FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME since Bill Clinton created a cabinet
designed to “look like America,” something that might not otherwise
have been done was done expressly in order to “send a message.” The
Norweigan Nobel Committee has awarded, in fatuous and Oprahesque
style, its rarified Peace Prize to the International Atomic Energy
Agency in general and to Mohamed ElBaradei in particular. For the
person working to devise what behavior or accomplishment of the
IAEA or of its ennobled director-general has produced peace, the
road of inquiry is as barren as it is circular. No matter that
ElBaradei “refused to endorse Washington’s contention that Iran was
working to make nuclear weapons” (and of course “disputed U.S.
assertions that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had an active
atomic weapons program”). Back in 2002, the director-general took a
courageous step in accusing North Korea of “nuclear blackmail.” And
he remains to this day, as the Committee boasted, “an unafraid
advocate” of nonproliferation and international oversight.
For Hans Blix the event is “very encouraging and fortunate,”
because he knows as well as Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes
(who said the following) the Prize was awarded to send “a message
to all the people of the world: Do what you can to get rid of
nuclear weapons.” Ironically it is the IAEA’s job to help do this
preemptively, and compounding the self-satire is ElBaradei’s
beaming declaration that “the award basically sends a very strong
message” — “Keep doing what you are doing.”
Thus awarding the achievements of the IAEA, though they be
little, is not the point of the Peace Prize — but rather the
rewarding of the intent; since its job is to “prevent nuclear
energy from being used for military purposes,” the IAEA must be
superlegitimized, not in order to applaud its accomplishments but
to praise its purpose. This is feel-goodism of the most blatant and
artificial kind, impervious to actual merit and consequence and
cheeringly, knowingly defiant of the quaint convention that people
ought to be honored not for how they feel about something but what
they do about it.
AND THOUGH THE CRITICISM of this sop to the IAEA has been well-put,
what’s been missed is its embodiment of an entire culture of
“sending a message” — a catchphrase now used to describe the
purpose of stunts, speeches, and activisms ranging from voting to
hairstyling to golf-playing to, completing the circle, calling out
Iran on its nuclear program. “Sending a message” is now shorthand
for imbuing one’s otherwise trivial action with the unimpeachable
moral authority of some grand cause celebre. The moral authority is
unimpeachable both in causes too big to disagree with (world peace)
and too niche to deserve anything less than PC-based respect
(homeless junkies, migrant illiterates, the lonely, and the
transgendered). But “sending a message” also, paradoxically,
diminishes the worth of impressive achievements, by putting them to
a use that privileges being a tiny part of something “bigger than
yourself” over demonstrating the largeness of your purpose by the
largeness of your individual accomplishment.
This gross phenomenon is a master of that other buzzword,
“inclusiveness,” as much as it is its product (we begin to glimpse
the interlinked lexicon of a parallel language). “Diversity” itself
— manufacturing pride among a membership whose only common trait
is being unlike one another — is a prime example of the unnatural
logic that runs through the “sending” of “messages.” But, lest any
feelings be hurt, no cultural persuasion is left out. Send a
message about drug use. Send a message about teenage pregnancy.
Send a message to Washington. Send a message about oil companies,
about breast cancer, about hyperactivity or autism or living with
Crohn’s disease or genital warts. “It’s about suppression,” a
woman’s voice says, while a fit, attractive girl skips down a
Malibu beach, in love with herself. There are billboards in Los
Angeles where a cartoon blob smoking a cigar makes a mean face at
you, labeled, in Spanish, “Sifilis.”
In the realm of disease “sending a message” dominates, because
self-identity today is ensnared in the new sexual obligations of
medicine and the medical obligations of sexuality — get tested,
get the pill, get erect, get an abortion. Sex is the ultimate nexus
of the three most important modern social values — caring,
experiencing, surviving — and human technology is not only
increasingly necessary to fully inhabit those values but is also
extraordinarily, exponentially profitable.
MESSAGE-SENDING IS ALSO KNOWN as “raising awareness” — the
technique by which people talk about things everyone already knows,
but are listened to and fawned over because they “care more,”
because they are a “survivor,” because they “know what it’s like.”
It is Casey Sheehan syndrome: my pain entitles me to you. The death
of a chain-smoking grandfather comes to hold meaning only in the
context of the Fight Against Big Tobacco. The baby born with HIV is
a tiny martyr in the Battle Against AIDS. The street protest, the
publicity tour, the documentary-style commercial that looks like
guerrilla filmmaking but is the end result of a million-dollar
promotional campaign? What matters is media, what matters is
meaning, what matters is message. Feeling, immersed in the moment,
is what counts; substance only gets us there.
Pin a giant ribbon on for the big awards show, to show that you
care more. Wriggle your wrist through an ever-expanding number of
rubber bracelets, to show that you, personally, know a survivor.
Add a lapel pin. Add a t-shirt that shows you walked this summer’s
such-and-such-a-thon. Encase yourself in a papier-mache of meaning.
Replace yourself with a polaroid of cred. You are not to be judged
by your actions or by the value of your deeds but by your flair.
The index of your worth is your willingness to abandon your
privacy. Give yourself to us. Make the masses your intimacy.
MEANWHILE THE PROCESS reaches eliteward even as it enforces a
culture of required sharing. The Nobel Peace Prize has been
reduced, this year, to the level of a bumper sticker on an Acura
SUV reading “My Child Is a Person of Meaning at Broad Brook Middle
School.”
And politics has become so choked with catchphrases of the new
social lexicon that you can make whole 30-second spots out of them:
our candidate will “fight to protect your rights” this year,
because “now, more than ever” it’s time to “send a message to
Washington,” or to the terrorists, or to baby daddies, or
whomever.
But let’s not forget, coming up for air, that we don’t want to
capture or kill Osama bin Laden to send a message. We want to do so
to punish him, personally, for his crimes. We don’t want to enforce
a prescription-drug bill we can’t afford in order to send a message
that “seniors matter,” and we don’t want to institute universal
preschool for the state-sponsored offspring of millionaires and
migrants alike because “it’s all about the children.” These are not
reasons, they are emotions, as sophisticated and compelling of
arguments to do or not to do something as “grumpiness” or
“cheerfulness.”
