The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

330 The condition of postmodernityNixon television debate, in which the latter's loss of a presidentialelection was attributed by many to the untrustworthy look of hisfive o'clock shadow. The active use of public relations firms to shapeand sell a political image quickly followed (the careful imaging ofThatcherism by the now all-powerful firm of Saatchi and Saatchi isa recent example, illustrating how Americanized in this regardEuropean politics is becoming).The election of an ex-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, to one of themost powerful positions in the world put a new gloss on the possibilitiesof a mediatized politics shaped by images alone. His image,cultivated over many years of political practice, and then carefullymounted, crafted, and orchestrated with all the artifice that contemporaryimage production could command, as a tough but warm,avuncular, and well-meaning person who had an abiding faith in thegreatness and goodness of America, built an aura of charismaticpolitics. Carey McWilliams, an experienced political commentatorand long-time editor of the Nation, described it as 'the friendly faceof fascism.' The 'teflon president,' as he came to be known (simplybecause no accusation thrown at him, however true, ever seemed tostick), could make mistake after mistake but never be called toaccount. His image could be deployed, unfailingly and instantaneously,to demolish any narrative of criticism that anyone cared toconstruct. But the image concealed a coherent politics. First, toexorcize the demon of the defeat in Vietnam by taking assertiveaction in support of any nominally anti-communist struggle anywherein the world (Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, Mozambique,Afghanistan, etc.). Second to expand the budget deficit throughdefence spending and force a recalcitrant Congress (and nation) tocut again and again into the social programmes that the rediscoveryof poverty and of racial inequality in the United States in the 1960shad spawned.This open programme of class aggrandizement was partially successfuLAttacks upon union power (led by the Reagan onslaughtupon the air traffic controllers), the effects of deindustrialization andregional shifts (encouraged by tax breaks), and of high unemployment(legitimized as proper medicine in the fight against inflation), and allthe accumulated impacts of the shift from manufacturing to serviceemployment, weakened traditional working-class institutions sufficientlyto render much of the population vulnerable. A rising tideof social inequality engulfed the United States in the Reagan years,reaching a post-war high in 1986 (see figure 2.15); by then thepoorest fifth of the population, which had gradually improved itsshare of national income to a high of point of nearly 7 per cent in theEconomics with mirrors 331early 1970s, found itself with only 4.6 per cent. Between 1979 and1986, the number of poor families with children increased by 35 percent, and in some large metropolitan areas, such as New York,Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans, more than half the childrenwere living in families with incomes below the poverty line. In spiteof surging unemployment (cresting at over 10 per cent by officialfigures in 1982) the percentage of unemployed receiving any federalbenefit fell to only 32 per cent, the lowest level in the history ofsocial insurance since its inception in the New Deal (see figure 2.9).An increase in homelessness signalled a general state of social dislocation,marked by confrontations (many of them with racist orethnic overtones). The mentally ill were returned to their communitiesfor care, which consisted largely of rejection and violence, the tip ofan iceberg of neglect which left nearly 40 million citizens in one ofthe richest nations of the world with no medical insurance coverwhatsoever. While jobs were indeed created during the Reagan years,many of them were low-wage and insecure service jobs, hardlysufficient to offset the 10 per cent decline in the real wage from 1972to 1986. If family incomes rose, that simply signified that more andmore women were entering the workforce (see figures 2.2 and 2.9).Yet for the young and the rich and the educated and the privilegedthings could not have been better. The world of real estate, finance,and business services grew, as did the 'cultural mass' given over tothe production of images, knowledge, and cultural and aestheticforms (see above, p. 290). The political-economic base and, withit, the whole culture of cities were transformed. New York lost itstraditional garment trade and turned to the production of debt andfictitious capital instead. 'In the last seven years,' ran a report byScardino (1987) in the New York Times,New Y or k has constructed 75 new factories to house the debtproduction and distribution machine. These towers of graniteand glass shine through the night as some of this generation'smost talented professionals invent new instruments of debt tofit every imagined need: Perpetual Floating Rate Notes, YieldCurve Notes and Dual Currency Notes, to name a few, nowtraded as casually as the stock of the Standard Oil Companyonce was.The trade is as vigorous as that which once dominated the harbour.But 'today, the telephone lines deliver the world's cash to be remixedas if in a bottling plant, squirted into different containers, cappedand shipped back out.' The biggest physical export from New York