doug wrote:
>An old college friend of mine who became a hotshot DC political
macher -
>and who ended up doing some time in federal prison in the House post
office
>scandal - told me once that the secret of Reagan's popularity was
just this
>kind of winking detachment. He could appeal to the alienated masses
by
>communicating an "isn't this government stuff a boring old joke?" -
all the
>while his boring old government was hacking the budget and killing
Central
>Americans.
which raises in another context some of the stuff i was alluding to in the previous post. namely, are there occassions when a cynical ironic detachment is conducive to making people form attachments to conservative agendas?
i raised the difference between 'independance day' and 'starship troopers'; this from the previous post:
"...how goldblum's character works in 'independance day': he gets to nod and wink at us the viewer, allowing for the performance of cynical detachment... as a counterpoint to 'independance day', i think 'starship troopers' ... starship troopers is irony without the cynicism, no liberal or leftish meta-narrative location or character which would absolve the fundamentally racist character of the genre."
to put it another way: there is a sense in which we assume that a meta-narrative is crucial for critique and oppositionality, and that this would serve as a criticism of a postmodernist refusal of meta-narratives. (i've already talked about why i think a meta-narrative is unavoidable, and that there is no one position on meta-narratives amongst any set of writers cast as pomos, so i won't go into that again)
what however of the ways in which a meta-narrative is actually in the service of a suspension of critique, an injunction to enjoy 'in good conscience' what are either conservative narratives or horrendous policies?
angela