It’s Time to Boo

Rush Limbaugh calls Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a “slut” for advocating contraception

—M. F. Fard, The Washington Post (2012)

Left Freaks Out Over My Fluke Remarks

—Rush Limbaugh (2012)

People have the desire to take everything, to pillage everything, to swallow everything, to manipulate everything. Seeing, deciphering, learning, does not touch them. The only massive effect is that of manipulation.

—Jean Baudrillard (1994), Simulacra and Simulation (p. 69)

You’ve heard it before. The “catcall” from the rear of the auditorium. You’ve laughed too, or joined the crowd in wild applause. But other times your response differs from those around you. Sometimes you are horrified. You’ve seen images on television of angry demonstrators burning your flag. You’ve seen people cheering for politicians you dislike or maybe abhor. You may have yelled at the radio, or yelled at the guy who is always on the radio yelling. You’ve seen stadiums filled with thousands raising their arms in celebration of what you think is idiocy, primitive, or delusional—just plain wrong. You can’t believe it!

“You lie!”

“You flippin’ idiot!”

“Boo!”

How can anyone think like that, you wonder? What is wrong with people? What wavelength have they all tuned into? How does the jangling discord in your ears resonate harmoniously for them? Are they zombies? You’ve seen the vote tallies and taken note of the poll numbers. Have they all gone nuts?

And when the camera shows the crowd cheering for that catcall from the rear of the auditorium, you analyze it. You search for a reasonable explanation. You note how that immediate, improvisational vocalization demands attention. You see how people respond to what seems spontaneous. You suppose that these moments call forth affiliation and membership like primal growls and grunts. You think of nature documentaries with chimpanzees screaming and threatening each other. Chimpanzees hooting, banging on whatever they can find and charging each other in energetic chest-thumping dominance displays. But, what is going on? When you turn on the television you think the world has gone crazy.

* * * *

Me too. I’m puzzled, delighted, amazed, and sometimes horrified by my fellow human beings. I’m also curious. So I want to take a closer look at what have been, for me, provocative public performances. And I want to let some of my own responses reverberate. I want to consider how resonance plays a part in performances that impact social change, whether I like the change or not. In what ways do the voices of enacted spoken language and languages of the body emerge from the harmonies of performance? When we say that something “strikes a chord” are we identifying a kind of meme that can play out as performances of resistance or revolution? What role do resonant frequencies play in the spread of those performances?

I want to take just a couple of examples from my friends at Fox News and the Grand Old Party (GOP) presidential debates of 2011-2012: The so-called booing of a gay soldier, and the audience applause for executions under the Texas death penalty. First, the booing of a gay soldier happened in a GOP Presidential Debate, at Orlando Florida, September 22, 2011. In this event, sponsored by Fox News, Google, and the Florida Republican Party, moderated by Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, a video clip of an Iraq War veteran was used to pose a question to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. At that time there were eight candidates running for the Republican nomination: Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. They’re standing in a semicircle on stage behind their respective podiums. The soldier raised a question about the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”—a policy that required U.S. gay and lesbian military service personnel to remain closeted. Kelly addresses the question to former Senator Santorum.

Kelly:

Senator Santorum, this question stirred up a whole lot of controversy

on line. It comes from Steven Hill who was a soldier serving in Iraq.

Hill:

In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq I had to lie about who I was

because I’m a gay soldier

and I didn’t want to lose my job. My question is

under one of your presidencies

do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made

for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?

Audience:

BOO (one voice)

Audience:

[Booo (more voices) with applause

Santorum:

[Yeah, I- I would say

any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military

and that fact that they’re making a point to include it

as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize

a group of people uh and give them a special privilege

uh to uh to to uh and i- in removing don’t ask don’t tell

I think tries to inject social policy into the military

and the military’s job

Audience [loud applause ¹

* * * *

And there is laughter

heads nodding, more applause . . . . . . .

And maybe worse than that—

the derisive sneer—

the dismissive snort.

And can I believe what I hear?

Can I believe it is happening here? Now?

Who are these people?

What resonates in their ears?

* * * *

So, I try to see, decipher, and learn (Baudrillard, 1994). That is my response—or, at least, one of them. I want to consider it. Let me work this out. I take that case of that soldier booing event at that Republican Presidential debate. I try to see how others see it and decipher it. First of all, the “gay soldier” has a name: Stephen Hill. He is a person becoming a symbol.

This event was widely reported, distributed on YouTube, and debated. Who booed? How long? How did others in the audience respond? Did Senator Santorum even really hear the booing? Let’s see what Ann Coulter, one of the scariest of the Fox News squawkers, does when she turns her formidable syndicated analytical skills on this case:

the audience was not “booing a soldier” [writes Coulter] during one of the video questions, as the media, president and vice president have alleged. The audience was booing the soldier’s demand that Republican presidential candidates commit to not overturning a sleazy partisan vote taken in the twilight days of the heavily Democratic 2010 Congress.

In my job as communications director of Defenders of Republicans Unfairly Attacked by the Media and Then Immediately Sold Out by Their Fellow Republicans (DORUAMATISOTFR), I am required to point out that the question and audience reaction went like this:

“In 2010, when I was deployed to Iraq . . .”

(No booing.)

“I had to lie about who I was . . .”

(No booing—despite the fact that not talking about your sex life with your co-workers is not lying about who you are. In fact, many Americans manage quite easily to go days and days without talking about their sex lives with co-workers.)

“because I’m a gay soldier . . .”

(No booing, although we didn’t ask and would prefer that you not tell.)

“and I didn’t want to lose my job.”

(No booing.)

To recap: So far, a remarkably boo-free interaction.

Finally, we got to the question: “My question is, under one of your presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?”

Then there was booing. And for good reason.

It is beyond absurd to demand that Republican candidates pledge not to consider altering a recent rule change overturning a military policy that had been in effect from the beginning of warfare until the last few weeks of the 111th Congress.

Of course there was booing for that! (Coulter, 2011)

Coulter is essentially correct in identifying the point in the transcript when the booing is heard. It does come following the policy question. But, sifting through her overblown rhetoric, Coulter’s argument essentially rests on reinscribing homophobic discrimination. The idea that heteronormativity, enforced through countless military rules, social conventions, and laws, does not involve what Coulter later terms “open sexuality in the military” appears to be beyond Coulter’s analytical range. Hello Ann, heterosexuals are already “out” in our culture. Duh!

Boo!

Okay, so I expect the words Coulter uses to be incendiary—that’s how she makes her living. Lesa Lockford (2012) says words can be slippery as well as sublime. What about the Republican front runner who was campaigning to become Commander in Chief? Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, when asked about it said

“I think we can hear the boos,” Romney told the Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., on Monday, in a 70-minute interview broadcast on C-SPAN. “I would tell you that in these debates there has been a lot of booing and a lot of applause. Cheering and booing. Some of which I don’t agree with. Now I have not made it my practice to scold the audience and say, ‘I disagree with this person, I agree with that person,’ because it goes in a lot of different directions. I don’t recall with this soldier whether people were booing his question or just booing him.” (Epstein, 2011)

What do you think, dear reader? Slippery or sublime? “Just booing him?” What does that mean? It is okay to “just” boo the soldier? You’re running for President for heaven’s sake! You say it isn’t your practice to agree or disagree with people in the audience? For Romney, it isn’t clear apparently, whether it is fine to boo the question, the concept, or whether it is okay to express revulsion at the very idea of being a gay soldier. Hill is making a case that he has been unable to speak his identity. He has been unable to say “I am gay” “This is my life.” “This is who I am—a person and a soldier.” For candidate Romney, the audience may have been “just booing him,” merely booing him, only booing the man, this queer man, this gay 20-year veteran. Just booing him.

Boo!

* * * *

So what resonates with me?

With me?

I begin to write an essay carved from the lumber of scholarship.

I think I should begin with data and analysis and a literature review.

But, no! No!

What resonates with me?

I should muzzle my growing impatience as I probe and prod this “resonance” for itself, for its implications,

for its performances and performativity.

Let me dig in with theory and analysis.

Let me have the security of my profession.

But the wind blows distractions my way.

Distractions, that catch on the ankles

like newspapers whipped along a city street

before chasing each other down the block.

The wind that howls in my ears,

the discourse that flies in all directions and from everywhere—

catches me. Commands my attention—

a colleague’s comment, hip-hop from the car that pulls up next to mine,

The insult of television.

The horror of Fox News.

The absurdity of a “supreme court” decree that treats corporations

as if they are people.

As if!

I reel when I hear the hubris of the businessman whose self-proclaimed success comes from downsizing the factory,

utting people out of work,

sending jobs overseas,

collecting a multi-million dollar C.E.O. bonus.

I cringe

at the shrieking insanity of Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly,

the bombastic distortions of Rush Limbaugh—

the buzzing and booming in my own head.

I run to and away from the news.

Even my rational interlocutors on National Public Radio bring me

horrors.

They bring me horrors and happiness and sometimes hope,

but more often horrific tales of harm.

Humans hating hitting hurting sometimes helping.

But just sometimes.

So what resonates with this evil? What happens to people?

How do they hear what they hear?

Why do they laugh when they laugh

Or boo, or applaud?

Are there memes of stupidity as Richard Dawkins might suggest?

Must ignorance and fear beget ignorance generation after generation?

After the latest version of lightning and thunder,

are we still

afraid

that we’ve angered a sky god?

* * * *

I turn to Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things for answers. He takes me on a rationalist’s journey past junk yards of ghosts, and spirits, and unidentified flying objects, past Holocaust deniers and various cults, past collections of crackpots, flat earth believers, con-artists and the confused. Shermer especially puzzles over smart people who believe weird things. What is it about tuning in to a frequency of thought that makes it possible to harmonize one’s thinking with the absolutely implausible?

Don’t forgive me if I offend you—if I step on your cherished belief. I don’t seek forgiveness. I may still knock wood, but it serves to bring me to consciousness. I don’t worry about walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror unless some fool on the ladder is about to drop a tool or I cut myself picking up the glass. But if you believe Elvis visits you on lonely Saturday nights, you’re on your own.

So many ideas, like prejudices, are responses-ready-to roll. They’re loaded and ready to explode. You can see it in the reactions of crowds. How do they all coordinate a cheer, a boo, or applause? They tune in. They’re ready when the note is struck. We humans crave validity from others. Truth is on our side. We can’t all be right. You can’t question our particular sky god, our cherished beliefs, our sacred traditions. You do that and we’ll pour out into the streets. We’ll gather in crowds shaking our fists. We’ll prosecute you with whatever laws we’ve made up for unbelievers in whatever ways we’ve inherited from our fathers and their fathers and mothers before them. We’ll burn you at the stake. We’ll call you blasphemer, heretic, witch, infidel, liberal, capitalist, communist or anything we can use to mark difference. Your hair, your clothes, your ideas, whatever. There are plenty of different “n-words” throughout history to suit any occasion. We can “other you” with a wink, a sneer, a shout, our laughter or with bullets and bombs.

I look for another explanation; I look for help from modern neuroscience. Maybe the booing, the group mentality, comes from a lowering of executive brain function in the prefrontal cortex. This is the area of higher order functioning in the brain that evolved late in primates and that “operates as a control center that keeps our baser emotions and impulses in check” but as it happens, “acute, uncontrollable stress sets off a series of chemical events that weaken the influence of the prefrontal cortex while strengthening the dominance of older parts of the brain” (Arnsten, Mazure, & Sinha, 2012, p. 50). Maybe the ranting of politicians and talk-radio hosts, as well as trigger language and other elements of the surrounding culture, establish a level of paranoia and fear. In this way the listener’s stress level rises rapidly when a threat (however imaginary) is perceived. Having been primed with a host of volatile scary notions, the listener is predisposed to respond when a speaker activates the response. In the current U.S. American landscape many trigger points are well-known: Second-amendment fears “they’re taking our guns away,” immigration and “those people” fears, communists, socialists, liberals, feminists, “they’re taking away our freedom,” and others. “The prefrontal cortex is so sensitive to stress because of its special status within the hierarchy of brain structure . . . changes during stress can rapidly switch off prefrontal function.” (Arnsten et al., 2012, p. 50). The boo erupting in this context thus would emerge from a lowering of higher-order brain function. Recent research shows that when stress extends days or weeks “chronic stress appears to expand the intricate web of connections among neurons in our lower emotional centers, whereas the areas engaged during flexible, sustained reasoning—anything from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to calculus—start to shrivel” (Arnsten et al., 2012, p. 53). In other words, the effects can be cumulative. Exposure to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, Hollywood movies, Fox News or MSNBC, may elevate the stress levels over time. Higher order thinking shrivels. Maybe that’s how it works. Maybe. Maybe Baudrillard (1994) is right about the masses when he writes: “ Seeing, deciphering, learning, does not touch them” (p. 69). Am I finding solace in thinking of “them” as “masses” rather than as individuals?

* * * *

When the service man says he is a soldier who served

In Iraq and he is gay and he’s glad to be rid of

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,

Some members of the crowd are heard to boo.

Do they boo him or his politics?

As if they are different.

The Fox news personality says “see, just listen. Just listen.

They’re not booing him, they’re booing his politics.”

As if the politics don’t mark his body

His life, his love, his own flesh.

They boo.

And this resonates. It must resonate. It gets ratings.

Fox News Corporation can take it to the bank.

Boo!

* * * * *

Okay let’s take this case,

let’s take this case of gut response

this case of deep growls

of rampant rage

of harmonies it calls forth.

Try this:

Try this you fucking academics.

Try this.

You queers you fags you dicks you homosexual liberal anti-American

God-hating queers.

Queer theorizing, gender studying, whores and bitches.

Feminists!

You abortionists. You baby killers.

How do you like that, you fags.

You want to shower together, you sickos?

I’m talking about unit cohesion.

I’m talking about winning wars.

Stick those girls back in the kitchen.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Boo.

Lazy college professors.

Tree-hugging environmentalists.

Get back into your fucking Prius. Asshole.

Gun-hating dicks.

Pansy. Wuss.

Piss ant.

Love it or leave it.

Boo!

* * * *

There’s another case that also astonishes me. It is the case of cheering for the death penalty, cheering for Rick Perry as Governor of Texas, presiding over the most executions of any state. At a debate of Republican candidates running for the office of President of the United States on September 7, 2011, at the Ronald Regan Presidential Library, moderator Brian Williams noted that 234 people had been executed in State of Texas under a policy supported by presidential candidate Rick Perry:

Williams:

Governor Perry, your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times

[applause and whistles

Williams:

Have you struggled to sleep at night uhm uh with the idea that any one of those might have bee:n uh innocent.

Perry:

No, sir, I’ve never struggled (0.2) with that at all

The state of Texas has a uh very (0.2) thoughtful (0.2)

a very (0.2) clear (0. 1) process in place of which when

when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens.

they get a fair hearing

go through an appellate process

up to the supreme court a the United States if that’s required

but the state of Texas (0.2)

you come into our state (0.3) and you kill one of our children (0.2)

you kill a police officer,

you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens,

(0.5)

will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas,

and that is you will be executed.

(0.5)

Audience:

[applause

Williams:

[what do you make of uh

Audience:

[loud cheers, extended applause

Williams:

[What do you make of the (0.2)

what do you make of that Dan

the dynamic that just happened here.

the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause.

Perry:

I think Americans understand justice.

I think Americans are clearly in the vast majority of cases,

supportive of capital punishment. ²

In all of the Americas, the United States, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, is the only country to execute its citizens. Not Bolivia, not Brazil since 1876, not Chile, not Columbia since 1910, or Costa Rica, Ghana, Guyana, Guatemala, Honduras, or Haiti, not in Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru or Venezuela, but in the United States of America we have politicians who sell it like soap to a foaming-at-the-mouth public. Sophie Tamas writes that “we bring the abjected scraps of trauma back into speech in order to call our culture to account” (Tamas, 2011, p. 454). When I puzzle over homophobic cat-calls and cheers for state executions, I respond as though in trauma from my U.S. American culture.

In the United States we’re running a bit behind North Korea over 60 killed since 2010, but we’re ahead of Saudi Arabia at 27 plus; we join the illustrious group of Yemen, Iran, and Bangladesh. But China, with over 2,000 executed since 2010, has us totally beat.

I don’t know what all we might have in common with those other countries, but some of our U.S. citizens seem to share a notion that it is good state business to whack the heads off, electrocute, stone, poison, gas, or otherwise “execute” people. They believe that this is the right and proper domain of government. Didn’t they get the point in eighth grade English about the horror of picking out a scapegoat to kill when they read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery?” Can they absorb the warnings in The Hunger Games? Does the Holocaust offer no history lessons? When the government assumes that its rights include control of women’s uteruses, denial of equal rights to gay and lesbian members or any other group it chooses, and the power to kill its citizens, I rise from the back of the auditorium and fill my lungs.

I’m talking about gut response.

My human resonance.

And you can hear it.

Boo!

BOO!

B O O O O O O O O O O !