on Harry Whittington’s face as he approached from the wrong side and witnessed the shotgun barrel suddenly swinging toward him just before hearing the blast. That shot would place top rung on the gallery of the grotesque.
“Too close to consciousness” the dark, dark side presses. This is the psychodynamics of repression, in Freud’s terms; of the repulsion of psychological opposites, in Jung’s. The unconscious thought “he wants to kill us” must be reversed; “it was an accident, a mistake; he loves us.” This is the mechanism Freud called “reaction formation”, typically the reversal of “No! No! I don’t hate him!” felt by the son fearing reprisal from Father, inwardly ‘sinned’ against by wishing dead, “I love him” (subtext: “please don’t hurt me, Daddy! See how sweet I am?”) What “Dick Cheney” represents to all is this figure; how the public divides depends on how its individual members relate to the reaction formation/reversal formation, which depends further on their relations to their own fathers, or authority surrogates.
In Jungian terms, this makes him symbolic. The Swiss psychologist’s focus on the symbol as two-sided, conscious/unconscious communicator, comes to the fore here, subsuming the Freudian Oedipal content as a particular instance specifically linked to sexuality. What is symbolic has these two sides, corresponding to text (symbol as cognitive) and token (symbol as picture) of the sign-use. Either dark or amiable Cheney can be brought forward in conversation as context requires. Even predicating on his name, now, brings both together, and puts those communicating with or about him in the position of Harry Wittington. What “Shooter” has done, combing text with token, is shoot America in the face. “We are under his gun” that is the unconscious thought brought too close to consciousness, repulsive and repugnant to Americans in general as sit is. To Republicans, in particular, it is like a BB pellet embedded in and rubbing up against their heart muscle.
BB pellets. Birdshot. Buckshot. “Buckshot in the backsides”, hi-school joke- token of narrow escape from cuckolded husband’s wife’s window. “Shotgun wedding.”
The Red Ryder rifle advertisement in 40’s comic books available at Lockney’s Rexall Drug store; Saddam Hussein’s finely tooled piece flashed repeatedly on CNN. The King Ranch, Duval County politics (the courthouse burned down after LBJ’s ’48 election to the Senate after a 1000 vote margin for him was turned in late from this county); this is a place Texas Rangers once patrolled on the lookout for rustlers, owlhoots, horsethieves; selling body-building equipment for martial arts men these days. The hospital at Corpus Christi, where relatives live, was nearby to aid the wounded. This picture is the stuff of Old Texas fantasy lore following WWII, looming larger symbolically in the trip I made from high school from West Texas to Baylor University in Waco in central Texas. My father was associated with the cotton harvest in The Valley in the 50’s.
These are core childhood associations from those times, that era, brought together by the blast from Cheney’s gun.
In order to appreciate the communication situation fully one further male psychodynamic element needs figuring in. It has already been noted that Whittingon = America, in particular, Republicans and others panting to join in the Sportsman’s retinue, aer obliged to identify with the victim. If they back Darth Cheney, they must back him even when he makes a “mistake” and fires on them. Just doing what he had to – shouldn’t have got in the way. And the man, Cheney himself, must struggle for an objectivity that permits him to face it as an accident, something for which he, ultimately, is not responsible for bringing about, allowing for negligence.
Yet, lodged in his brain, somewhere, is a fraction of fraction of a second when he is looking through gun barrel sights tinged with the face of his friend. “Friendly fire” its called when one gets shot by someone on one’s own side. This, even if fictitious, will be amplified in the imagination of comedians, deviants, crypto-rebels. “If this is what he would do in the line of manhood, out on the ranch, to one of his own party, think what he would do to YOU!” – and he had a right to do what he is. How does he know, how does anyone know, Wittington is not a secret betrayer? – perhaps even without knowing it. Genghis Khan killed a brother who stole from him. A fearless leader must be prepared to kill even their own son! (Darth Vadar was Luke Skywalker’s father!) And we all know Abraham was.
This is the double-double reverse psychodynamic twist. It is good to go over it again and again because the spin put on this one will be perpetual – and psychotic. To tolerate it is to accept being shot in the face by Dick Cheney. Hey, its OK. South Texas prairie land, waving brush, Chuck Norris nearby, … (fade into Goodman’s rave in The Big Jabowski….on the death of his friend ) If it’s all kept light, wrapped in split-off metaphors and predications, maybe no one will notice. Or common speech habits can be gerrymandered so that both sides of the “Life/Death Father” symbol are not displayed with such blatant simultaneity as came to happen with pictures of Hitler.
When the laughter erupts over this one, as it will, for a long, long time, peal after peal, who will the joke be on this time?
Part II. Righteousness over risibility
Taking the Muslim side in the issue between free speech and cartoons of the Prophet.
The story of how “Friendly Fire” Cheney and Cartoon Bomber “Tokyo Rose” shared a Danish down Texas way
Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it
Part I. Who is the joke on?
“Humans are the risible species,” Aristotle remarked. This is one of its distinguishing characteristics. We are the animals who are capable of laughing. An entire branch of the grammatical “we” tree is devoted to communicating about it.
Sigmund Freud was able to take up Aristotle’s observation from the standpoint of late 19th century neurological science and to note two things: in addition to the involuntary muscle reactions (as in hiccups, gag reflex, sobbing) there is a psychological component. The content is invariably childhood sexual association, when fantasy and impulsiveness ruled. The human species is rigged to undergo spasmodic jags from hmphs to chuckles to belly laughs due to the way it is called upon to reproduce itself as a species. Remove the urge to merge, remove the comedy routine surge. Spock knows that, for heaven’s sake.
Freud connected the peculiar ha-ha hee-haw reaction to repression: the repetitive convulsion is the simultaneous impulse to release, then not release, the unconscious thought into consciousness. Like shoving against an inner gate with strong exhalation. What is “comedic”, the joke, has this effect: by conjoining opposites, to simultaneously show – by way of picturing, or by acting-out -- what must not be said – concealed, censored, because it contradicts the ongoing reality assumptions of the conscious standpoint. This ongoing reality is the level of common conscious life mediated by learned language for sharing group content. It is marked “Public TokenSpace” in the psychosemiotic manual. It is the entity predicated on as “we”, by the power-possessing beings (government, authorities, law enforcement, health agencies, etc.). This entity exists only as the common “half” of each individual consciousness, its own “we” deriving from the historical memory each retains from womb-life as source of associations. This is “Private TokenSpace”; or, simply “TokenSpace” (since it includes Public TokenSpace as a separate domain under “we” use). The two segments of the single unity of consciousness under all sign uses weave, or twine, within the anatomical processes, first, through the unfolding of its gene-pool, through the phenotypes, determining the typology of reproduction; then, second, through the imprinting and patterning of neural-enviornmental responses beginning in utero, as we now know. The upper and lower triads of sign-use processing in the psychic apparatus correspond to these two sources of sign-uses – words, for communicating necessity through the upper triad, independent of experience; vrs. pictures, for communicating through the lower triad, carrying individual experience through deep waters, etc. That which communicates only through signs used as text, as in names and predicates to make sentences; numbers; logical syntax; determine the logical form of Public TokenSpace (PbTkSp). The only shapes, or pictures occurring in pure intellectual PbTkSp are geometric models and schema, for no pictures dependent on perceptual apparatus have objective necessity, only necessity relative to conditions of the apparatus (three dimensional, for instance).
Private TokenSpace (PvTkSp), by contrast, spans content from both triads, applies common abstract general ideas to objects of sense perception, when an existentially self-aware, religiously committed (let us say) person brings this completion of ego by consciousness as a unity for themselves. This is mentioned here, yet again, as background setting of the seven (7) token types of sign-uses spanning the universe of discourse of PvTkSp, because its sharp logical compartments are the only guide through the confusions sown by false twining “I”’s and “We”’s that don’t belong together into the same PbTkSp. In common terms, this amounts to being brought under someone else’s “God”, the way that natural human life is/can be brought under someone else’s “scientific” psychology as a control.
It is my contention here that the event everyone is dealing with now in the news, Dick Cheney’s shooting his hunting comrade in the face, carries an unconscious thought, in Freud’s terms, that can only be met with risibility – by arousing our species response of laughter at the comedic. I submit that to be a certifiable fact about the media coverage. “White House Shoots Foot”, was The NY Times editorial cheap shot. “May you go hunting with Dick” jokes abounded. An episode you would rather have missed, but since you didn’t, must grin, make fun of, and bear up under.
The psychodynamics are unmistakable. Cheney is the classic Dark Force of the group-unconscious (that which is censored from PbTkSp), psychologically identified with Bush’s “Father” figure (“the Emperor always stands behind Darth Vader”, George Lucas said). He represents everything about the Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned America against in his final presidential speech. Through his office, the “WHIG” committee coordinated Pentagon, media, political, secret agency operatives to bring off the war on Iraq. Having hyped the data to fit the policy, he has routinely condemned those opposed to the war as unpatriotic, soft-on terror, in bed with the terrorist enemy, etc. He has defended US torture policies, virtual al Quada terrorist supporters.
****
Risibility and Righteousness (continued)
Specific indications – symptoms – that Cheney was under the gun of the unconscious, so to speak, already abounded before 2.12.06.
Making most noise just the week before was ‘Scooter’ Libby’s reported grand jury testimony that he had received authorization (if not instruction) from his “superiors” to leak Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame’s CIA identity to the press in the ongoing hi-level scandal. This places him in the forefront of not just plotting a lying war but of attempting to silence or discredit whistleblowers through their family connections. Tracing the pre-conscious loop, this is almost as if the “leak” in the Plame case, leading back to his guilt, had been covered over – “doubled” – by the “leak” to the Caller-Times Corpus Christi press. It was first announced with “We would not have known about the shooting if one of the party had not called to leak the news”: something good to do. So the terms communicating the VP’s “bad”, “revengeful death-father” image, are overlaid with something it is OK, even right to do: get the word out to the press. Indeed, the pro-Cheney spinners talked about his “acting to get the administration’s case out to the public”, nothing wrong with that. This goes with the Rove strategy of making the best of the worst, jabbing at the tiger’s eye. The way the shooting incident got reported re-iterated that. This “doubling” of the same token font creates a two-sided text-switch mechanism in communication. The pro-Cheney conscious standpoint is given an excusing, vs accusing verbal path away from the crime scene.
Only a few weeks earlier, a picture of Cheney’s face had appeared on CNN marked over by a very prominent “X”. The was so striking it was posted by Drudge, and I downloaded it at Christmas to show non-newswatchers. A switch failed to go off or something, executives explained later; hi-tech glitch, not symbolic retaliation for his recent defense of torture prisons.
In another media incident, one CNN commentator’s remark “that’s bullshit” could be heard nationwide over the mic assumed to be shut off. (My friend has a copy),
These mark Dick Cheney as the ultra polarized and polarizing good-bad loving-rapist/killer Father. Those committed to following the path that he, Karl Rove, G.W. Bush and other major figures designed and followed, would see a virile hunter with comrades on a South Texas ranch. What dude wouldn’t want to go along for that?
The Speilberg camera shot would be the eager expectation on Harry Whittington’s face as he approached from the wrong side and witnessed the shotgun barrel suddenly swinging toward him just before hearing the blast. That shot would place top rung on the gallery of the grotesque.
“Too close to consciousness” the dark, dark side presses. This is the psychodynamics of repression, in Freud’s terms; of the repulsion of psychological opposites, in Jung’s. The unconscious thought “he wants to kill us” must be reversed; “it was an accident, a mistake; he loves us.” This is the mechanism Freud called “reaction formation”, typically the reversal of “No! No! I don’t hate him!” felt by the son fearing reprisal from Father, inwardly ‘sinned’ against by wishing dead, “I love him” (subtext: “please don’t hurt me, Daddy! See how sweet I am?”) What “Dick Cheney” represents to all is this figure; how the public divides depends on how its individual members relate to the reaction formation/reversal formation, which depends further on their relations to their own fathers, or authority surrogates.
In Jungian terms, this makes him symbolic. The Swiss psychologist’s focus on the symbol as two-sided, conscious/unconscious communicator, comes to the fore here, subsuming the Freudian Oedipal content as a particular instance specifically linked to sexuality. What is symbolic has these two sides, corresponding to text (symbol as cognitive) and token (symbol as picture) of the sign-use. Either dark or amiable Cheney can be brought forward in conversation as context requires. Even predicating on his name, now, brings both together, and puts those communicating with or about him in the position of Harry Wittington. What “Shooter” has done, combing text with token, is shoot America in the face. “We are under his gun” that is the unconscious thought brought too close to consciousness, repulsive and repugnant to Americans in general as sit is. To Republicans, in particular, it is like a BB pellet embedded in and rubbing up against their heart muscle.
BB pellets. Birdshot. Buckshot. “Buckshot in the backsides”, hi-school joke- token of narrow escape from cuckolded husband’s wife’s window. “Shotgun wedding.”
The Red Ryder rifle advertisement in 40’s comic books available at Lockney’s Rexall Drug store; Saddam Hussein’s finely tooled piece flashed repeatedly on CNN. The King Ranch, Duval County politics (the courthouse burned down after LBJ’s ’48 election to the Senate after a 1000 vote margin for him was turned in late from this county); this is a place Texas Rangers once patrolled on the lookout for rustlers, owlhoots, horsethieves; selling body-building equipment for martial arts men these days. The hospital at Corpus Christi, where relatives live, was nearby to aid the wounded. This picture is the stuff of Old Texas fantasy lore following WWII, looming larger symbolically in the trip I made from high school from West Texas to Baylor University in Waco in central Texas. My father was associated with the cotton harvest in The Valley in the 50’s.
These are core childhood associations from those times, that era, brought together by the blast from Cheney’s gun.
In order to appreciate the communication situation fully one further male psychodynamic element needs figuring in. It has already been noted that Whittingon = America, in particular, Republicans and others panting to join in the Sportsman’s retinue, aer obliged to identify with the victim. If they back Darth Cheney, they must back him even when he makes a “mistake” and fires on them. Just doing what he had to – shouldn’t have got in the way. And the man, Cheney himself, must struggle for an objectivity that permits him to face it as an accident, something for which he, ultimately, is not responsible for bringing about, allowing for negligence.
Yet, lodged in his brain, somewhere, is a fraction of fraction of a second when he is looking through gun barrel sights tinged with the face of his friend. “Friendly fire” its called when one gets shot by someone on one’s own side. This, even if fictitious, will be amplified in the imagination of comedians, deviants, crypto-rebels. “If this is what he would do in the line of manhood, out on the ranch, to one of his own party, think what he would do to YOU!” – and he had a right to do what he is. How does he know, how does anyone know, Wittington is not a secret betrayer? – perhaps even without knowing it. Genghis Khan killed a brother who stole from him. A fearless leader must be prepared to kill even their own son! (Darth Vadar was Luke Skywalker’s father!) And we all know Abraham was.
This is the double-double reverse psychodynamic twist. It is good to go over it again and again because the spin put on this one will be perpetual – and psychotic. To tolerate it is to accept being shot in the face by Dick Cheney. Hey, its OK. South Texas prairie land, waving brush, Chuck Norris nearby, … (fade into Goodman’s rave in The Big Jabowski….on the death of his friend ) If it’s all kept light, wrapped in split-off metaphors and predications, maybe no one will notice. Or common speech habits can be gerrymandered so that both sides of the “Life/Death Father” symbol are not displayed with such blatant simultaneity as came to happen with pictures of Hitler.
When the laughter erupts over this one, as it will, for a long, long time, peal after peal, who will the joke be on this time?
Part II. Righteousness over risibility
Taking the Muslim side in the issue between free speech and cartoons of the Prophet.
posted by Sid Thomas | 12:04 PM
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