Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu
No longer representations of an objective reality, the simulations produced by the media do not refer to anything other than the intertextual relations underpinning them. A media text, according to this view, “has no relation to reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”41
For Hoberman, the pseudo-event and the discursive continuum extending it were part and parcel of the nation’s “dream life,” in which “images themselves were shadows cast by shadows and mirrors of mirrors.” The purpose of this image-driven totality, as Hoberman puts it, was to sell an ideal image of American identity back to America.42 This “dream life” acquired a particular urgency within the atmosphere of heightened anxiety attending Kennedy’s management of the Cold War. If at the beginning of his presidency, Marcos inspired “flashbacks” to Kennedy, it could very well have been because Americans desired a Third World simulacrum of Kennedy, or at the very least, a congenial image of heroic leadership that the United States could disseminate as a symbolic weapon against communist incursion in the Third World.
Cold War Western: The United States and Third World Nationalism
For a United States struggling to preserve its post–World War II position as the world’s greatest economic and military power, so much was perceived to be at stake in Marcos’s bailiwick—the so-called Third World. This blanket term for the numerous “new states” engendered by the collapse of European empires at the end of World War II underscored the precarious balance of power opened up by decolonization.43 U.S. strategists feared that the political and economic instability engendered by decolonization could not but lead to the spread of revolutionary movements linking Marxism with the force of nationalist aspirations. At issue was the apparent clash between Third World nationalism and what was then coming to the fore as a defensive U.S. nationalism.
On the occasion of his first televised State of the Union address, on January 30, 1961, the newly elected Kennedy conjured the specters of the Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem’s faltering hold over South Vietnam and the escalating war in the Congo. “Today, the crises multiply,” he warned. “Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger.”44 The alarmist tones of Kennedy’s speech exemplified the crisis mongering that would come to define his administration’s foreign policy. Simply put, the public had to be conditioned to support America’s war on communism—for what was at stake, as political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow put it, was nothing less than the survival of the nation and its defining values.45
The Truman administration’s famous military document, NSC-68, presciently expressed Kennedy’s posture of a defensive nationalism when it warned that the United States might be “crippled by internal weakness at the moment of its greatest strength.”46 In the intervening years the worry that the American public would not support the nation’s postwar economic and security roles was a persistent one, and the permanent mobilization of the population (to support foreign aid and military interventions in the decolonizing world) posed chronic problems.
The specter of public apathy found a powerful solution in the covert military operation, which was closely intertwined with public anticommunist mobilizations.47 In the early Cold War years, the former served the interests of military elites while the latter engaged the masses. The lines separating the two became increasingly hazy with Kennedy, for whom the “theory and practice of foreign interventions served less to preserve imperial interests than to demonstrate the firmness of American will.”48
With the New Frontier as his campaign signature, Kennedy had at his disposal a powerful set of symbols to “summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against Communism.”49 In particular, he resurrected the frontiersman whose rugged individualism, self-sacrifice, and constant vigilance had figured prominently in the nation’s expansionist history. Kennedy’s New Frontier glamorized this violent history, and it did so by making covert military operations in the Third World function as spectacle.
In Kennedy’s time the hero of the frontier myth metamorphosed into the covert operator, also known as the freedom fighter. This new and improved icon of the nation’s expansionist-cum-anticommunist foreign policy was invoked—literally or metaphorically—in a series of media spectaculars, most notably the Bay of Pigs invasion (Operation Zapata; April 14, 1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16–28, 1962). As Hoberman points out, these pseudo-events began as top-secret happenings, “scripted, produced and directed by the CIA” with the full participation of the president.50 Whether by design or by happenstance, these events were thrust into the nation’s living rooms and daily papers. This development pointed to the increasingly permeable border between public spectacle and covert operations; a phenomenon that, Rogin points out, has since become a characteristic feature of the “postmodern American empire.”51
Rogin convincingly argues that covert military interventions derive from the imperatives of spectacle. Furthermore, they owe their invisibility not to secrecy but to something else entirely—political amnesia. As a form of “motivated forgetting,” political amnesia is the phenomenon whereby “that which is insistently represented becomes, by being normalized to invisibility, absent and disappeared.” In the covert spectacle, the freedom fighter enacts a “countersubversive” fantasy. Like the frontiersman of the western myth, he “enters racially alien ground, regresses to primitivism in order to destroy the subversive and appropriate his power.”52 Political amnesia, then, constitutes a “cultural structure of motivated disavowal.” It implicates the audience, whose desire to experience the violence of the countersubversive scenario is matched by an equally powerful desire not to retain it in memory.
The specular form of the covert spectacle is crucial in this regard. In contrast to the subject-centered story of narrative, spectacles are “superficial, sensately intensified, short-lived and repeatable.” Spectacle, then, is the cultural form of amnesiac representation. It produces a sensory overstimulation that “disconnects from their objects and severs from memory those intensified, detailed shots of destruction, wholesaled on populations and retailed on body parts.”53 In the fragmented jumble of “interchangeable individuals, products and body parts” displayed in the covert spectacle, centrifugal threats—threats to the subject and threats to the state—are depicted in a manner conducive to containing as well as enjoying them.
But what is displayed and forgotten in the covert spectacle is the “historical content of American political demonology.” As Rogin has convincingly shown elsewhere, the covert spectacle may be traced back to an almost pathological fear of subversion subtending the nation’s political culture.54 This “countersubversive” tradition has historically played on fears of secret penetration and social contamination presented by an imagined alien power. Political demonology has been a concomitant feature of this tradition. It begins as a “rigid insistence on difference” that extends to “the inflation, stigmatization and dehumanization of political foes.”55 Such demonology provides the performative space within which the countersubversive might be allowed to indulge in forbidden desires. Or to put it another way, political demonology is what enables the countersubversive, in the name of battling the subversive, to imitate its enemy.
The covert spectacle constituted a form of symbolic recovery: their significance lay less in stopping the spread of communism than in convincing the public that the United States had the power to direct world events. In Rogin’s words,
Individual covert operations may serve specific corporate or national security-clique interests, and the operations themselves are often (like Iran/Contra) hidden from domestic subjects who might hold them to political account. But even where the particular operation is supposed to remain secret, the government wants it known it has the power, secretly to intervene. The payoff for many covert operations is their intended demonstration effect.56
The Cold War, it must be remembered, was fought mainly with symbols and surrogates—in the visible military buildup of weapons that function more as “symbols of intentions in war games rather than evidence of war-fighting capabilities; and in the invasion of private and public space by the fiction-making visual