This just in: a Los Angeles Times essay, pegged on former White House flack Scott McClellan's memoir, about the transformation of politics into a branch of special effects, and of the White House into a Hollywood backlot. The restless shades of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays haunt the West Wing. But beyond this obvious point, I argue that the Bush administration's faith-based worldview, the logical terminus of Ronald Reagan's belief that "facts are stupid things," marks the official beginning of our age, the Unenlightenment.

Teaser:

Like no administration before it, the Bush administration has mastered what the media critic Walter Lippmann called "the manufacture of consent"---the use of what Lippmann called "psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," to muster mass support for elite agendas. Staging photo ops whose choreographed drama and camera-ready visuals (Mission Accomplished!) are intended to play to the emotions and overrule objections; reducing complicated geopolitical issues to black-or-white dualisms (Team America: World Police versus the Axis of Evil!); stonewalling the media, cherrypicking military intelligence, and parroting the same Karl Rove-approved talking points---the Bush administration represents the apotheosis of government by spin control. Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But this is the stuff of which doctoral dissertations on Baudrillard are made.

(Note: the LAT website is prone to link rot---nothing stays put for more than a week or two, seemingly---so you may have to plug the article headline---"McClellan's "Matrix" moment: Bush's former press secretary has stumbled out of a White House that lets political rhetoric shape reality"---into Google.)

Detourned image, courtesy Misha.

bOING bOING sprinkled holy water on my blog (I Am Not Worthy), and now faithful and godless alike are weighing in, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio: a handful of closely reasoned, well-argued responses and a farrago of spittle-flecked invective, Alpha Mensa threat-posturing, and off-topic maunderings from the flying snark monkeys. Like Dawkins, I have a day job (albeit a far less exalted one!), so I'm going to address the points raised by the more substantive commenters---whose insightful critiques leave me very much in their debt---sometime in the next few days, perhaps as late as this weekend. Until then...
...watch this space.

Image: Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick.

I heartily endorse the New Atheists' strategy of taking the firefight to the enemy's doorstep. As someone who is truly soul-sick of his fundie relatives' condescending, culturally arrogant prayers that he find The Light© before he's cast into the lake of everlasting fire, I'm thrilled by the new strain of what might be called "evangelical" atheism. Watching Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens hand Christian apologists their heads is my idea of fun for the whole secular-humanist family, a popcorn-friendly bloodsport that's as entertaining for the little ones as it is edifying. It's high time those proselytizing god-botherers who materialize on my doorstep every Sunday morning understand what it's like to have their beliefs treated as self-evidently absurd, the foundations of their world-view vigorously challenged by a devil's advocate who gives no quarter. Spread the love, I say.

But Dawkins and Hitchens (both of whom I admire immensely as vorpal swordsmen in the Enlightenment cause, Hitchens's intellectual glaucoma regarding the Iraq question notwithstanding) reveal an almost willful ignorance about religion as a social construction and American evangelical Christianity as a subculture.

Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at "The Sacred & The Profane," a conference at San Diego State University.

Ted Neeley in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The Messiah as don't-harsh-my-mellow SoCal dude.

Official Blurb:

In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in '70s Southern California

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the "situated knowledges" and "lived experiences" of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes---to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the 'Jesus People' movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted "Jesus" Neeley's infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment...

VITALS:

When: 11-6:15. NOTE: I go on at 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where:
Scripps Cottage
English and Comparative Literature
Arts and Letters 226
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020
San Diego, California 92182-6020

What:

(From the official website): "Sacred & Profane: Meditations on a World in Translation

Salman Rushdie once wrote, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions." In this interdisciplinary conference, we invite original works that explore the way we construct meaning out of historical, theoretical, and literary works.

Panels will include an interrogation of sacred texts, ranging from holy words to canonized works; the past as a sacred text; profane texts, which may challenge our definitions of literature as well as our tolerance for profanity; and issues involved in the process of translation, from one language to another or one time period to another. We invite submissions from visual artists that interpret or explore these topics."

If you drop by, be sure to tug on my sleeve. I'll be milling around aimlessly afterward, hoisting a margarita with faculty, grad students, and you.

What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age.

Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on.

When: I'm delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here.

Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103.

What I'm Talking About: "Humanimal" Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera." Executive Summary: "Humanimal" porn is calculated to blister the mind of even the most been-there, done-that pornsurfer. Armed with image-manipulation software, morph auteurs are conjuring up images worthy of a medieval bestiary or a postmodern Decameron. The result is Dr. Moreau's idea of Web porn: Hyperreal cheesecake in which nude babes with cow ears, tails, and udders suckle each other and naked werewomen flaunt donkey ears straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Is this an absurdist attempt to push the envelope of fetishism to the point where not even devotees of this obscure desire can take it seriously? Or an earnest attempt to feed the fantasies of a vanishingly obscure market niche that would have flown under radar cover in the lost world before do-it-yourself Web porn? Or is it something more profound---a campy, tongue-in-cheek exorcism of our cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants in the age of pigs with human hemoglobin and babies with baboon hearts?

Caveat: That's what I'm contracted to speak about, in any event. As always, there's a better than even chance I may just go off on some hairy-eyed rant about one of my current obsessions, such as: pathological masculinity in America, the country that brought you warporn, gorenography (a.k.a. "torture porn" in the Saw and Hostel vein), The Passion of the Christ (considered as Foucauldian fever dream), Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and 300, that dyspeptic mix of homophobia and homophilia whose target demographic seems to be the sweet spot between Michael Savage and Tom of Finland.

Consider yourselves forewarned. And come up and tug on my sleeve if you make it to this thing.