Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital Prohibition and the New 'Reefer Madness'
by Dion Dennis
CTheory
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. [1] 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. [2] 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 [3] 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. [4] 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. However, if past is prologue, the U.S. will not be without a new form of Prohibition for long, with a new set of targets constructed by a dominant demographic slipping from power; a new domestic "War" against a rival demographic, under the discursive cover of a newly fashioned political correctness. (It's just what Americans "do.") For example, after the passage of the Twenty First Amendment in 1933, it was not long before Prohibitionist impulses settled on a new target population, and a new set of cultural practices. In the 1930s, these impulses were instantiated in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics anti-Marijuana campaign, a campaign that demonized Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and generated the perceptions that paved the way for the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. In the second decade of the Twenty First century, the demonization geist will fall hard on those who remix and mash up digitized cultural icons and images. This uptick in a global "War on Pirates" is the contested site of an emergent generational "war," the latest site in which post-Baby Boomer generations, already saddled with elephantine debt, crumbling infrastructure, and intensive responsibilization techniques that shift governmental functions onto their privatized collective backs (think "service learning" and "civic engagement" initiatives) [5] now face Boomer-based criminalization of their cultural practices of quotation and communication; [6] all in the service of indefinitely maintaining Boomer-era models of cultural production, circulation and profit, in a post-Boomer world. [7] It's the latest and onerous manifestation of "low intensity conflict," of a cultural guerrilla war that pits a subset of well-heeled and well-positioned Boomers against their children and grandchildren. The ramped up stakes are evident in recent high-level appointments in the Obama Administration's Department of Justice, and in the deeds of U.S. Vice President Biden and his Congressional allies. The conceptual coherence and persistence of these efforts point to a demographically-defined, and increasingly probable period of Digital Prohibition. The politics of Prohibition are alive and well; the population and objects have changed, but the general game resembles that of 1930s America. A brief look backwards, as prologue, is instructive.
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