Je suis sur la scène politique depuis assez peu de temps pour servir d’écran sur lequel des gens d’horizons politiques très différents peuvent projeter leurs points de vue. A ce titre, je ne peux que décevoir certains d’entre eux, voire tous. Barack Obama
Les frères Jonas sont ici ; ils sont là quelque part. Sasha et Malia sont de grandes fans. Mais les gars, allez pas vous faire des idées. J’ai deux mots pour vous: « predator drones ». Vous les verrez même pas venir. Vous croyez que je plaisante, hein ? Barack Obama (2010)
Oh ! CNN, merci beaucoup pour l’excellente couverture du virus Ebola. Pendant deux longues semaines on était à un doigt d’être dans Walking Dead « . Le traducteur en colère enchaîne en hurlant « vous n’avez pas Ebola ! Barack Obama (2015)
Obama surfe sur cette vague d’aspiration des Blancs qui se projettent sur lui. Il parle d’espoir, de changement, d’avenir… Il se cache derrière ce discours éthéré, sans substance, pour permettre aux Blancs de projeter sur lui leurs aspirations. Il est prisonnier car à la minute où il révélera qui il est vraiment, ce en quoi il croit vraiment, son idéologie, il perdra toute sa magie et sa popularité de rock-star. (…) Il est prisonnier, car il ne peut pas être lui-même. (…) Les Blancs sont l’électorat naturel de Barack Obama. (…) C’est ça l’ironie: il a fallu que Barack Obama gagne les voix blanches pour emporter les voix noires. Shelby Steele
Un problème plus sérieux pour notre nation aujourd’hui est que nous avons un président dont la bénigne – et donc désirable – couleur l’a exempté du processus politique d’individuation qui produit des dirigeants forts et lucides. Il n’a pas eu à risquer sa popularité pour ses principes, expérience sans laquelle nul ne peut connaître ses véritables convictions. A l’avenir, il peut lui arriver à l’occasion de prendre la bonne décision, mais il n’y a aucun centre durement gagné en lui à partir duquel il pourrait se montrer un réel leader. Shelby Steele
Obama, contre lequel je suis, a fait une excellente campagne, y compris en se présentant comme un homme vide, en qui quiconque peut projeter tous ses désirs, mais qui est en réalité une feuille blanche. (…) Et les gens qui votent pour lui vont voter pour une feuille blanche et ils vont être très déçus. (…) La plus grande faiblesse, c’est que c’est un grand inconnu qui n’a rien fait jusqu’à maintenant. Et c’est quelque chose qui m’inquiète, non pas dans un esprit partisan, mais parce que quand on a un monde avec l’Iran en face de soi par exemple, avec la Corée du nord, etc, si on sait ce qu’on veut, on le fait. Si on ne sait pas ce qu’on veut, on dépend des bureaucraties de Washington et on fait des bêtises. C’est ce qui est arrivé à Jimmy Carter. C’est ce qui est arrivé à Kennedy dans les premiers mois de son administration. Danger. Laurent Murawiec
Obama demande pardon pour les faits et gestes de l’Amérique, son passé, son présent et le reste, il s’excuse de tout. Les relations dégradées avec la Russie, le manque de respect pour l’Islam, les mauvais rapports avec l’Iran, les bisbilles avec l’Europe, le manque d’adulation pour Fidel Castro, tout lui est bon pour battre la coulpe de l’Amérique. Plus encore, il célèbre la contribution (totalement inexistante) de l’Islam à l’essor de l’Amérique, et il se fend d’une révérence au sanglant et sectaire roi d’Arabie, l’Abdullah de la haine. Il annule la ceinture anti-missiles sise en Alaska et propose un désarmement nucléaire inutile. (…) Plus encore, cette déplorable Amérique a semé le désordre et le mal partout dans le monde. Au lieu de collaborer multilatéralement avec tous, d’œuvrer au bien commun avec Poutine, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, Bachir al-Assad, et Cie, l’insupportable Bush en a fait des ennemis. (…) Il n’y a pas d’ennemis, il n’y a que des malentendus. Il ne peut y avoir d’affrontements, seulement des clarifications. Laurent Murawiec
Qu’est donc devenu cet artisan de paix récompensé par un prix Nobel, ce président favorable au désarmement nucléaire, cet homme qui s’était excusé aux yeux du monde des agissements honteux de ces Etats-Unis qui infligeaient des interrogatoires musclés à ces mêmes personnes qu’il n’hésite pas aujourd’hui à liquider ? Il ne s’agit pas de condamner les attaques de drones. Sur le principe, elles sont complètement justifiées. Il n’y a aucune pitié à avoir à l’égard de terroristes qui s’habillent en civils, se cachent parmi les civils et n’hésitent pas à entraîner la mort de civils. Non, le plus répugnant, c’est sans doute cette amnésie morale qui frappe tous ceux dont la délicate sensibilité était mise à mal par les méthodes de Bush et qui aujourd’hui se montrent des plus compréhensifs à l’égard de la campagne d’assassinats téléguidés d’Obama. Charles Krauthammer
Les drones américains ont liquidé plus de monde que le nombre total des détenus de Guantanamo. Pouvons nous être certains qu’il n’y avait parmi eux aucun cas d’erreurs sur la personne ou de morts innocentes ? Les prisonniers de Guantanamo avaient au moins une chance d’établir leur identité, d’être examinés par un Comité de surveillance et, dans la plupart des cas, d’être relâchés. Ceux qui restent à Guantanamo ont été contrôlés et, finalement, devront faire face à une forme quelconque de procédure judiciaire. Ceux qui ont été tués par des frappes de drones, quels qu’ils aient été, ont disparu. Un point c’est tout. Kurt Volker
Il y a quatre ans, l’Amérique a élu la plus grande célébrité du monde. Et l’Amérique a effectivement un président cool. Mais après quatre années avec un président célèbre 1 diplômé sur 2 est sans emploi ou sous-employés. 85% d’entre eux sont retournés vivre chez leur parents. Les dettes des étudiants dépassent un milliard de milliards de dollars. Après quatre années avec un président célèbre, avez-vous une vie meilleure ? Spot de campagne républicain (2012)
To be sure, Obama’s communication skills remain one of his biggest strengths. They did much, after all, to get him elected in 2008 on the basis of pretty thin résumé, and it is natural to think they will serve him well again this year. As with all valuable resources, though, they need husbanding carefully. If Obama isn’t careful, his opponent could conceivably turn his in-jokes and dazzling hipness against him. (…) The essence of being hip, after all, is that you operate on a more refined plane than most people: you are more fashionable, more discerning, and more discriminating than the average boob. For a President who is already viewed by some Americans as an out-of-touch élitist, this isn’t necessarily the sort of image you want to cultivate—especially during a prolonged economic downturn.(…) When you are pitching a former Mormon bishop who uses the diction of a nineteen-fifties preppy, you cannot really hope to compete for the votes of hipsters with a slim groover who uses the word “man” without any irony. (Obama to Newt: “There’s still time, man.”) But as a diligent campaign consultant, you can try to present the other candidate as an out-of-touch élitist who doesn’t understand the concerns of ordinary (read “white”) folks out there in middle America (…) For all his smarts, he needs to be a bit careful. Americans like having a funny, articulate, and modern President. But they don’t want somebody who is too cool for school. New Yorker (April 2012)
«Propagande», «agence TASS», «si Poutine faisait ça…» Barack Obama est habitué aux lazzis des républicains les plus conservateurs, qui lui reprochent des penchants « socialistes », version soviétique. Mais ces derniers jours, les accusations d’autoritarisme visant l’exécutif américain viennent d’un groupe d’habitude moins enclin aux coups de sang: les organisations de presse, fédérées par la centenaire Association des correspondants à la Maison Blanche (WHCA). Jeudi 21 novembre, la WHCA et des dizaines de médias, dont l’Agence France-Presse, ont envoyé une lettre d’une fermeté sans précédent à Jay Carney, le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, pour protester contre le contrôle de l’information par l’administration démocrate. Le motif de ce courroux ? Le sentiment, nourri par de nombreux exemples depuis cinq ans, de ne pas bénéficier de la « transparence » médiatique promise par le président lors de sa campagne électorale de 2007-2008. Les reporters de presse écrite et photographes notent même une régression par rapport au précédent locataire de la résidence exécutive, George W. Bush. Le républicain a en effet laissé dans la salle de presse le souvenir d’un dirigeant prêt à se soumettre de bonne grâce aux sollicitations des médias. (…) En effet, le problème aux yeux des photographes de presse n’est pas que la Maison Blanche de Barack Obama soit avare d’images, ou les manipule comme à la grande époque des procès de Moscou, quand d’anciens responsables tombés en disgrâce disparaissaient de la tribune sur la place Rouge. La stratégie de la présidence américaine est plutôt de jouer à saute-mouton avec les médias classiques et d’investir tous les médias sociaux, de Twitter à Facebook en passant par Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube et Flickr, des sites régulièrement alimentés en images et en vidéos par une armée de communicants. Le caractère immédiat des photos de Souza, et leur qualité technique impeccable, font parfois oublier au grand public qu’elles sont partie intégrante de la communication présidentielle. Sur Twitter, où le photographe est suivi par près de 100.000 personnes, elles obtiennent des centaines de «retweets» en quelques minutes, tandis que les «like» se comptent par milliers sur la page Facebook d’Obama, «aimée» par 37 millions de personnes. Toutefois, préviennent la WHCA et l’association des photographes de presse de la Maison Blanche (WHNPA), il faut prendre ces photos pour ce qu’elles sont: ni plus ni moins que des «communiqués de presse visuels». Tangi Quemener
Tout le monde craque sur les incroyables photos de Pete Souza, fameux photographe officiel de la Maison Blanche. Il publie chaque jours plusieurs clichés du président Obama. Souvent insolites, touchants, d’une qualité et d’un cadrage irréprochables, plusieurs sont déjà rentrés dans l’histoire du photo-journalisme en dehors de leur succès populaire. Reste que selon la très sérieuse Association des correspondants à la Maison Blanche (WHCA), il s’agit plutôt d’une machine à communiquer parfaitement huilée, qui n’est pas loin de faire obstruction à la liberté de la presse. «Si Poutine faisait ça…», a même commenté l’un deux. Tribune de Genève
L’aura de cool absolu qui entoure Barack Obama doit en effet beaucoup –voire tout– à Pete Souza. Le photographe officiel canarde le président américain partout –dans son bureau, dans ses voyages, quand il va embrasser des bébés et manger des hot-dogs– et fournit en instantané sa légende iconographique. Les photos sont mises à disposition du public et des médias par la Maison Blanche, sous une license Creative Commons, pour qu’elles soient mieux partagées. Grâce à Pete Souza, on a l’impression d’être dans la vraie vie de Barack Obama, alors que rien n’est plus construit que ses photos. Slate
The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation. Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. The aesthetic is spread by Hip Hop culture for example, which has become “the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world” (…). Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioural tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become “the only distinctive American artistic creation” (…). The African American philosopher Cornel West sees the “black-based Hip Hop culture of youth around the world” as a grand example of the “shattering of male, WASP cultural homogeneity” (…). While several recent studies have shown that American brand names have dramatically slipped in their cool quotients worldwide, symbols of black coolness such as Hip Hop remain exportable. However, ‘cool’ does not only refer to a respected aspect of masculine display, it’s also a symptom of anomie, confusion, anxiety, self-gratification and escapism, since being cool can push individuals towards passivity more than towards an active fulfillment of life’s potential. Often “it is more important to be ‘cool and down’ with the peer group than to demonstrate academic achievement,” write White & Cones (…). On the one hand, the message produced by a cool pose fascinates the world because of its inherent mysteriousness. The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire. On the other hand, to be cool can be seen as a decadent attitude leading to individual passivity and social decay. The ambiguity residing in this constellation lends the cool scheme its dynamics, but it also makes its evaluation very difficult. (…) A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Cool est généralement associé au sang-froid et au contrôle de soi et il est utilisé dans ce sens comme une expression d’approbation ou d’admiration. Cette notion peut aussi être associée à une forme de nonchalance. Wikipedia
There is no single concept of cool. One of the essential characteristics of cool is its mutability—what is considered cool changes over time and varies among cultures and generations. One consistent aspect however, is that cool is wildly seen as positive and desirable. Although there is no single concept of cool, its definitions fall into a few broad categories. The sum and substance of cool is a self-conscious aplomb in overall behavior, which entails a set of specific behavioral characteristics that is firmly anchored in symbology, a set of discernible bodily movements, postures, facial expressions and voice modulations that are acquired and take on strategic social value within the peer context. Cool was once an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs, such as slaves, prisoners, bikers and political dissidents, etc., for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so it hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing itself from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it. In general, coolness is a positive trait based on the inference that a cultural object (e.g., a person or brand) is autonomous in an appropriate way. That is the person or brand is not constrained by the norms, expectation of beliefs of others. (…) Cool is also an attitude widely adopted by artists and intellectuals, who thereby aided its infiltration into popular culture. Sought by product marketing firms, idealized by teenagers, a shield against racial oppression or political persecution and source of constant cultural innovation, cool has become a global phenomenon that has spread to every corner of the earth. Concepts of cool have existed for centuries in several cultures. In terms of fashion, the concept of “cool” has transformed from the 1960s to the 1990s by becoming integrated in the dominant fabric of culture. America’s mass-production of “ready-to-wear” fashion in the 1940s and ‘50s, established specific conventional outfits as markers of ones fixed social role in society. Subcultures such as the Hippies, felt repressed by the dominating conservative ideology of the 1940s and ‘50s towards conformity and rebelled. (…) Starting in the 1990s and continuing into the 21st century, the concept of dressing cool went out of the minority and into the mainstream culture, making dressing “cool” a dominant ideology. Cool entered the mainstream because those Hippie “rebels” of the late 1960s were now senior executives of business sectors and of the fashion industry. Since they grew up with “cool” and maintained the same values, they knew its rules and thus knew how to accurately market and produce such clothing. However, once “cool” became the dominant ideology in the 21st century its definition changed to not one of rebellion but of one attempting to hide their insecurities in a confident manner. The “fashion-grunge” style of the 1990s and 21st century allowed people who felt financially insecure about their lifestyle to pretend to “fit in” by wearing a unique piece of clothing, but one that was polished beautiful. For example, unlike the Hippie style that clearly diverges from the norm, through Marc Jacobs’ combined “fashion-grunge” style of “a little preppie, a little grunge and a little couture,” he produces not a bold statement one that is mysterious and awkward creating an ambiguous perception of what the wearer’s internal feelings are. While slang terms are usually short-lived coinages and figures of speech, cool is an especially ubiquitous slang word, most notably among young people. As well as being understood throughout the English-speaking world, the word has even entered the vocabulary of several languages other than English. In this sense, cool is used as a general positive epithet or interjection, which can have a range of related adjectival meanings. Wikipedia
Ronald Perry writes that many words and expressions have passed from African-American Vernacular English into Standard English slang including the contemporary meaning of the word « cool. » The definition, as something fashionable, is said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young. This predominantly black jazz scene in the U.S. and among expatriate musicians in Paris helped popularize notions of cool in the U.S. in the 1940s, giving birth to « Bohemian », or beatnik, culture. Shortly thereafter, a style of jazz called cool jazz appeared on the music scene, emphasizing a restrained, laid-back solo style. Notions of cool as an expression of centeredness in a Taoist sense, equilibrium and self-possession, of an absence of conflict are commonly understood in both African and African-American contexts well. Expressions such as, « Don’t let it blow your cool, » later, chill out, and the use of chill as a characterization of inner contentment or restful repose all have their origins in African-American Vernacular English. (…) Among black men in America, coolness, which may have its roots in slavery as an ironic submission and concealed subversion, at times is enacted in order to create a powerful appearance, a type of performance frequently maintained for the sake of a social audience. (…) « Cool pose » may be a factor in discrimination in education contributing to the achievement gaps in test scores. In a 2004 study, researchers found that teachers perceived students with African-American culture-related movement styles, referred to as the « cool pose, » as lower in achievement, higher in aggression, and more likely to need special education services than students with standard movement styles, irrespective of race or other academic indicators. The issue of stereotyping and discrimination with respect to « cool pose » raises complex questions of assimilation and accommodation of different cultural values. Jason W. Osborne identifies « cool pose » as one of the factors in black underachievement. Robin D. G. Kelley criticizes calls for assimilation and sublimation of black culture, including « cool pose. » He argues that media and academics have unfairly demonized these aspects of black culture while, at the same time, through their sustained fascination with blacks as exotic others, appropriated aspects of « cool pose » into the broader popular culture. George Elliott Clarke writes that Malcolm X, like Miles Davis, embodies essential elements of cool. As an icon, Malcolm X inspires a complex mixture of both fear and fascination in broader American culture, much like « cool pose » itself. Wikipedia
When you’re cool, people are pre-disposed to want to be your friend. At least, that’s how it works in youth culture. Romney was the Republican governor of a Democrat state. He got a lot of things done, through compromise. Obama was a Democrat senator – briefly – in a Democrat state. Obama and the Republican-majority U.S. House have been unable to agree on anything for two years. One thing we ought to think about is which candidate can build bridges. If the President can’t work with folks in the other party, it’s likely that no work for the people gets done for another four years. Romney has successfully worked with one of the most partisan Democrat majority state legislatures in the country. Although he promised to build bridges across the aisle, President Obama hasn’t worked well with anyone with an R beside their name. At least on this dimension, it seems to me the choice is clear. Cool is getting everyone on the same page to make life better in America. What do you think? Eddie Settles (septembre 2012)
Les défis auxquels nous sommes confrontés requièrent patience et persistance stratégique. (…) Dans un monde interconnecté, il n’est pas de problème global qui ne puisse être résolu sans les Etats-Unis et peu qui ne puissent être réglés par les Etats-Unis seuls. Rapport de la National Security Strategy (février 2015)
Nous manquons trop souvent d’un sens des perspectives ici à Washington. Nous ne pouvons nous permettre de sombrer dans l’alarmisme à chaque nouveau cycle médiatique. Susan Rice (conseillère nationale à la sécurité d’Obama)
Il est difficile d’établir la ligne stratégique d’Obama dont la présidence s’est largement définie en opposition aux échecs de son prédécesseur. Dès l’introduction, le document se félicite de la reprise de la croissance, la baisse du chômage et de la fin des deux guerres des années Bush : l’Irak et l’Afghanistan. Cependant, certains concepts donnent un éclairage utile sur la façon dont l’administration juge son action internationale jusqu’ici, ou à tout le moins la justifie à posteriori. Il annonce surtout la ligne qui sera celle des deux dernières années de la présidence Obama. (…) Comme l’indique le chercheur Thomas Wright dans une analyse du document, le débat stratégique à Washington sur la nature des menaces auxquelles est confrontée l’Amérique peut aujourd’hui se décliner en deux camps. Un premier camp considère que le système international bâti au lendemain de la Guerre froide est profondément remis en question. C’est notamment la thèse postulée par Henry Kissinger dans son dernier ouvrage, « World Order » mais aussi d’autres analystes comme Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography) ou Walter Russel Mead (The Return of Geopolitics). Agression russe contre l’Ukraine, effondrement du système d’Etats-nations au Moyen-Orient, disputes territoriales en Mer de Chine, nucléaire iranien : plutôt qu’une succession de crises isolées, c’est l’ordre international lui même, fondée des normes de droit, de respect de la souveraineté et d’expansion du commerce, appuyé par le leadership américain, qui est menacé dans ses fondements par des puissances révisionnistes. Une deuxième école, dans laquelle s’inscrit le National Security Strategy, prend le contrepied de cette vision : les fondamentaux de l’économie américaine sont bons et les principaux défis sont d’ordre différents, transnationaux, liés aux risques de la globalisation. Ainsi, si « l’agression russe » est condamnée en des termes sans ambiguïtés dans le document, la Russie n’est pas mentionnée parmi les huit menaces stratégiques auxquelles est confrontée l’Amérique : les attaques « catastrophiques » contre le territoire américain, les attaques contre les citoyens américains à l’étranger ou les alliés, la crise économique, la prolifération des armes de destruction massive, les pandémies, le changement climatique, les disruption des marchés de l’énergie et les conséquences sécuritaires des Etats faillis. Fondamentalement, malgré les appels au leadership américain, le texte est emprunt de prudence face à ce que la puissance américaine peut accomplir. (…) Dès lors, le risque principal auquel s’exposerait la diplomatie américaine serait de sur-réagir, de se trouver piégée dans une dynamique de « surextension ». Quand les adversaires de la Maison Blanche dénoncent un président Obama trop réfléchi et hésitant, voire uniquement réactif devant les crises internationales, ses défenseurs plaident qu’il joue le jeu long et résiste à la pression médiatique ou partisane de court terme. (…) Le National Security Strategy ne rassurera pas les critiques dénonçant une Maison Blanche repliée sur les enjeux de politique intérieure. Si le président Obama fait preuve, depuis les élections de mi-mandat, d’une audace renouvelée sur les enjeux intérieurs (comme l’immigration), il est peu probable que ce soit le cas sur le plan international. De la patience à la passivité, il n’y a qu’un pas. Benjamin Haddad (Hudson Institute)
C’est la coolitude, imbécile !
Effondrement du système d’Etats-nations au Moyen-Orient, expansion incontrôlée de l’Etat islamique, nucléaire iranien, agression russe en Ukraine, disputes territoriales en Mer de Chine …
Chanter et rapper (à la télé) Tweeter, « viner », « instagramer » (et aimer ça) Manger de la « junk food » (sans culpabiliser) Mettre les pieds sur le bureau (et assumer) Jouer avec des enfants (et adorer) …
Alors que les uns après les autres s’accumulent les désastres …
Qu’à l’horizon s’amoncèlent les menaces …
Pendant qu’après avoir menacé les frères Jonas d’une attaque de drones il y a quatre ans et pendant que la rue brûle à 70 km de Washington, le Predator in chief aux 2 500 « kills » au compteur nous présente cette année son traducteur de colère …
Et que son homologue français s’invite à l’émission la plus branchée de Canal plus …
Comment ne pas voir …
Derrière la passivité aujourd’hui théorisée, par le « Sinatra de la politique », comme « patience stratégique » …
Ce « mélange paradoxal de soumission et de subversion » …
Que constitue pour le dernier numéro de Philosophy now …
La si séduisante « cool attitude » qui nous a valu l’élection et la réélection …
Du véritable accident industriel que se confirme être le président Obama ?
What Does It Mean To Be Cool?
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein links Stoicism and Hip Hop.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Philosophy now
April-May 2015
In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. But this doesn’t explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool, and why is it so cool to be cool?
The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation.
Modern Cool
Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. The aesthetic is spread by Hip Hop culture for example, which has become “the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world” (montevideo.usembassy.gov). Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioural tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become “the only distinctive American artistic creation” (White & Cones, Black Man Emerging: Facing the Past and Seizing the Future, 1999, p.60). The African American philosopher Cornel West sees the “black-based Hip Hop culture of youth around the world” as a grand example of the “shattering of male, WASP cultural homogeneity” (Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 1993, p.15). While several recent studies have shown that American brand names have dramatically slipped in their cool quotients worldwide, symbols of black coolness such as Hip Hop remain exportable.
However, ‘cool’ does not only refer to a respected aspect of masculine display, it’s also a symptom of anomie, confusion, anxiety, self-gratification and escapism, since being cool can push individuals towards passivity more than towards an active fulfillment of life’s potential. Often “it is more important to be ‘cool and down’ with the peer group than to demonstrate academic achievement,” write White & Cones (p.87). On the one hand, the message produced by a cool pose fascinates the world because of its inherent mysteriousness. The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire. On the other hand, to be cool can be seen as a decadent attitude leading to individual passivity and social decay. The ambiguity residing in this constellation lends the cool scheme its dynamics, but it also makes its evaluation very difficult.
What is Cool?
In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool? Let me say that cool resists linear structures. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes. This has been well known since at least the time of cool jazz. This paradoxical nature has much to do with cool’s origins being the fusion of submission and subversion.
A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. This does not mean that the cool person needs to be an idealist. On the contrary, very few of the coolest rappers are idealists. Idealism can be extremely uncool, as shown by the self-righteous examples of both neoDarwinists and creationists. Cool is a balance created by the cool person’s style, not through straightforward rules or imposed standards. Coolness implies the power of abstraction without becoming overly abstract. Similarly, the cool person stays close to real life without getting absorbed by it. Going with the masses is as uncool as being overly eccentric. It is not cool to take everything, nor is it cool to give everything away: it seems rather that the master of cool handles the give and take of life as if it were a game. The notion of ‘play’ is important to cool, because in games power gets fractured and becomes less serious, which enables the player to develop a certain detached style while playing. For the cool, this detached style matters more than the pursuit of money, power and ideals.
Classic Greek Cool
In ancient Greece, the Stoic philosophers supported a vision of coolness in a turbulent world. The Stoic indifference to fate can be interpreted as the supreme principle of coolness, and has even been been viewed as such in the context of African American culture. The style of the jazz musician Lester Young, for example, was credible mostly because Young was neither proud nor ashamed. This is a Stoic attitude. Also, in ‘Rap as Art and Philosophy’ (in Lott & Pittman (eds), A Companion to African American Philosophy), Richard Shusterman likens Hip Hop culture to a philosophical spirit which is also implicit in Stoicism.
Epictetus the Stoic posited a strict difference between those things that depend on us and those things that do not depend on us, and advocated developing an attitude of regarding the things we can’t influence as unimportant. What depends upon us are our impulses, passions, attitudes, opinions, desires, beliefs and judgments. These things we must improve. Everything that cannot be controlled by us – death, the actions of others, or the past, for examples – should leave us indifferent. Through this insight that all the things upon which we have no influence are best neglected, a ‘cool’ attitude is nurtured.
Stoics have been criticized for being deterministic and fatalistic. As a matter of fact, we find in this materialist and rationalist philosophy the same spectrum of problems that are linked with coolness, because the Stoic, just like the Cool, has to continually decide what is up to him and what is not. In as far as his indifference extends to areas of life that are within his power because he wrongly believes them to be outside his power, the result will be fatalism, decadence and alienation. Yet should he decide to care about things he believes to be within his power although they are not he loses his coolness. Once again, coolness is a matter of balance; or more precisely, of negotiating a way to survive in a paradoxical condition. It’s about maintaining control while never looking as though you might have lost control. All this is why losing and still keeping a straight face is probably the coolest behavior one can imagine.
Living With the Paradox of Cool
Coolness is control; but the dictator who controls everything is not cool because he does not balance a paradox. The self-control of cool black behavior in and before the 1960s, on the other hand, is immediately linked to the African American inability to control political and cultural oppression. This paradox of the need for self-control in the face of a lack of control nurtured a cool attitude. Thus, instead of revelling in either total control or total detachment, the aesthetics and ethics of cool fractures and alienates in order to bring forward unusual constellations of ideas and actions. In a phrase: the cool person lives in a constant state of alienation.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is staying cool as assistant professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait.
Voir aussi:
Barack Obama et la « patience stratégique »
Benjamin Haddad, chercheur au Hudson Institute à Washington
Le Monde
25.02.2015
La Maison Blanche a publié la semaine dernière le deuxième et dernier « National Security Strategy » (NSS) de la présidence Obama. Le NSS, un document de 26 pages, est censé définir la vision du monde, la « grande stratégie » animant l’action du président et de son équipe. Les observateurs lisent généralement le document pour y chercher un grand principe unificateur de l’action du président, le plus souvent pour l’inscrire dans les grandes écoles de pensée dont les experts de relations internationales sont friands : réaliste, idéaliste, multilatéral, unipolaire, etc. Il peut notamment annoncer de nouvelles doctrines d’engagement militaire. Après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, le NSS de 2002, théorisa la doctrine controversée de « guerre préventive » qui fut utilisée pour justifier l’intervention en Irak.
Il est peu probable que le document de 2015 marque son époque de la même façon. Il est le fruit d’un long exercice bureaucratique et le texte s’en ressent, chaque département devant y trouver son compte : aucune région ou thématique ne doit être oubliée, quitte à sombrer dans le catalogue. La publication a par ailleurs deux ans de retard : symbole de la difficulté de produire un document quand les crises se multiplient et rendent le texte facilement obsolète : Ukraine, Daech, etc.
Il est difficile d’établir la ligne stratégique d’Obama dont la présidence s’est largement définie en opposition aux échecs de son prédécesseur. Dès l’introduction, le document se félicite de la reprise de la croissance, la baisse du chômage et de la fin des deux guerres des années Bush : l’Irak et l’Afghanistan. Cependant, certains concepts donnent un éclairage utile sur la façon dont l’administration juge son action internationale jusqu’ici, ou à tout le moins la justifie à posteriori. Il annonce surtout la ligne qui sera celle des deux dernières années de la présidence Obama.
LES RISQUES DE L’ « OVER-REACH » (SUREXTENSION)
Le texte rappelle sans surprise la nécessité du leadership américain (le terme « lead » est répété plus de 100 fois en 26 pages) mais le tempère avec une mise en garde contre les risques de sur-réaction ou d’unilatéralisme: « Les Etats-Unis défendront toujours leurs intérêts et respecteront leurs engagements auprès de nos allies et partenaires. Mais, nous devons effectuer des choix difficiles parmi nos nombreuses priorités concurrentes, et devons en permanence résister à l « over-reach » qui est le résultat de décisions fondées sur la peur. (…) » Vient plus loin la phrase qui a provoqué le plus de débats : « Les défis auxquels nous sommes confrontés requièrent patience et persistance stratégique. »
Comme l’indique le chercheur Thomas Wright dans une analyse du document, le débat stratégique à Washington sur la nature des menaces auxquelles est confrontée l’Amérique peut aujourd’hui se décliner en deux camps. Un premier camp considère que le système international bâti au lendemain de la Guerre froide est profondément remis en question. C’est notamment la thèse postulée par Henry Kissinger dans son dernier ouvrage, « World Order » mais aussi d’autres analystes comme Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography) ou Walter Russel Mead (The Return of Geopolitics). Agression russe contre l’Ukraine, effondrement du système d’Etats-nations au Moyen-Orient, disputes territoriales en Mer de Chine, nucléaire iranien : plutôt qu’une succession de crises isolées, c’est l’ordre international lui même, fondée des normes de droit, de respect de la souveraineté et d’expansion du commerce, appuyé par le leadership américain, qui est menacé dans ses fondements par des puissances révisionnistes.
Une deuxième école, dans laquelle s’inscrit le National Security Strategy, prend le contrepied de cette vision : les fondamentaux de l’économie américaine sont bons et les principaux défis sont d’ordre différents, transnationaux, liés aux risques de la globalisation. Ainsi, si « l’agression russe » est condamnée en des termes sans ambiguïtés dans le document, la Russie n’est pas mentionnée parmi les huit menaces stratégiques auxquelles est confrontée l’Amérique : les attaques « catastrophiques » contre le territoire américain, les attaques contre les citoyens américains à l’étranger ou les alliés, la crise économique, la prolifération des armes de destruction massive, les pandémies, le changement climatique, les disruption des marchés de l’énergie et les conséquences sécuritaires des Etats faillis.
Fondamentalement, malgré les appels au leadership américain, le texte est emprunt de prudence face à ce que la puissance américaine peut accomplir. Les Etats-Unis ne peuvent répondre seuls aux défis internationaux : « Dans un monde interconnecté, il n’est pas de problème global qui ne puisse être résolu sans les Etats-Unis et peu qui ne puissent être réglés par les Etats-Unis seuls ». Le plus grand risque serait dès lors de l’oublier.
Comme l’a souligné la conseillère nationale à la sécurité d’Obama, Susan Rice lors de la conférence de présentation du NSS : « nous manquons trop souvent d’un sens des perspectives ici à Washington. Nous ne pouvons nous permettre de sombrer dans l’alarmisme à chaque nouveau cycle médiatique ». Dès lors, le risque principal auquel s’exposerait la diplomatie américaine serait de sur-réagir, de se trouver piégée dans une dynamique de « surextension ». Quand les adversaires de la Maison Blanche dénoncent un président Obama trop réfléchi et hésitant, voire uniquement réactif devant les crises internationales, ses défenseurs plaident qu’il joue le jeu long et résiste à la pression médiatique ou partisane de court terme.
UNE MAISON BLANCHE ISOLÉE ?
Pourtant les critiques de la diplomatie du président se multiplient et sont renforcés à Washington. Le Congrès républicain tout d’abord. John McCain, adversaire de Barack Obama en 2008 et favori des néoconservateurs, est le nouveau président de la commission des forces armées où il pourra influer en faveur de ses causes favorites : la confrontation avec le Kremlin, le soutien à l’opposition syrienne et l’augmentation des budgets de défense. Le président de la commission des affaires étrangères, Corker est lui engagé dans un effort pour assurer que tout accord sur le nucléaire iranien doive être ratifié par le Congrès, même si la Maison Blanche a déjà affirmé son intention d’opposer son veto à toute initiative en ce sens.
Une partie conséquente du Parti démocrate, en particulier les proches d’Hillary Clinton, commence aussi à se positionner contre la politique étrangère du président. En précampagne pour l’investiture démocrate (pour laquelle, elle est pour l’instant largement favorite), Hillary Clinton prend soin de se démarquer de certaines positions de la Maison Blanche. Il ne faut pas voir dans cette attitude uniquement du positionnement électoral : Hillary Clinton, qui avait activement soutenu la guerre en Irak, est proche des interventionnistes libéraux du camp démocrate, beaucoup moins timides face à l’usage de la puissance américaine. Dans une interview remarquée l’été dernier, elle a pris des positions proches des faucons républicains sur des sujets comme Israël, la Syrie ou le nucléaire iranien. Et les stratèges démocrates n’hésitent plus à se démarquer du président.
Ainsi, un rapport très remarqué co-signé par des think tank influents proposait en janvier de livrer des armes au gouvernement ukrainien pour contrer l’agression. Il n’a pas échappé à de nombreux observateurs que les principaux signataires (Strobe Talbott, Michelle Flournoy) sont des proches de l’ancienne secrétaire d’Etat. Si le nouveau secrétaire à la défense Ashton Carter s’est aussi déclaré en faveur de cette option (avant le cessez-le-feu de Minsk), rien n’indique que la Maison Blanche penchait en ce sens.
La Maison Blanche est elle de plus en plus isolée ? Peut-être mais le président continuera d’avoir le dernier mot dans les débats stratégiques qui animeront les deux prochaines années : accord sur le nucléaire iranien, décision d’intervenir au Moyen-Orient, etc. Le National Security Strategy ne rassurera pas les critiques dénonçant une Maison Blanche repliée sur les enjeux de politique intérieure. Si le président Obama fait preuve, depuis les élections de mi-mandat, d’une audace renouvelée sur les enjeux intérieurs (comme l’immigration), il est peu probable que ce soit le cas sur le plan international. De la patience à la passivité, il n’y a qu’un pas.
Voir également:
A défaut de sortir de la crise, François Hollande veut sortir de la routine. Après avoir accordé une interview sur la mort et la pluie au magazine Society, le président de la République est l’invité de Maïtena Biraben, dimanche 19 avril, dans « Le Supplément », sur Canal +, une émission d’actualité au ton décalé. Dans son entourage, certains n’apprécient pas du tout ce virage et parle même « d’hipsterisation », comme le racontent Les Echos. Si François Hollande veut se montrer cool, il n’atteint pas encore le niveau de Barack Obama.
Chanter et rapper (à la télé)
Barack Obama a des talents de crooner, et il le sait. Le président des Etats-Unis n’hésite pas à pousser la chansonnette lors de ses sorties publiques. A la Maison Blanche, sur les plateaux de télévision ou lors de discours, Barack Obama donne le la. Des standards de blues au rap en passant par le slam, il est mélomane et il l’affiche.
Il démontre ses premiers talents de chanteur en janvier 2012 à New York lors d’une réunion électorale en vue de la présidentielle de fin d’année. Il entonne un Let’s Stay Together du chanteur Al Green sans fausse note.En février 2012, après avoir pris goût à la chanson en public, il reprend quelques notes de Sweet Home Chicago, du bluesman Robert Johnson lors d’un concert organisé à la Maison Blanche pour le Black History Month, un mois où les Américains célèbrent la contribution de la communauté noire à leur culture. Volant la vedette au chanteur des Rolling Stones Mick Jagger et au guitariste BB King, Barack Obama conquiert définitivement le cœur des mélomanes, et parfait son image de président « so cool ».
Il réitère au printemps de la même année, sans doute après avoir élargi son répertoire musical : le président s’invite sur le plateau du « Tonight Show », de Jimmy Fallon, sur la chaîne NBC, et entame un slam « pédagogique » pour expliquer sa politique sur les emprunts étudiants.
Pas certain que la musique ait fait oublier le fond, mais Barack Obama gagne en quelques semaines de gros points de « branchitude », notamment dans les pays étrangers.
Du côté de l’Elysée, on envisage mal François Hollande pousser la chansonnette en public. Par désintérêt ou volonté de muscler une image trop souvent moquée ? Dans tous les cas, François Hollande reste l’un des hommes politiques qui inspire le plus de parodies.
Tweeter, « viner », « instagramer » (et aimer ça)
Premier président américain à (officiellement) coder, Barack Obama prend le web au sérieux et l’affiche même dans son programme. En 2013, il annonce le lancement d’une semaine de l’informatique à l’école et définit le code comme une « compétence importante, non pas juste pour les jeunes, mais pour l’avenir du pays ».
Au-delà, l’équipe de communication de la Maison Blanche est sur tous les fronts : Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, MySpace… Une armée de communicants raconte le quotidien du président de manière plus ou moins décalée, avec l’objectif de le rendre proche des Américains. Résultat : le monde entier a l’impression d’être dans l’intimité du président et ne loupe aucun de ses plus beaux moments.
Côté français, même si l’Elysée a ouvert dernièrement un Tumblr sur le quotidien du chef de l’Etat, les images sont uniquement prises lors de déplacements officiels et restent très formelles. En 2013, lors d’une conférence de presse à l’Elysée, un journaliste l’avait d’ailleurs interrogé sur son usage de Twitter, une question qu’il avait raillée en répondant :« Twitter n’est pas le centre du monde (…) ça n’intéresse que les journalistes ».
Manger de la « junk food » (sans culpabiliser)
Barack Obama est fan de junk food, il a même son adresse favorite : le Five Guys, à quelques pas de la Maison Blanche. Régulièrement pris en train d’avaler burgers, glaces et autres donuts, le président américain se fiche pas mal de sa ligne, puisqu’il se montre tout autant en train de pratiquer le baseball ou le basket. Voilà qui fait de Barack un digne représentant de l’American way of life, jeune, décontracté… mais toujours svelte.
Une condition que François Hollande doit bien lui envier, puisqu’après avoir subi un régime drastique lors de la campagne présidentielle de 2012, François Hollande a repris du poids une fois élu, rappelait L’Express en 2013.
Mettre les pieds sur le bureau (et assumer)
Il n’y a qu’un seul photographe officiel à la Maison Blanche, Pete Souza. Accrédité pour se balader dans les moindres recoins du bâtiment, il a photographié à de nombreuses reprises Barack Obama dans des postures très décontractées. Pieds sur le bureau, adossé mollement à son fauteuil ou assis sur ses dossiers… Mise en scène ou réalité, Barack Obama a l’air d’être zen dans n’importe quelle situation.
Difficile d’en dire autant de François Hollande, dont l’attitude a souvent été moquée, à commencer par sa photo officielle, où il pose les bras ballants.
Jouer avec des enfants (et adorer)
S’il y a des invités qu’on voit souvent dans le bureau ovale, ce sont bien les enfants. En 2013, Barack Obama avait invité son homologue de 9 ans « the kid president » dans son bureau à la Maison Blanche. Une session vue plus de 7 millions de fois sur internet et qui montre un Barack Obama accessible et paternel. Cet épisode a même permis au « kid president » de rencontrer Beyoncé dans les coulisses de sa tournée.
Le reste de l’année, de nombreux enfants se relaient dans le potager de la Maison Blanche pour apprendre à jardiner et bien manger. Barack Obama s’affiche très régulièrement avec ses filles et distribue à la moindre de ses sorties publiques des checks, (salut avec les poings) aux plus jeunes. Une manière trop cool pour un Président de saluer.
En France, François Hollande a participé, en janvier 2015, à la rédaction des journaux pour enfants Mon Quotidien et L’Actu, à la suite des attentats du début d’année. L’événement a été perçu comme un véritable tournant. La communication de l’Elysée mise (enfin) tout sur les jeunes pour redorer l’image du président. Cool mais un peu tard, puisque la jeunesse était au cœur du programme du candidat socialiste.
Voir de même:
Fermé à la presse »
Décryptages
Tangi Quemener
WASHINGTON, 28 nov. 2013 – «Propagande», «agence TASS», «si Poutine faisait ça…» Barack Obama est habitué aux lazzis des républicains les plus conservateurs, qui lui reprochent des penchants « socialistes », version soviétique. Mais ces derniers jours, les accusations d’autoritarisme visant l’exécutif américain viennent d’un groupe d’habitude moins enclin aux coups de sang: les organisations de presse, fédérées par la centenaire Association des correspondants à la Maison Blanche (WHCA).
Jeudi 21 novembre, la WHCA et des dizaines de médias, dont l’Agence France-Presse, ont envoyé une lettre d’une fermeté sans précédent à Jay Carney, le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, pour protester contre le contrôle de l’information par l’administration démocrate.
Le motif de ce courroux ? Le sentiment, nourri par de nombreux exemples depuis cinq ans, de ne pas bénéficier de la « transparence » médiatique promise par le président lors de sa campagne électorale de 2007-2008. Les reporters de presse écrite et photographes notent même une régression par rapport au précédent locataire de la résidence exécutive, George W. Bush. Le républicain a en effet laissé dans la salle de presse le souvenir d’un dirigeant prêt à se soumettre de bonne grâce aux sollicitations des médias.
Diffusé chaque soir pour le lendemain, le programme quotidien du président permet aux journalistes accrédités dans le Saint des Saints du pouvoir américain d’organiser leur journée. A côté de chaque activité présidentielle, l’administration précise quelle couverture de l’événement sera possible. Cela peut être soit « open press » (tous les journalistes sont autorisés à y assister), soit « pooled press » (seul le « pool », une douzaine de reporters dont celui de l’AFP, y a accès).
Les conférences de presse sont toujours « open press », les déclarations du président dans la roseraie de la Maison Blanche aussi. Le pool prend le relais quand l’activité d’Obama se produit dans un endroit trop étriqué, comme le Bureau ovale et la salle du Conseil des ministres. C’est aussi le cas lors des déplacements du président sur le terrain, aux Etats-Unis comme à l’étranger, puisque seules 13 places sont réservées aux médias dans Air Force One.
Mais trop souvent au goût des reporters, la mention qui s’affiche est « closed press », synonyme d’accès interdit. Evidemment, personne ne prétend photographier Obama dans la « Situation Room », la salle de gestion des crises du sous-sol, où se prennent des décisions engageant la sécurité nationale des Etats-Unis. Cependant, certaines des occasions « closed press », ainsi que de fréquentes restrictions à leurs mouvements lors d’événements publics, laissent aux photographes un goût de cendre.
Exemples ces dernières années dans Bureau ovale: la réception du Dalaï lama, la visite de la jeune héroïne pakistanaise Malala Yousafzaï, un tête-à-tête avec Nicolas Sarkozy et même une rencontre entre Obama et le Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu, ont été déclarées «fermées». En revanche, quelques heures plus tard tombaient des photos officielles, signées du photographe attitré de Barack Obama, Pete Souza.
Autre cas qui a provoqué dernièrement l’émoi des photographes de presse: à la dernière minute lors du discours d’Obama à l’occasion des 50 ans de « I have a dream » de Martin Luther King, la Maison Blanche est revenue sur sa promesse d’accès au monument Lincoln, qui aurait permis de prendre un cliché du président et de la foule en arrière-plan. Souza, dont l’accès à Obama est total et qui pour cette raison se retrouve souvent… sur les clichés du président pris par nos collègues, a bien sûr obtenu le meilleur cadrage, en exclusivité.
La WHCA tente depuis des années d’arracher à la Maison Blanche un plus grand accès aux activités présidentielles, et la publication du communiqué du 21 ressemble à une « frappe nucléaire »: mettre sur la place publique ses doléances, faute de réponses satisfaisantes en privé. Pour elle, l’administration Obama interdit aux journalistes de « photographier ou filmer le président dans l’exercice de ses fonctions officielles », bien qu’elle s’auto-congratule sur la «transparence» sans précédent dont elle ferait preuve.
Ron Fournier, longtemps reporter à la Maison Blanche, résumait la situation le 21 novembre dans les colonnes du National Journal. « La machine de communication d’Obama: un monopole de propagande, financé par vous », les contribuables. Et de citer un échange entre Carney et Doug Mills, respecté photographe, vétéran d’AP et du New York Times, qui a dit au porte-parole d’Obama: « vous êtes comme TASS ». Carney, ancien correspondant de l’hebdomadaire Time à Moscou, a dû apprécier la comparaison avec l’agence de presse officielle de l’URSS, célèbre pour ses communiqués arides de l’ère brejnévienne.
En effet, le problème aux yeux des photographes de presse n’est pas que la Maison Blanche de Barack Obama soit avare d’images, ou les manipule comme à la grande époque des procès de Moscou, quand d’anciens responsables tombés en disgrâce disparaissaient de la tribune sur la place Rouge. La stratégie de la présidence américaine est plutôt de jouer à saute-mouton avec les médias classiques et d’investir tous les médias sociaux, de Twitter à Facebook en passant par Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube et Flickr, des sites régulièrement alimentés en images et en vidéos par une armée de communicants.
Le caractère immédiat des photos de Souza, et leur qualité technique impeccable, font parfois oublier au grand public qu’elles sont partie intégrante de la communication présidentielle. Sur Twitter, où le photographe est suivi par près de 100.000 personnes, elles obtiennent des centaines de «retweets» en quelques minutes, tandis que les «like» se comptent par milliers sur la page Facebook d’Obama, «aimée» par 37 millions de personnes.
Toutefois, préviennent la WHCA et l’association des photographes de presse de la Maison Blanche (WHNPA), il faut prendre ces photos pour ce qu’elles sont: ni plus ni moins que des «communiqués de presse visuels».
Souza et les cameramen officiels sont payés par l’Etat et loyaux à l’administration. Ils ne vont évidemment pas présenter un Barack Obama énervé, fatigué ou désemparé, et chaque plan est sélectionné et édité pour montrer le président sous un jour flatteur.
A l’écrit, le communiqué de presse avance moins masqué: c’est notre rôle de le jauger, d’y ajouter une mise en perspective et de gratter le vernis parfois épais de la communication. Nous savons que bien souvent, les communiqués « enterrent » les vraies informations dans leurs derniers paragraphes, et réservent leurs premières lignes à l’«actualité heureuse».
«Comme s’ils bloquaient l’objectif de l’appareil photo d’un journaliste, des responsables de cette administration empêchent le public de bénéficier d’une perspective indépendante sur des événements importants de l’exécutif», remarquait la WHCA dans sa lettre du 21.
Le même jour, le porte-parole adjoint d’Obama, Josh Earnest, était malmené pendant le point de presse quotidien de la présidence. « Si Vladimir Poutine faisait ça, vous le tourneriez en dérision et diriez que la liberté de la presse (en Russie) n’existe pas », remarquait un de nos collègues. «Depuis ce podium, des gens ont critiqué la façon dont d’autres pays gèrent la liberté de la presse. Et quand cette Maison Blanche diffuse sa propre version des choses sans filtre de la presse, est-ce que cela ne met pas en causes certaines valeurs démocratiques fondamentales?»
Réaction d’Earnest, un peu décalée: pour lui, le recours aux photos officielles et aux nouveaux médias est destiné… à « donner davantage d’accès au président ».
« Il existe des circonstances dans lesquelles il n’est tout simplement pas possible d’avoir des journalistes indépendants dans la pièce lorsque le président prend des décisions, donc plutôt que de le cacher aux Américains, ce que nous avons fait est de profiter des nouvelles technologies pour donner aux Américains un accès encore plus important, en photo ou en film, de ce qui se passe dans les coulisses», selon lui.
« Je comprends la raison pour laquelle certaines personnes dans cette pièce en conçoivent du chagrin, mais les Américains en bénéficient clairement», estime Earnest. Il laisse ainsi entendre que les médias classiques n’ont plus la prééminence d’antan.
Concession de la Maison Blanche? Quelques heures plus tard, le « pool » des photographes était convié inopinément dans le Bureau ovale pour une séance de promulgation de loi. Mais Souza était aussi là, et sa « photo du jour » ressemblait fort à un coup de pied de l’âne, d’ailleurs perçu comme tel par nos collègues présentés sous un jour peu flatteur. Pour le blog spécialisé dans la communication visuelle BagNews, un «allez vous faire voir» visuel, «minable» et «vulgaire». En tout cas certainement pas un rameau d’olivier.
(Avec Eva Claire HAMBACH)
La « photo du jour » de la Maison-Blanche du 22 novembre 2013, signée Pete Souza, au lendemain de la lettre de protestation des journalistes mécontents des restrictions d’accès au président Obama… (AFP / The White House / Pete Souza)
Tangi Quéméner est correspondant de l’AFP à la Maison-Blanche. Il est aussi l’auteur du livre « Dans les pas d’Obama » (JC Lattès, 2012).
Si Barack Obama est si cool, c’est aussi parce que les journalistes ne peuvent pas le prendre en photo
Repéré par Cécile Dehesdin
Slate
16.02.2015
Comment photographier un homme entouré en permanence d’agents des services secrets? Avec des appareils télécommandés, explique le photojournaliste Saul Loeb dans un billet sur l’excellent blog Making Of de l’AFP.
Le photographe de l’agence de presse, accrédité à la Maison Blanche, estime que lui et ses confrères «sont confrontés à un grand nombre de restrictions ayant trait aux moments et aux endroits où ils peuvent photographier le président des Etats-Unis».
Ils contournent le problème entre autres via «des appareils télécommandés aux endroits où nous ne pourrons nous trouver physiquement»: dans un coin, sur l’estrade où le président parle, derrière la tribune présidentielle…
Saul Loeb ne se plaint pas de la situation, estimant qu’«il serait très étrange de voir un reporter perché au sommet d’une échelle derrière le président pendant une conférence de presse et le Secret Service n’apprécierait pas». En même temps, comme il le note:
«Nos mouvements sont limités, et du coup cela limite aussi nos choix pour prendre des images.»
Le manque de liberté de mouvements et donc d’images des photojournalistes de la Maison Blanche n’est-il rien d’autre que le pendant de l’accès open-bar au quotidien de l’homme le plus puissant du monde qu’il nous offre via son photographe officiel?
L’aura de cool absolu qui entoure Barack Obama doit en effet beaucoup –voire tout– à Pete Souza.
Le photographe officiel canarde le président américain partout –dans son bureau, dans ses voyages, quand il va embrasser des bébés et manger des hot-dogs– et fournit en instantané sa légende iconographique. Les photos sont mises à disposition du public et des médias par la Maison Blanche, sous une license Creative Commons, pour qu’elles soient mieux partagées.
GRAND FORMAT
Grâce à Pete Souza, on a l’impression d’être dans la vraie vie de Barack Obama, alors que rien n’est plus construit que ses photos. C’est d’ailleurs un des gros reproches que font à la Maison Blanche les journalistes accrédités, comme le racontait Tangi Quemener dans un autre billet du blog de l’AFP fin 2013.
L’Association des correspondants à la Maison Blanche avait alors publié une lettre ouverte et énervée au porte-parole Jay Carney:
«Les restrictions imposées par la Maison Blanche, suivies par la publication routinière de photographies faites par des employés gouvernementaux de ces mêmes événements, est une contrainte arbitraire et une interférence injustifiée aux activités légitimes de récolte d’informations. Dans les faits, vous remplacez du photojournalisme indépendant par des communiqués de presse visuels.»
Les photographies de Pete Souza inondent les réseaux sociaux, et leur «caractère immédiat […] et leur qualité technique impeccable, font parfois oublier au grand public qu’elles sont partie intégrante de la communication présidentielle», analysait Tangi Quemener. La Maison Blanche avait rapidement invité le pool de photojournalistes à une séance imprévue de photos de Barack Obama signant une loi. Evidemment, Pete Souza était là lui aussi, et il avait choisi de faire une photo… intéressante:
Voir encore:
Derrière les photos «cool» d’Obama, une image sous contrôle
Presse Consignes de sécurité imposantes, événements fermés à la presse. Les photos «autorisées» de Pete Souza irritent les photographes de la Maison Blanche qui parlent de pratiques «soviétiques».
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Au téléphone avec le président Tunisien Beji Caid Essebs, le 5 janvier dernier, depuis le bureau ovale. Sous l’œil de Pete Souza, ancien du Chicago Tribune et de Nature, Obama n’est jamais fatigué ou sous un mauvais angle. Le cadrage est toujours parfait.
Pete Souza (Flickr) (15 Images)
Erwan Le Bec
la Tribune de Genève
17.02.2015
Tout le monde craque sur les incroyables photos de Pete Souza, fameux photographe officiel de la Maison Blanche. Il publie chaque jours plusieurs clichés du président Obama. Souvent insolites, touchants, d’une qualité et d’un cadrage irréprochables, plusieurs sont déjà rentrés dans l’histoire du photo-journalisme en dehors de leur succès populaire. Reste que selon la très sérieuse Association des correspondants à la Maison Blanche (WHCA), il s’agit plutôt d’une machine à communiquer parfaitement huilée, qui n’est pas loin de faire obstruction à la liberté de la presse. «Si Poutine faisait ça…», a même commenté l’un deux.
Un photographe de l’AFP a expliqué lundi 16 février les incroyables difficultés qu’ont les spécialistes accrédités à immortaliser Barack Obama. Les restrictions des services de sécurité sont en effet grandes, les moments sont limités, le lieu choisi, et le point de vue pas forcément heureux. Ne reste plus qu’à tenter un angle original.
Pour l’investiture du président, le photographe Saul Loeb a été jusqu’à placer son précieux appareil au sommet du capitole, muni d’un déclencheur, 48h avant l’événement… Seulement voilà, la technique n’est pas garantie et le risque d’une panne ou de l’intervention d’un tiers est élevé.
S’il faut faire preuve d’autant de prouesse, c’est que la marge de manœuvre est faible. La Maison Blanche distingue les situations «open press», comme les conférences dans la fameuse salle aux rideaux bleus, les espaces restreints au «pooled press» d’une dizaine de reporters en raison des dimensions de certaines pièces, et enfin le «closed press». Dans ce dernier cas, personne ne passe, sauf Pete Souza. Là et ailleurs, cet ancien du Chicago Tribune bénéficie d’accès spéciaux, d’angles inédits et donc de clichés défiant toute concurrence.
Obstructions à la presse
La Maison Blanche justifie ces «closed press» par le caractère confidentiel des téléphones ou des rencontres qui intéressent la sécurité du pays. Mais trop, pour les journalistes accrédités, sont fermés et réservés au seul Pete Souza: la visite du Dalaï Lama, de la jeune Malala Yousafzaï ou même l’accès à la tribune lors du discours des 50 ans du «I have a dream» de Martin Luther King, fermé à la dernière minute.
Dans un billet de l’AFP repris par un site, il ne s’agit ni plus ni moins d’obstructions à la presse, pas si lointaine de ce que faisait l’agence soviétique TASS. Une lettre ouverte a même été envoyée au porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, attaquant frontalement la «transparence» dont se félicite l’administration Obama.
Aucune photo d’Obama grimaçant
«Le problème aux yeux des photographes de presse n’est pas que la Maison Blanche de Barack Obama soit avare d’images», expliquait Tangi Quemener pour l’AFP. «La stratégie de la présidence américaine est plutôt de jouer à saute-mouton avec les médias classiques et d’investir tous les médias sociaux, de Twitter à Facebook en passant par Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube et Flickr, des sites régulièrement alimentés en images et en vidéos par une armée de communicants.»
«Le caractère immédiat des photos de Souza fait parfois oublier au grand public qu’elles sont partie intégrante de la communication présidentielle», conclut-il. L’association de presse va plus loin. Selon elle, il faut uniquement prendre les clichés pour des «communiqués de presse visuels», dans la mesure où Pete Suza est payé par l’Etat et où une sélection impitoyable est effectuée: aucune photo d’Obama fatigué, grimaçant ou sous un mauvais angle n’est sorti.
Rien de soviétique pour la Maison Blanche, qui rappelle les impératifs de sécurité. Il s’agit au contraire de «donner davantage d’accès au président», avec les réseaux sociaux.
Quelques heures après la publication de la lettre ouverte, le «pool» était soudainement invité à photographier le président signant une loi. Pete Souza y était, et en a profité pour cadrer ses collègues sous un jour peu flatteur. Le pouvoir de l’image en somme.
Voir également:
Barack Obama, Mister (faux) Cool
Corine Lesnes
M le magazine du Monde
05.10.2012
Barack Obama est un couche-tard. Contrairement à son prédécesseur, qui bâillait après 21 h 30, le 44e président des Etats-Unis veille souvent après minuit. Il lui arrive de s’installer sur le balcon en demi-cercle que fit construire Harry Truman, au deuxième étage de la façade sud de la Maison Blanche, à une époque où les présidents se permettaient d’entreprendre des travaux d’envergure dans la « maison du peuple ». S’asseoir sur le balcon lui procure un sentiment de liberté, a-t-il expliqué.
Les filles sont couchées. Michelle aussi, qui est généralement au lit avant 22 heures. Barack, lui, veille jusqu’à 1 heure du matin. Rien à voir avec Bill Clinton, qui refaisait le monde avec ses amis noctambules. Obama profite de sa solitude. Il lit, écrit, paraît-il, son journal ; regarde la chaîne sportive ESPN, parcourt l’iPad que lui ont laissé les services secrets. Il rêve peut-être. C’est le seul moment dans la course folle de ses journées où il est libre de s’égarer dans son monde intérieur. Depuis son arrivée à la Maison Blanche, c’est ce qui lui manque le plus : les promenades au hasard, l’inattendu. « La perte d’anonymat et d’imprévu n’est pas un état naturel, a-t-il confié. On s’adapte, mais on ne s’y habitue pas. »
Le président américain se lève à 7 heures. Il fait tous les jours une heure entière de gymnastique. « Sinon, on craque », a-t-il assuré au journaliste et écrivain Michael Lewis qui l’a suivi pendant des mois pour Vanity Fair. Cardio un jour, poids le lendemain. Pour ne pas s’encombrer le cerveau avec des choix sans importance, il limite les options. Pour la sélection du costume du jour, cela signifie : le gris ou le bleu. « Il faut avoir sa routine », conseille Obama. Selon lui, des études l’ont montré : le simple fait de prendre des décisions diminue la capacité à en prendre d’autres. Mieux vaut éviter de se laisser distraire par des détails quand on a à arbitrer entre Jérusalem et Téhéran.
ETRE LE MEILLEUR… UNE OBSESSION
En quatre ans, Barack Obama a singulièrement mûri. Ceux qui s’étaient fiés à son « cool » hawaïen ont été surpris par son côté « perfectionniste et super-compétitif », dit la journaliste du New York Times Jodi Kantor, auteure d’un best-seller sur le couple présidentiel (1). Obama lit tout. Il répète la prononciation des noms des dirigeants étrangers avec le staff avant les sommets. Les assistants qui préparent ses briefings s’inquiètent parfois de le voir n’y jeter qu’un coup d’œil. « Quarante-cinq minutes plus tard, il ressort les éléments dans l’ordre exact où on les a présentés, dit un haut responsable. Il a une mémoire photographique hors du commun. »
Rançon de la facilité : il a horreur qu’on lui fasse perdre son temps. « Monsieur le président, comme vous le savez, la Réserve fédérale, de par son mandat, ne peut intervenir… », commence un assistant. « Je sais, interrompt sèchement le président. J’ai lu le mémo. » L’anecdote est racontée par un ancien conseiller, à qui il est arrivé de se faire remettre à sa place. « Dans les réunions, mieux vaut ne pas sous-entendre qu’on en sait plus que lui ou qu’on est plus intelligent. » Le New York Times s’est amusé à collecter les extraits vidéo où Barack Obama se présente comme le meilleur. Cela va du billard (« Je suis étonnamment bon joueur ») à la lecture pour enfants, comme ce lundi de Pâques, à l’occasion de la traditionnelle chasse aux oeufs qu’organise la Maison Blanche pour 3 000 enfants. « Je vais faire la meilleure lecture qui ait jamais été faite de Green Eggs and Ham », annonce-t-il en ouvrant le livre du Dr Seuss.
Etre le meilleur est une obsession. Quand il joue aux cartes dans Air Force One, l’avion présidentiel, il faut qu’il gagne. Et si c’est le cas, « il ne vous le laissera jamais oublier », dit un familier de la West Wing. « J’ai rencontré beaucoup de gens compétitifs. Mais je ne connais qu’une personne qui le soit plus que lui, affirme le journaliste Richard Wolffe, qui voit régulièrement le président. C’est sa femme. » Michelle aussi a changé, selon lui, à l’épreuve de la Maison Blanche : « Elle est de plus en plus disciplinée, de plus en plus sur ses gardes. »
Une fois par semaine, Barack joue au basket avec un groupe d’anciens pros qui ont une vingtaine d’années de moins que lui. Là non plus, le président ne plaisante pas. Il se fait apporter ses chaussures hautes marquées de son chiffre « 44 ». « Hé Doc, vous avez mon protège-mâchoires ? », l’entend réclamer, un jour, l’écrivain Michael Lewis, au médecin qui l’accompagne dans tous ses déplacements. « On est à cent jours », justifie le président. Cent jours ? Des élections, bien sûr. Barack ne voudrait pas souffrir d’une ecchymose alors qu’il a toutes ses pubs de campagne à tourner. Le président n’aime pas qu’on le ménage, mais Rey Tercera, qui lui a ouvert la lèvre d’un coup de coude en novembre 2010, n’a pas été réinvité, rigolent les autres.
Le samedi matin, à Chevy Chase, dans la banlieue de Washington, le président des Etats-Unis entraîne les « Vipères de Bethesda », l’équipe de sa fille Sasha (11 ans). Qui a gagné tous ses matches, bien sûr, la saison dernière. « Le Congrès aurait des leçons à prendre », a-t-il fait remarquer dans l’un de ces accès de condescendance qui font enrager les républicains.
« AUTHENTICITÉ ET PART D’ARTIFICE »
Obama donne des leçons à ses anciens collègues du Congrès, comme s’il était toujours le prof de droit dans sa salle de classe de Chicago : conseils d’écriture, recommandations sur la manière optimale de serrer la main de l’électeur (toujours le regarder dans les yeux). Un ton qu’il adopte aussi avec ses collègues chefs d’Etat. Quand l’un d’eux lui résiste, Obama lui parle comme le font « les pères lorsque les enfants les déçoivent », selon l’expression de Robert Gibbs, son ancien porte-parole. Nicolas Sarkozy en a fait l’expérience en septembre 2011, lors d’un entretien à l’Hôtel Waldorf Astoria, à New York. Le président français avait irrité ses partenaires en faisant une proposition de conciliation à Mahmoud Abbas, le dirigeant palestinien, au podium de l’assemblée générale de l’ONU. « Nicolas, je suis ravi de te voir, a commencé Obama. Mais je me dois de te le dire en toute franchise : nous avons été un peu surpris par ton discours. Ce n’est pas le genre de relations que nous avons tous les deux. Et ce n’est pas le genre de relations que nous entendons avoir… » C’était la deuxième incartade du Français. En 2010, il avait promis une contribution aux renforts en Afghanistan. Cinq cents soldats, qui n’arrivaient pas. L’explication a eu lieu à l’occasion d’une téléconférence, raconte un diplomate. « Nicolas, tu avais promis que tu ne me mentirais pas. Jusqu’ici, tu ne m’avais jamais menti… »
Obama se sait doué. « Il y a chez lui un sens de l’authenticité et une part d’artifice, dit le journaliste Richard Wolffe, auteur de livres sur la Maison Blanche d’Obama (2). Il sait qu’il peut se produire sur scène. » Un jour d’avril 2008 – il n’était que candidat –, l’humoriste Jon Stewart lui a fait passer un test pour son « Daily Show » : dire les phrases les plus anodines avec son ton « hope and change », la voix inspirée de ses discours. Obama fait l’essai : « Je vous appelle pous savoir si vous êtes satisfait de votre service de téléphone. » On s’y croyait. Les spectateurs ont été épatés.
Cette confiance l’a propulsé à la Maison Blanche. Elle l’a aidé à prendre (seul contre tous, avec le soutien de Michelle) la décision d’imposer la réforme de l’assurance-santé, un acquis historique. Mais elle l’a aussi desservi. Sur le conflit israélo-palestinien, Obama n’a pas écouté les réalistes. Il a surestimé sa capacité à faire bouger les lignes. Sur l’Afghanistan, il a effectué un virage à 180 degrés. Après avoir envoyé 30 000 soldats en renfort, il s’est tourné vers une guerre de drones. « Au début, il y avait une certaine arrogance dans son équipe, dit un analyste qui a passé deux ans dans l’administration. Ils marchaient sur l’eau. Ils pensaient qu’ils comprenaient mieux le Proche-Orient parce qu’ils étaient la génération Twitter. »
L’ancien prof de droit constitutionnel agace les notables. Il consulte à peine les « éléphants » de la diplomatie américaine. Son équipe, des jeunes issus de son staff au Sénat, se soucie peu des barons de l’époque pré-Internet. Comme dans les administrations précédentes, le département d’Etat et le Conseil de sécurité nationale se détestent, et la West Wing est traversée de conflits. Le président laisse faire mais dans les réunions, il prend l’avis de tout le monde. Les militaires, la CIA et « surtout ceux qui se taisent », relate Vali Nasr, ancien du département d’Etat. Il ne laisse rien paraître de son avis puis se retire, pour réfléchir. Pour l’intervention en Libye, il a sollicité jusqu’à l’avis des conseillers juniors, assis derrière les membres du cabinet, dans la Situation Room, et qui se bornent habituellement à prendre des notes. Et tant pis si cela déplaît à certains. Le président candidat n’a pas le temps de s’embarrasser des susceptibilités des uns et des autres. Les chefs d’Etat présents cette année à l’assemblée générale de l’ONU ? Il n’en a reçu aucun : ça aurait fait trop de jaloux et il était pris par la campagne. Il a froissé nombre de donateurs, dépités de ne même pas avoir reçu une invitation à un dîner d’apparat à la Maison Blanche. « Il est tellement sûr de lui qu’il ne lui vient pas à l’esprit que les autres ont besoin d’entendre : « Bon travail » », dit l’un de ses anciens collaborateurs.
TOUJOURS UN « OUTSIDER »
Parmi ceux qui travaillaient dans l’équipe originelle, peu sont restés. Certains ont été écartés après avoir déplu, comme l’avocat Greg Craig, qui s’était mis en tête de tenir la promesse de fermer Guantanamo. Ou Désirée Rogers, l’ex-chef du protocole, trop glamour pour une Maison Blanche soucieuse d’austérité. D’autres sont partis d’eux-mêmes, sans qu’Obama ne prenne la peine de les retenir. « Personne n’est indispensable, à part la famille et les vrais amis de Chicago », constate le journaliste Richard Wolffe. Lesquels sont en nombre réduit : Martin Nesbitt, fondateur d’une société de parkings d’aéroports, et Eric Whitaker, médecin et cadre dans un hôpital.
L’establishment washingtonien désapprouve bien sûr le clan de Chicago. Comment le président peut-il dîner tous les soirs en famille plutôt que tisser des liens dans les cocktails ? Ou aller jouer au golf avec Marvin Nicholson, un ancien caddy, paré du titre de « directeur des voyages », plutôt qu’avec des présidents de commissions sénatoriales ? Les caciques assurent qu’il s’agit d’une faute politique. La preuve : il aurait peut-être réussi à conclure un deal sur le relèvement du plafond de la dette l’an dernier avec John Boehner, le chef de l’opposition, s’il avait noué des réseaux. Bref, il n’a pas réussi à changer Washington parce qu’il ne s’y est pas intégré. Obama avait bien essayé, au début, d’inviter les élus à regarder le Super Bowl à la Maison Blanche. Mais les républicains n’ont pas été dupes : il n’aime pas ça. « Il ne voit même pas les démocrates, dit le journaliste John Heilemann. C’est simple : le président Obama ne parle pas à grand monde. » De son côté, John Boehner a raconté qu’il s’était senti un rien décalé pendant la négociation à la Maison Blanche : « J’étais avec mes cigarettes et mon verre de vin. Obama avec ses Nicorette et son thé glacé. »Par rapport à ses prédécesseurs, le président américain apparaît distant, cérébral. Il n’a jamais cessé d’être l’écrivain qu’il voulait être. « Si un magazine littéraire avait accepté ses nouvelles de jeunesse, il ne serait pas devenu président », assure Michael Lewis. « Il se regarde lui-même faisant de la politique et contemplant le côté surréaliste d’y participer », ajoute le journaliste David Maraniss (3), qui a mené une contre-enquête fouillée suite à l’autobiographie publiée par Obama après sa sortie d’Harvard.
Certains attribuent cette quasi-infirmité relationnelle au fait qu’il a grandi sans père (et même sans mère pendant son adolescence) et qu’il a toujours été un outsider. David Maraniss a retrouvé Genevieve Cook, la petite amie blanche d’Obama lorsqu’il était étudiant à l’université Columbia à New York. Du journal intime de cette fille de diplomate australien, il ressort des jugements d’une perspicacité étonnante sur le jeune Barack, déjà à la fois chaleureux, distant et égocentrique. « I love you », lui dit-elle un jour. La réponse fut courte : « Thank you. »
Pour corriger l’impression de froideur qu’il dégage, Obama court les émissions populaires de l’après-midi où on pose des questions plus intimes que dans les talk-shows politiques. La plus grande erreur de perception à son égard ? « Que je suis détaché, comme Spock [le personnage de « Star Trek »]. Ou très analytique, répondait-il en décembre 2011 à l’inusable animatrice Barbara Walters (83 ans). Les gens qui me connaissent savent que je suis un tendre. Et j’ai facilement les larmes aux yeux. Ce qui est difficile, c’est que les gens s’attendent à ce que vous soyez très démonstratif. Et si vous ne le faites pas d’une manière théâtrale, cela ne passe pas l’écran. »
Mais en public, il répugne à mettre en scène sa sensibilité. Quand le corps de l’ambassadeur en Libye Christopher Stevens, tué à Benghazi, a été ramené lors d’une cérémonie sur la base aérienne d’Andrews, il est resté de marbre. Voyant la mère du diplomate en pleurs, il est allé la réconforter. « Il faut une grande maîtrise pour faire un geste comme celui-là, une minute avant un discours officiel, dit un haut fonctionnaire qui était sur le tarmac. Le président ne peut pas arriver en larmes à la télévision. »
Pour compenser le gouffre culturel qui sépare Obama, intellectuel buveur de thé, des milieux populaires, les conseillers en image ont travaillé. Le président n’apparaît plus qu’avec une bière à la main. Il laboure l’Ohio, terre de cols bleus, avec une chemisette digne du catalogue de Walmart, l’équivalent américain de Carrefour. Il a des arguments de fond, bien sûr. Le chômage est tombé à 7 % dans cet Etat, et cela grâce à l’une des grandes décisions stratégiques de sa présidence : le sauvetage de l’industrie automobile. Mais la perception fait tout.
Et pour l’avoir oublié, pour avoir laissé les républicains le dépeindre comme un « socialiste », couteau de la redistribution entre les dents, il a traversé des moments pénibles. « Le plan de relance de 2009 a été un échec de communication », relève le journaliste Richard Wolffe. Personne n’a jamais su qu’il comportait un volet de réductions d’impôts : « La Maison Blanche a pensé que tout ce qu’elle faisait était si bien qu’elle n’avait pas besoin d’expliquer. » La critique est injuste, estime Daniella Gibbs-Leger, qui était la responsable de la mise en scène de la politique gouvernementale à la Maison Blanche : « Les gens oublient quelle était la situation il y a quatre ans. Une crise après l’autre : l’automobile, la grippe H1N1… »
RIEN N’EST LAISSÉ AU HASARD
En 2010, quand les démocrates se préparaient à perdre la majorité à la Chambre, les perspectives de réélection paraissaient bien éloignées. Le Tea Party était triomphant. Le président a fait un dernier compromis avec les républicains, acceptant de reconduire – y compris pour les riches – les allégements d’impôts passés sous George Bush. Dans son équipe, les divisions s’étaient accentuées. D’un côté, ceux que Richard Wolffe appelle les « survivalistes », partisans d’un recentrage, qui avaient conseillé de laisser tomber la réforme de la santé et de s’adapter aux manières de Washington. De l’autre, les « revivalistes », qui voulaient raviver la torche de l’espoir et du changement, façon 2008. Le président a fini par trancher. Rahm Emanuel, le chef de file des « survivalistes », a été poussé vers la mairie de Chicago tandis que David Plouffe, le gardien du temple, a rejoint la West Wing. Six mois plus tard, en mars 2010, la réforme de l’assurance-santé était votée.
Aujourd’hui, la Maison Blanche tient sa « narration », avec l’assassinat de Ben Laden et le sauvetage de l’industrie automobile. Et Obama a passé la vitesse supérieure. De tout l’été, il n’a pas pris une journée de vacances. Son équipe a bombardé les écrans de publicités qui dépeignent Mitt Romney comme le parangon du capitalisme aveugle. Son entourage dément toute agressivité nouvelle. Barack Obama aime avoir l’air de réussir avec facilité, avec naturel. « Il n’est pas plus compétitif, assure Jen Psaki, la porte-parole de son équipe de campagne. Il veut gagner tout comme il y a quatre ans. Il croit que si les Américains travaillent ensemble, nous pouvons apporter le changement à ce pays. » En fait, cela fait des années que rien n’est laissé au hasard. Obama « veut être le Reagan de la gauche », dit Richard Wolffe. Celui qui reconstruit une grande coalition reprenant l’électorat cols bleus aux républicains – en même temps que la production des éoliennes à la Chine. Depuis le premier jour, il s’engage pour les droits des femmes. Sa première mesure visait à favoriser l’égalité salariale. L’une des dernières est le remboursement obligatoire de la contraception par les compagnies d’assurances, ce qui a causé un sérieux débat avec les catholiques de son équipe. Résultat : il domine Mitt Romney de plus de 15 points dans l’électorat féminin.
Obama a pris des mesures en faveur des Latinos (la suspension des poursuites contre les jeunes clandestins faisant des études) et des homosexuels (l’approbation du mariage gay). Il s’est employé à corriger le désavantage traditionnel des démocrates dans le domaine de la sécurité nationale. Michelle a été mise à contribution : elle est l’envoyée spéciale de la Maison Blanche auprès des familles de militaires, afin de promouvoir l’effort de réintégration des soldats de retour du front. Trois ans plus tard, la Virginie, terre où l’électorat militaire est important, penche pour Obama.
Cible fétiche du Tea Party, le président travaille à rappeler constamment qu’il est chrétien et non musulman, comme s’obstinent à le penser 18 % des républicains, selon un sondage Gallup de juin. Et comme a semblé le croire aussi Madonna – qui s’en est défendue depuis – lors d’un concert le 24 septembre à Washington, même si c’était pour se féliciter qu’un « musulman noir » occupe la Maison Blanche.
En février 2012, au National Prayer Breakfast, un rassemblement annuel de quelque 3 000 personnes (membres du Congrès, diplomates, dignitaires étrangers), le président américain a laissé entrevoir un pan de sa vie spirituelle – dont il n’a manifestement pas parlé au journaliste qui a détaillé son compte à rebours matinal pour Vanity Fair. « Je me lève le matin et je dis une brève prière. Je passe un petit moment à lire les Ecritures et les dévotions. » Sa politique, dit-il, est directement inspirée de l’Evangile. S’il défend les pauvres et les plus vulnérables, face aux compagnies d’assurances et aux institutions financières, c’est qu’il « croit au commandement de Dieu d’aimer son prochain comme soi-même ». Il explique qu’il s’agenouille régulièrement. « J’ai demandé à Dieu de montrer la direction, non seulement dans ma vie personnelle, mais pour la vie de cette nation. Je sais qu’il nous guidera.
Il y a quatre ans, être simplement le candidat du parti était déjà en soi un accomplissement historique. Pour la première fois, un Noir était dans la course finale. « Perdre n’aurait pas été déshonorant », dit un démocrate qui soutient Barack Obama depuis 2006. Cette fois, perdre le ferait entrer dans l’histoire comme une figure importante, mais avant tout symbolique. Il a donc d’autant plus besoin de gagner, ajoute ce proche : « Il n’arrive déjà pas à accepter de perdre au basket contre ses amis. Il ne peut pas se permettre de perdre contre un candidat comme Mitt Romney. »
Corine Lesnes
Correspondante du Monde aux Etats-Unis basée à San Francisco
Notes
(1) Interrogée sur C-Span. Elle est l’auteure de The Obamas (Back Bay Books, août 2012).
(2) Richard Wolffe, Renegade : The Making of a President (Broadway, mai 2012) et Revival : The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House (Broadway, novembre 2011).
(3) Lors d’un débat sur C-Span. Il est l’auteur de Barack Obama : The Story (Simon & Schuster, juin 2012).
Mr. Cool: Obama and the Hipness Factor
John Cassidy
The New Yorker
April 30, 2012
The results of Saturday’s rubber-chicken primary are in. At the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner, which C-SPAN and many Web sites showed live, the incumbent defeated his challenger hands down. “Obama outshines Kimmel and pokes fun at campaigns past and present, Secret Service, Donald Trump,” said a headline on washingtonpost.com. Regular viewers appeared to agree: “Obama is cool,” Ron Lloyd, a commenter from Walla Walla, Washington, wrote at Politico.
“The Sinatra of politics.”
To be sure, Obama’s communication skills remain one of his biggest strengths. They did much, after all, to get him elected in 2008 on the basis of pretty thin résumé, and it is natural to think they will serve him well again this year. As with all valuable resources, though, they need husbanding carefully. If Obama isn’t careful, his opponent could conceivably turn his in-jokes and dazzling hipness against him.
If you haven’t yet seen the speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner, take a peek. To those favorably disposed to him, the sight of Obama in full flow, even now, four years after the beginning of the affair, can be intoxicating.
It should be noted that the Correspondents’ dinner is hardly a tough gig: two thousand media poohbahs and their celebrity guests, most of whom, by the time the President gets up, have been drinking for at least three hours. The President always get a friendly reception. In 2001, George W. Bush brought the house down with an old photograph of himself and his siblings in the bath with their father, George H. W. Bush, when they were young children. I take issue with the sentiments of the Republican operative that my colleague Jane Mayer referred to her post about the evening: I think even Mitt Romney could pull off a speech at the Correspondents’ dinner.
Still, Obama’s performance was a cut above the average. He is a natural, and he knows it. Rather than rushing his jokes, he delivers them slow and deadpan, pausing for effect, using his hands for emphasis. After he’s dropped the gag line—“I want to thank all the members [of Congress] who took a break from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws to be here tonight: let’s give them a big round of applause”—he sometimes bares his teeth and laughs to himself, as if to say, that was good. David Letterman does the same thing.
If the President can take down Jimmy Kimmel, who gets paid millions of dollars for hosting a late-night talk show, surely he should be able to handle Romney, whose rhetorical talents are, let us be kind, less fully developed. That, in case you need reminding, was Newt Gingrich’s argument: faced with a gabber of Obama’s stature, the G.O.P. needed to nominate somebody who could compete with him in the televised debates, and Romney wasn’t up to to task.
It isn’t quite that simple. From the perspective of Obama’s campaign managers, the key issue is how to deploy Obama’s talents most effectively—and what message to send. At the moment, somebody in Chicago or the White House clearly think he needs to shore up his standing among young voters, which, according to some accounts, has been slipping. Slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and joking, at the Correspondents’ dinner, that in his second term he will beat out raps by Young Jeezy, the gangsta rapper, rather than singing Al Green tunes, certainly makes him seem youthful and hip. “Obama has repeatedly nodded to Jay-Z and Nas and some of the genre’s other elder statesmen, but to my knowledge this is the deepest dive into hip-hop that the Prez has attempted so far,” Amos Barshad, a former writer for Spin magazine, commented at Grantland, a Web site devoted to sports and pop culture, “and I gotta say, I’m impressed.”
But for Obama, accentuating his hipness carries some dangers. The essence of being hip, after all, is that you operate on a more refined plane than most people: you are more fashionable, more discerning, and more discriminating than the average boob. For a President who is already viewed by some Americans as an out-of-touch élitist, this isn’t necessarily the sort of image you want to cultivate—especially during a prolonged economic downturn.
“This election is not going to be about who’s cooler,” Peter Flaherty, a senior advisor to Romney, said a couple of days ago at a forum organized by the Washington Post. “The question is going to be, who do you trust to run the economy?” Another Romney adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom (yes, he of the Etch A Sketch gaffe) added at the same event, “You won’t see the governor slow jam the news.”
Of course, the Romney operatives are trying to make a virtue out of a necessity. When you are pitching a former Mormon bishop who uses the diction of a nineteen-fifties preppy, you cannot really hope to compete for the votes of hipsters with a slim groover who uses the word “man” without any irony. (Obama to Newt: “There’s still time, man.”) But as a diligent campaign consultant, you can try to present the other candidate as an out-of-touch élitist who doesn’t understand the concerns of ordinary (read “white”) folks out there in middle America.
That, you can be sure, is where the Republicans will be concentrating their attacks. In his remarks at the Washington Post event, Fehrnstom identified Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio as key battleground states. Notwithstanding the positive review provided by Mr. Lloyd of Walla Walla, it remains to be seen how Obama’s latest media appearances will go down in places like these. For all his smarts, he needs to be a bit careful. Americans like having a funny, articulate, and modern President. But they don’t want somebody who is too cool for school.
John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more, for newyorker.com.
Sorry, Romney. Youre Not Black Or Cool.
Before it’s news
November 5, 2012
At least one complaint has been lodged with the Advertising Standards Association of Ireland over this morning’s newspaper ad. BOOKMAKER PADDY POWER has defended an advertisement that appeared in this morning’s newspapers in which it apologised to Mitt Romney for not winning this year’s US Presidential Election – in part because he’s “not black”.
The half-page advertisement heralds the fact that the bookmaker has already begun paying out on bets that Obama would win tomorrow’s election.
“Sorry, Romney”, the ad declares. “You’re not black or cool.”
This afternoon the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland said it would be beginning an investigation into the advert after receiving a complaint from a member of the public.
“It’s not a clear-cut case that this is offensive or not,” said Frank Goodman, its chief executive, who added that a response would now be sought from Paddy Power to defend the advert against charges that the ad is in breach of the Code of Standards for Advertising, Promotional and Direct Marketing.
“Historically, the black community have been restricted in rights and access to public life,” Goodman said.
“If someone refers to this and says, ‘Obama, you’re not white’ […] that would probably be immediately offensively racist.”
Paddy Power spokesman Ken Robertson dismissed such suggestions, however, and insisted the ad was “not supposed to be racial stereotyping”.
“It certainly wasn’t our intention to set out to offend people,” Robertson asserted, saying the bookmaker merely wanted to underline that it had paid out €650,000 to punters who had bet on Obama to be re-elected.
“In keeping with all Paddy Power advertising, it’s edgy – sometimes a little bit provocative – but always funny,” he said.
Voir de plus:
To Be Cool or to Be Effective, That Is the Question
Eddie Settles
Back in river city
September 16, 2012
We’re all – or should be – thinking about whom to vote for in November.
The young folks say Romney isn’t cool, but Obama is.
Check out the cool test for the David Letterman crowd:
Does “cool” trump the (other) attributes necessary to run the most powerful country in the world? We could probably all agree that George W. Bush was not cool.
Neither was Jimmy Carter (except, for some, it was arguably cool to pull the lever for a peanut farmer). Bill Clinton, that rascal, whose popularity is now at an all-time high, is definitely cool. Or at least so they tell me. Was Lincoln cool? Seriously doubtful.
But I digress.
When you’re cool, people are pre-disposed to want to be your friend. At least, that’s how it works in youth culture.
Romney was the Republican governor of a Democrat state. He got a lot of things done, through compromise.
Obama was a Democrat senator – briefly – in a Democrat state. Obama and the Republican-majority U.S. House have been unable to agree on anything for two years.
One thing we ought to think about is which candidate can build bridges. If the President can’t work with folks in the other party, it’s likely that no work for the people gets done for another four years.
Romney has successfully worked with one of the most partisan Democrat majority state legislatures in the country. Although he promised to build bridges across the aisle, President Obama hasn’t worked well with anyone with an R beside their name. At least on this dimension, it seems to me the choice is clear.
Cool is getting everyone on the same page to make life better in America.
What do you think?
Voir de plus:
Cool transformations
Dale Smith reviews
Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde by Lewis MacAdams
Simon & Schuster, 2001, 288 pp., 68 black and white photographs, USD$27.50
Jacket
December 2001
“Growing up in Texas myself, I know instinctively what he means. It was always cooler elsewhere.”
BY THE TIME I was born in the late 1960s the term “cool” already stood for the quiet defiance and restrained desire that marked it for earlier generations who frequented jazz clubs and taverns like Birdland in New York City. Growing up outside Dallas, Texas, I didn’t know about Bebop or even the Beats, but that didn’t matter. The idea of “cool” had been filtered, extending far beyond its early contexts in jazz circles of the ’40s and ’50s. Cool for me was a given, a statement and testament of oneself.
For my friends and me, cool was a way to get along, to not impose crippling histrionic gestures on each other. It was about a tight-lipped nonchalance and silent defiance in a world run by people much older and more uptight than we could ever imagine ourselves to be. Cool was a ubiquitous code of conduct for nearly everyone I knew. It shielded our confused emotional lives, providing us with a protective cultural apparatus to avert offensive demands made by Reaganomics. In the age of the yuppie, “cool” insured our self-dignity.
In Birth of the Cool, poet-journalist Lewis MacAdams goes behind our cool conceptions to chronicle the historic deliverance of “cool” from small mid-century art vanguards. Before that “‘cool’ was in use among African Americans in Florida as early as 1935,” he tells us. But it wasn’t until the era of Bebop that the term really stuck, widening in usage among black musicians during and just after the Second World War.
MacAdams understands the slippery nature of his subject, and he tells us that “anybody trying to define ‘cool’ quickly comes up against cool’s quicksilver nature. As soon as anything is cool, its cool starts to vaporize.” “Cool” also was about self-protection, “the ultimate revenge of the powerless. Cool was the one thing that the white slaveowner couldn’t own. Cool was the one thing money couldn’t buy. At its core, cool is about defiance.”
Cool hit full stride around 1945, “taking place in the shadows, among marginal characters, in cold-water flats and furnished basement rooms.” Many jazz musicians, poets, performers and artists in New York existed as outsiders in a newly victorious world power. The Cold War in coming years would intensify social pressures, forcing artists into a quiet battle between art created at society’s margins and an explosive machinery of fame, bestowed on unknown artists by the sudden attention of the press and influential critics.
Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac are two such men for whom experimentation, social defiance and singular willpower ultimately crashed under a market conspiracy to move their art into mass consciousness (and consumption). They were the first to become national ambassadors of cool by embodying its very essence.
Others before them such as Miles Davis, Lester Young and Charlie Parker were still guiding spirits of cool, ruling for many in the imagination behind the mediated figures of Pollock, Kerouac and other popular stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Andy Warhol. But it was the media who embraced cool and presented it to a country hungry for some new expression as the Cold War destabilized a collective psyche already battered by World War II and conflicts in Korea.
Stories fuel his book, and MacAdams spins a narrative of cool by focusing on key figures of mid century art, music and literature. He finds in legend and lore the traits of “cool,” looking first at the black musicians closest to its roots, then at the quick transformation of cool from underground bohemian posture to a mainstay feature of national life. It was after all an African American phenomenon, and whites have always been drawn to the power of black art. Behind their hip facades, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins and other black jazz musicians are featured as conduits of cool.
MacAdams also acknowledges heroin use among musicians, not to moralize against it in the manner of Ken Burns’ recent documentary, nor to uplift it as a kind of inspiring daemon, but to show its use and the underground culture that developed around it. Sharing the words of trumpeter Red Rodney, MacAdams tells us that “Hipsters used heroin. Squares didn’t. Heroin gave us membership in a unique club, and for this membership we gave up everything else in the world. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.”
It was saxophonist Charlie Parker’s drug habit that influenced scores of younger musicians. “People followed Bird around everywhere, analyzing his moves,” MacAdams says. “Yet even as his reputation soared, and the music that he pioneered was coming of age, Parker’s health and music were collapsing.”
William S. Burroughs, another famous junkie and son of “genteel St. Louis upper-middle-class society” receives considerable attention as an outlaw figure, the wandering fuck-up who wants society to leave him alone to cruise for boys and take drugs. He is an uncanny image of depravity through which the idea of cool was filtered and extended.
Once Kerouac’s fame was sealed with the now legendary On the Road, Burroughs became an underground celebrity for his novels Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night and Place of Dead Roads. But throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s he wandered between American cities and rural areas in South Texas and Louisiana, living on the outside, a would-be gangster, unknown and desolate save for a small pension offered by his family. With Kerouac, Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Joan Vollmer (the wife he accidentally shot in Mexico City) and others, he lived the life that one day would be transformed into legend.
But his petty thefts, drug addiction and other brushes with the law left him scarred too. “I am so disgusted with conditions I may leave the U.S.A. altogether,” he wrote Kerouac in November 1948. The following year he crossed the border to Mexico, “inaugurating an exile that would last, with only a few brief, furtive interruptions, for the next twenty-four years.”
While Burroughs and others blasted America with drugs and sex, looking for a life free of the gripping social conditions of the Cold War, cool was extended further into the mainstream. D.T. Suzuki’s Columbia University lectures introduced a generation of young East Coast intellectuals to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. In addition to John Cage, Philip Guston and Erich Fromm, “Suzuki inspired an entire generation of ‘bodhisattvas of cool’ — new, cool heroes indifferent to privilege, dogma, and attachment in but not of the world.”
Socially, the Left embraced cool. Activist Dorothy Day, Living Theater performers Julien Beck and Judith Malina, pop artist Andy Warhol and singer Bob Dylan find space in MacAdams’ pantheon of cool. In Dylan, who abandons the leftist idealism of the folk movement to expand his music to a wider audience, MacAdams sees the ultimate upload of cool into the mainstream.
Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” revealed an earlier popularization of “cool” as a kind of commodified personality, insisting “cool was sexual,” and that “cool was capable of being seduced.” White intellectuals and artists sexualize this passage, a white acculturation to African defiance and self-defense extending through the ’50s and ’60s. The power of “cool” is that of self-transformation, the ultimate in New World mythology, and the reinvention of ourselves into social abstractions is one result of cool attitudes, poses and social extensions.
The value of this book lies in the historic narratives we encounter throughout it. Neither a celebration, exactly, nor a critical evaluation of it, the “cool” is shown by virtue of the forms it took in the lives of musicians and artists such as Charlie Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gary Snyder and others.
“If cool has been trivialized, it’s also been globalized,” MacAdams writes. “As English has spread around the earth, so has cool. To use the word ‘cool’ well is to partake of a central ritual of global culture as profound and as universal as a handshake.”
While he doesn’t say so, the global sale of the “cool” is nothing to celebrate. The mass production of personality, stamped out with products from Nike to Coke, or Budweiser to VW, is less a front for individual security than a necessary stance taken for success. The individual has been usurped by the cool projection of style and attitude, copped from magazines, movies, television — wherever the personal can be mediated.
But MacAdams remembers for us here the African American foundation of our current condition in a cool society, showing us a collaboration of American identity between the individual and the society that reduces us to a standard cookie cutter cutout of some greater mystery or more alien form.
For MacAdams, growing up in Texas, “‘Cool’ meant not only approval, but kinship. It was a ticket out of the life I felt closing in all around me: it meant a path to a cooler world.” Growing up in Texas myself, I know instinctively what he means. It was always cooler elsewhere.
But now that cool is everywhere, a global product of consumer marketing, we’re still waiting, anxious for what new image of ourselves to appear? With few traces of sentiment, the history behind the cool is a record of the resilient and adaptable psyche of a nation. MacAdams cuts to the chase to show us his version of the “cool,” and by extension, also where we come from.
Lewis MacAdams is the author of ten books of poetry, three film documentaries (including What Happened to Jack Kerouac?) and is an award-winning writer for Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times Magazine and many others. Born in Texas, he graduated from Princeton in 1966, and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. You can read his piece on Philip Whalen in Jacket 11, and Dale Smith’s review of Lewis MacAdams’ The River: Books One and Two in Jacket 7
Dale Smith lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the magazine Skanky Possum with his wife, the poet Hoa Nguyen. You can read Kent Johnson’s interview with Dale Smith in this issue of Jacket.
Voir encore:
Cool Politics: Styles of Honour in Malcolm X and Miles Davis
For John Fraser
George Elliott Clarke
Duke University
1998
The following article, « Cool Politics: Styles of Honour in Malcolm X and Miles Davis, » raises two implicit issues, one theoretical, the other personal. The hidden theoretical question is, how is it possible to discuss African-American masculinities in a postcolonial context? In other words, what congruencies exist between African-American literary theory/cultural studies and postcolonial theory? The secret, personal question is, what motivates my interest in undertaking the attempted rehabilitation of two sorry, African-American misogynists? If these queries are sediments in the essay itself, the same is true, perhaps, of their potential solutions.
Certainly, I see no essential divorce between African-American Studies and postcolonial theory. Indeed, one obvious linkage between the two is that both come into being at the same historical juncture, whether one wants to date this moment as the period of full-blown modernism (1914-1939), or whether one prefers to specify the period of post-World War II decolonization. In either case, African-American socio-political theorists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to bell hooks, have been central to the articulation of theories of political liberation that have proven influential for decolonized intellectuals. Famously, for instance, Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes saw their race pride poetics recapitulated in the works of African négritude writers like Léopold Senghor. Likewise, the revolutionary analyses of African-American leaders like Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) found an audience among Caribbean intellectuals, including exiles in Britain in the 1960s (See Carew). U.S. Black Panther Party rhetoric was translated and made to suit the aspirations of Canadian Québecois radicals (SeeVallières). Of course, African-American intellectuals have also been strongly influenced by their colonial and postcolonial counterparts. Obviously, Mahatma Gandhi’s indépendantiste movement in India provided a model for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, while South Africa’s Nelson Mandela has been adopted into the African-American pop culture pantheon. Moreover, the writings of the Martiniquan psychiatrist and Algerian liberation theorist Frantz Fanon are primary texts in African-American Studies and postcolonial theory. (Notably, Fanon borrowed some of his concepts from Du Bois.)
But the parallels between African-American Studies and postcolonial theory run deeper than their participation in the same intellectual economy. Indeed, African America evolved via a colonial process. For one thing, Philip Brian Harper urges that while « the situation of black Americans [cannot] be posited unproblematically as a colonial one, its historical sine qua non–the slave trade–can certainly be considered as a manifestation of the colonizing impulse » (253, n.26). Charles P. Henry, in Culture and African American Politics (1990), notes that present-day « Black nationalism, as an ideological response to white exclusion and uneven economic development, place[s] [urban issues] under the rubric of internal colonialism . . . » (106). Summing up others’ views on the subject, Henry writes, « Like the conventional colony, the black colony in the United States is characterized by political powerlessness, economic dependence, and social isolation » (103). Malcolm X, in a 1964 speech, offers this analysis: « America is a colonial power. She has colonized 22,000,000 Afro-Americans by depriving us of first-class citizenship, by depriving us of civil rights, actually by depriving us of human rights » (9). In American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971), American poet-critic Kenneth Rexroth concedes that « the [black] militants’ charge that Black America is an internal colony has been true as far as poetry was concerned » (149). He even sounds a postcolonial note, claiming that « Black poetry has been provincial, like Canadian, until recent years, or Australian still » (149).
Not only do some African-American scholars accept the analysis that Black America constitutes a « colony » within the United States, some also apply postcolonial theory to its cultural production. Hence, African American writer Gayl Jones, in her study of the African-American oral tradition, is sensitive to the political importance of the « Canadian English » (10) in Margaret Laurence’s novels:In Margaret Laurence’s prose . . . we see the need for asserting identity through language. This applies to a nation’s need to name its own songs, themes, and character in its own distinct language, and to a person’s need to say, this is who I am (or in collective oral traditions, as are most by implication, « this is who we are »). And by discussing [Laurence] we move closer to the motives of the African American writer and many other minority and Third World writers in their usually more manifest anddeliberate use of oral traditions and folklore to achieve and asserta distinctive aesthetic and literary voice. (7)
Like Jones, many African-American intellectuals explore the similarities between African-American culture and other postcolonial cultures. Indeed, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd opine that « Afro-American culture . . . can function as a paradigm of minority cultures » (5).
Being a once colonized entity, African America generates familiar, postcolonial concepts. For instance, Du Bois’s articulation, in 1903, of the American Negro’s « double-consciousness, » this sense of always feeling one’s « twoness, –an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder » (3), almost echoes the famous verdict in Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839) on the government of the British North American colonies: « I found two nations [Francophones and Anglophones] warring in the bosom of a single state [Québec] . . . » (8). But Du Bois’s comment also anticipates Canadian scholar Linda Hutcheon’s sense that Canadians possess « that doubleness able to see both sides at once » (17). To live black in the United States is, then, to develop a postcolonial consciousness. Given this reality, one can harmonize African-American Studies with postcolonial theory.
Two recent articles should help to clarify my personal motives in attempting to recuperate, for progressive political use, Malcolm X and Miles Davis and–along with them–the apparatus of chivalry. In « Hollow triumph, » a review of works reconsidering The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, British critic John Gray observes that « Marx’s expectations of socialism have been disappointed everywhere; but his glimpses of how capitalism hollows out bourgeois societies are proving prophetic » (4). Triumphalist capitalism has even castrated conservativism:Conservative parties seek to promote free markets, while at the same time defending « traditional values. » It is hard to think of a more quixotic enterprise. Free markets are the most potent solvent of tradition at work in the world today. (4)
Yet, if traditional socialism and conservatism cannot restrain neoliberalism, then what is left? (No pun intended.) One possible answer is spelled out in John Fraser’s America and the Patterns of Chivalry (1982), where he argues for the continued salience of codes of honour in political action: « The various chivalric-martial syntheses . . . make effective, high-energy combat easier, whether on behalf of so-called traditional or so-called radical principles » (231). I feel that X and Davis illustrate, despite their flaws, the possibility for the revitalization of non-sexist and life-enhancing chivalric-martial concepts such as virtue, gallantry, and honour, all of which can be used to « fight the powers that be. » But my other major reason for wishing to reactivate these concepts is that they continue to motivate many black males, including intellectuals. See, here, African-American writer Gerald Early’s recent reflections on Muhammad Ali and his importance to Early’s youth:. . . I saved my paper route money and simply bought a bat, the best bat I could find, a genuine Louisville Slugger, the first one I ever owned. . . . I carefully carved, scratched, really, into the bat the word « Ali ». . . . I just slung it on my shoulder like the great weapon it was, my knight’s sword. And I felt like some magnificent knight, some great protector of honor and virtue, whenever I walked on the field with it. I called the bat « the Great Ali. » (14)
Early’s chivalric characterization of himself–and Ali–is an act replicated a million times over among African-American males, and with particular reference to X and Davis. I need to explore the progressive element of this cultural imperative because these men are my heroes. I confess I am drawn to them as a leftist, African-Canadian intellectual of African-American and West Indian heritage. Moreover, like them, I live with the postcolonial irony that, for all my conscious critique of European–especially Anglo-Saxon–culture, I have inherited, for better or worse, the Anglo-Saxon slavemasters’s love of codes of honour.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, known popularly as Malcolm X (his Nation of Islam-issued name), and Sir Miles Dewey Davis III (whose honorific derives from his induction in 1988 into The Knights of Malta[1]) share intriguingly similar biographical details. Born in the mid-western United States, in 1925 and 1926 respectively, these iconic incarnations of African-American masculinity came to maturity during the era of Euro-American-authored apartheid in the United States, yet attained cross-over and international prominence in their proper fields of theological-cum-political theorizing and jazz trumpet virtuosity and music theory innovation. They also authored celebrated, as-told-to autobiographies. In collaboration with Alex Haley, X narrated The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Davis drafted, with the assistance of Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (1989). Though X was assassinated in 1965 and Davis died of a pneumonia-triggered stroke in 1991, they persist as phantasmal cultural presences through their books (including Davis’s The Art of Miles Davis,[2] a portfolio of his paintings) and their recordings (X’s speeches and Davis’s music). The Ballantine Books paperback edition of X’s Autobiography achieved, in November 1992, its 33rd printing since 1973, while Davis’s post-mortem popularity as a jazz artist seems poised to eclipse that of John Coltrane (1926-1967), the race pride emblem par excellence of the 1960s. [3] X and Davis dominate the popular cultures of their separate demesnes. Transfigured into demi-deities, they are omnipresent in mass media, in film (Spike Lee’s X [1992]), opera (Anthony and Thulani Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X [1986]), documentaries, books, recordings, and clothing and associated tchotchkes. Even as X and Davis are reified into protean, Warhol-like pop idols, their representations also dramatize and reproduce a patriarchal black masculinity, an anarchic machismo. Worse, this rugged phallocentrism, which bell hooks blames for « much black-on-black violence, » among other ills (Black 111), is furthered, perhaps, by the seductiveness of these figures for urban, African-American, male youth, from whose ranks they came and to whose concerns and styles they paid scrupulous fealty. [4] In fact, the steady appeal of these figures likely owes something to their efforts, during their careers, to address this alienated constituency. [5] Positioning themselves as archetypal black men, they became exemplary champions of the black male-delineated worlds of black religion and black music, spheres in which the masterful and the triumphant exude confidence, poise, purpose, style–in short, ‘cool.’ Their investments in codes of honour, in ‘coolness,’ offer a context for their cultural success, but also, arguably, useable notions for the construction of a re-energized and progressive African-American socio-political movement. [6] Paradoxically, too, their styles of honour yield means for subverting their sexism, while yet permitting their inscription into avant-garde politics and aesthetics. [7]
The issuance of salvific versions of X and Davis is hampered, however, by their patriarchal proclivities, their forthright pimping, and their verbal and physical assaults on women. Patricia Hill Collins, a perceptive reader of X’s views on gender, declares that he classified women into « two opposing categories »–as « Eves–deceptive temptresses who challenged male authority » (74) or as « Madonnas–archetypal wives and mothers who sacrifice everything for their husbands and children » (76). [8] Too, X’s Autobiography abounds in such stereotypes. Remembering his days as a zoot-suited dandy, X worries that he seduced Laura, an incipient lover, into a sensual and self-destructive life in Roxbury. If he had had the perceptiveness of a former Harlem friend, « Sammy The Pimp, » though, he « might have spotted in Laura then some of the subsurface potential [for prostitution, drug addiction, and lesbianism], destined to become real, that would have shocked her grandma » (Autobiography 64). He espouses, here, an unreconstructed, street-level Calvinism. Later, X suggests that, because he chose the white Sophia, a « fine » blonde over Laura (Autobiography 66), she suffered a vertiginous dégringolade:Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there. The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail. . . . Defying her grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor. This led to dope, and that to selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian. One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this. (Autobiography 68)
If Laura signifies the decline of a black woman, especially in the absence of the ‘correct,’ heterosexual bonding, other black women appear bestialized. X tells of dancing with Mamie Bevels, « a big, rough, strong gal, [who] lindied like a bucking horse » (Autobiography 64). Recalling his Detroit Red, pimp-hustler lifestyle, X sketches a New York City dominatrix as « a big, coal-black girl, strong as an ox, with muscles like a dockworker’s » who would grease « her big Amazon body all over to look shinier and blacker » (Autobiography 119), using terms that foresee those of writer Eldridge Cleaver, a chief, late-1960s proponent of black patriarchal chic. [9] X also treated Sophia parasitically, confessing that « even when I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket, when [Sophia] came to Harlem I would take everything she had short of her train fare back to Boston » (Autobiography 135). He justifies this behaviour by blaming the victim: « It seems that some women love to be exploited » (Autobiography 135). X would also « slap [Sophia] around, » for « every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this » (Autobiography 135, his italics). [10] Joining the Nation of Islam did not alter X’s gendered vision. As Harlem-based Minister Malcolm X, he was notorious for his anti-woman oratory, the catalyst for which he cited as « personal reasons »: « I’d had too much experience that women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh » (Autobiography 226). For most of the Autobiography, X is a figure whose inchoate, revolutionary, political consciousness is bounded and circumscribed by retrograde notions regarding half of the African-American community.
Davis’s Miles: The Autobiography articulates damningly the speaker’s own violence-prone exploitation of women. While a heroin addict in the early 1950s, for instance, Davis « met a nice young girl »: « But I was fucking her over like I was fucking over all the women I knew at that time. If they didn’t have no money I didn’t want to see them. . . . » (172). After marrying dancer Frances Taylor in 1958, Davis recalls that he became abusive: « Every time I hit her, I felt bad because a lot of it really wasn’t her fault but had to do with me being temperamental and jealous » (228). During his self-described Silent Period, between 1975 and 1980, when he was neither performing nor recording, Davis « just took a lot of cocaine . . . and fucked all the women I could get into my house » (335). « I had so many different women during this period, » he confesses, « that I lost track of most of them and don’t even remember their names » (336). These women were anonymous, interchangeable commodities, « there one night and gone the next day » (336). Valorizing « Brazilian, Ethiopian, and Japanese women, » Davis devalues African-American women:Most of them are in competition with you, no matter what you do for them. . . . Most white women tend to treat a man better than a black woman does, because most white women don’t have those [psychological] hangups that black women have. I know this is going to make a lot of black women mad but that’s just the way I see it.
See, a lot of black women see themselves as teachers or mothers when it comes to a man. They’ve got to be in control. (401) [11]
Davis’s vision of African-American women differs little from that of Cleaver’s Accused. White women fare better. Recalling his affaire de coeur with French chanteuse Juliette Gréco, Davis eyes her as a fetishized object: Gréco « was just so fine … long black hair, beautiful face, small, stylish » (126), « probably the first woman that I loved as an equal human being » (127). But when, as an addict, he met Gréco in New York City in 1954, Davis went « into my black pimp role, » asks her for money, and, as he was leaving, yelled, « ‘Aw, bitch, shut up; I told you I would call you later!' » (185-186). Though Davis claims, « I didn’t hate women; I loved them, probably too much » (336), his attitudes echo X’s phallocentric reasoning.
Expressions of, as Michele Wallace terms it, « black macho, » [12] pervade the script of late-1960s writers like Cleaver and pervert the rhetoric of Black Aesthetic, Black Power, and Black Panther Party leaders and disciples. As Houston A. Baker urges, « a lot of people committed all kinds of transgressions and just plain old nonsense under the sign ‘black men' » during this period (133), and these influences, violations and stances persist, festering in the constricted psychic spaces left to young, urban, African-American males. [13] Nor has jazz been immune from phrasing claustral ideas, for, from its inception in the streets of New Orleans, it has displayed, posits critic Richard Williams, « a strong component of competitive machismo. . . » (37). Certainly, an imperious, black machismo polices contemporary popular culture. « Public figures such as Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Chuck D., Spike Lee, and a host of other black males, » notes hooks, « blindly exploit the commodification of blackness and the concomitant exotification of phallocentric black masculinity » (Black 102). Paul Gilroy believes that « An amplified and exaggerated masculinity has become the boastful centrepiece of a culture of compensation [i.e. Rap music] that self-consciously salves the misery of the disempowered and subordinated » (85). The en vogue glamour of X and Davis as role models is signaled in part by their flagrantly recuperable machoism, sexism, and misogyny. Their ‘value’ depends, in part, on their status as good currency in the counterfeit-ridden marketplace of black phallocentrism.
But there is, perhaps, another reason for the apparent popularity of their works, namely, the codes of honour, or of ideal behaviour, they enshrine. If visions of justice determine masculine ideals, the exalted elements of the discourses of and around X and Davis are, for young black male audiences, likely those which codify masculinity in a manner that might assist survival. That manner, or style, is represented by the sign ‘cool.’
‘Cool’, though an amorphous quality–more mystique than material–is a pervasive element in urban black male culture. As sociologists Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson evince in Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (1992), African-American men employ « cool » as « a tool for hammering masculinity out of the bronze of their daily lives » (2). It is a « strategic style » that « allows the black male to tip society’s imbalanced scales in his favor » (2). Importantly, too, « coolness means poise under pressure and the ability to maintain detachment, even during tense encounters » (2). To further define the indefinable, Majors and Billson produce a pantheon of cool: « Black athletes, with their stylish dunking of the basketball, spontaneous dancing in the end zone, and high-fives handshakes, are cool. The twenty-two-year-old pimp, with his Cadillac and « stable of lace » (prostitutes), is cool. Celebrities such as Miles Davis, Eddie Murphy, and the late Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. are cool » (4). (Though X is absent here, Imani Perry believes that his style suited « the cool aesthetic in [African-American] folklore [which] respects composure and asserts the importance of personal control over a situation » [179].) Crucially, in Majors and Billson, coolness involves a willingness to engage in violence (33), to risk death (34), to suppress emotion (in interactions with friends, family members, lovers, spouses, and children), to value spontaneity, expressiveness, and stylishness (71), and to prize verbal dexterity (99). These qualities of cool render it an essential survival mechanism in a society in which « except for people over age eighty-five, black males are dying at a higher rate than any other group at any age » (19). Given this vicious context, any moral code that signals meaning, community, and purposefulness, that is to say, that combats anomie, is potentially irresistible. Coolness is one such code.
If coolness is an antidote to (or a palliative of) crisis, X and Davis are eminently marketable conveyors of this ‘medicine.’ Their ‘packaging,’ then, communicates charismatic aspects of cool, such as resourcefulness, quick thinking, skill, courage, fierceness, seeming insouciance, and fashion smarts. In his Autobiography, for instance, X remembers purchasing a zoot suit, in his Boston dandy phase, and taking three « sepia-toned, while-you-wait pictures of myself, posed the way ‘hipsters’ wearing their zoots would ‘cool it’–hat dangled, knees drawn close together, feet wide apart, both index fingers jabbed toward the floor. Of course, « the long coat and swinging chain and the Punjab pants were much more dramatic if you stood that way » (Autobiography 52). Following this « ‘hip code,' » X learns to repress his emotions (Autobiography 52). As Detroit Red, X alters his style again: « all of my suits were conservative. A banker might have worn my shoes » (Autobiography 136). X also exhibits cool in his preparedness to die for a matter of principle. Caught in a « classic hustler-code impasse » with West Indian Archie, X contemplates resolving their affaire d’honneur by way of a shoot-out, given the importance of « face » and « honor » in « our sidewalk jungle world » (Autobiography 127). Later, as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, X courts martyrdom, acknowledging that « societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies » (Autobiography 381-382). His ‘cool’ oratorical and performative skills were also showcased in his deft handling of hostile media. Murray Kempton insists that X’s « special genius was for preserving his message intact in the prison of the sound bite » and « the coldness of his voice to summon . . . ferocity » (43). With his telegenic looks and his scorched-earth discourse, he was a McLuhanesque personification of televisual vivacity: « Malcolm was like JFK or Elvis. He was made for the TV age, the information age and the hip-hop age » (Tate, « Can » 184). [14] In sum, X embodied a catalogue of cool values: « rebellion, intellect, style, grace, strength, the power of personal transformation and disarming honesty » (Imani Perry 185).
For his part, Davis is cool incarnate. The originator of so-called cool jazz, his The Complete Birth of the Cool (1949) recording is a classic. [15] According to Williams, Davis established his artistic « superiority » via the « development of a style, both personal and musical, so cool as to render its owner beyond competition–untouchable, unknowable, invulnerable » (37). His Autobiography anatomizes cool. Like X, Davis is fearless: « I ain’t never been the scaredy type, never was » (18). He knows « what I want, always have known what I wanted. . . » (19, his italic). He fashions himself in desirable guise: « Me and a couple of my friends–who were also into clothes–started comparing notes on what was hip and what wasn’t » (32). He represses his emotions: « I was just cold to mostly everyone » (186). He insists on his own values: « I’m black and I don’t compromise, and white people–especially white men–don’t like this in a black person, especially a black man » (383). Like X, Davis carried himself with an impressive, antinomian suavity. Krin Gabbard underscores the essential maleness and independence that Davis’s playing and personality communicated:Many phallic elements persisted in Davis’s playing, including spikes into the upper register, fast runs throughout the range of the instrument, and an often exaggerated feel for climaxes. He was also conspicuous in refusing to develop an ingratiating performance persona, often turning his back on audiences, ignoring their applause, and leaving the stage when other musicians were soloing. (110-111)
In addition, his public postures comprised « carefully crafted performances » (Major and Billson 4)–the essence of cool.
Though their emblematic coolness underlies the inviting stances of X and Davis, their commodification on this basis does not erase the truth that « coolness may be a survival strategy that has cost the black male–and society–an enormous price » (Major and Billson xi). As hooks observes, « asserting their ability to be ‘tough,’ to be ‘cool,’ black men take grave risks with their lives and the lives of others » (Black 111). Too, the cool images of X and Davis that circulate within African-American popular culture are mere reifications–all beaucoup style and denatured substance. Both figures have suffered ironic iconizations into a kind of cool that reproduces them as true ‘souls on ice,’ as cultural heroes whose politics and social relevance are frozen in two-dimensional friezes or freeze-frames. [16] To maintain the accessibility, the currency, of these figures for progressive causes, however, one must recontextualize and reconfigure their « cool poses. » One must relocate the seductive, sirenic appeal that X and Davis have for young black men, within a new values matrix. Ironically, though, these ideas refer to a powerful, older system of mores, codes of honour, that exists, almost subterraneanly, in Western–and African-American–pop and ‘high’ culture.
I refer here to chivalric codes that, far from vanishing after the successful revolt of the Thirteen Colonies against imperial rule and the establishment of the American republic, seem to have become vital constituents of latent notions of nobility. In his convincing, polymathic study, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (1982), John Fraser shows that, despite the American Revolution, « certain chivalric patterns were not only recreated in America but created more fully and purely at times than they had been in Europe » (49). His thesis illuminates the insight that no idea ever perishes completely; history is a poetry that we speak and write against our wills, resurrecting aèd terms and philosophies in the guise of the new. Hence, chivalric codes survive, even if literal knights, lords, ladies, and serfs are as dead as the aristocratic forebears of Hardy’s Tess. Indeed, X and Davis have been framed consciously in such terms. Introducing X’s Autobiography, M. S. Handler asserts that X « had the physical bearing and the inner self-confidence of a born aristocrat » (ix). As recorded by Haley, actor Ossie Davis’s eulogy for X constructs the martyred leader as a « bold young captain, » « our own black shining Prince!–who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so » (454). John Edgard Wideman even stages a Zapata-esque, Hollywood image of X: « Silhouetted against the sky the stallion rears up on its hind legs, then gallops off, bearing its invisible rider to the sanctity of the mountains, free, strong, always there when we need him, when we’re ready to seek him out. El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz » (116). Nikki Giovanni, in an essay rewriting Lee’s film bio of X, drafts a scene in which « Malcolm, like a knight of old, pledges his life and honor to Elijah Muhammad » (212, my italics). Likewise, Tate implies a chivalric idealization of Davis when he decides that Davis enacted « vulnerability with attitude » (« Preface » 246). Too, Davis’s demise signals, for Tate, « the end of a certain heroic master narrative of Black male artistry » (« Preface » 244). Herman Gray views Davis (and other jazz artists) as depicting « an assertive heterosexual masculinity » (176). The representations of X and Davis as neo-chevaliers, defenders of truth, black manhood, and the African-American Way, though superficially medieval, romantic, and essentialist, answer to deeply felt psychological and cultural needs and cultural patterns within African-American (and American) history.
In their autobiographies, for one thing, X and Davis–as protagonists– participate in what Fraser deems « the family of chivalric heroes » whose members, « in whole or in part, have entered into everyone’s consciousness, » and allude to such hardy, pop culture archetypes as « knightly Westerners, » crusading reporters, hardboiled detectives, martial arts samurai, incorruptible lawmen, and dashing military types, all of whom epitomize « native American gallantry and grace » (12). Fraser emphasizes that these chivalric figures–« knightly errants and cavaliers, and cowboys, and men about town, and all the other heroes were lively, and graceful, and free spirited » (16). Moreover, they had admirably « strong and healthy bodies and were masters of enviable physical skills » (Fraser 16). Vigorous, charming, urbane, and adventurous, X and Davis were stellar signifiers of the chivalric attributes of heroism and manliness. Their histories seem to validate that irrepressible, Yankee cliché–the « lonely hero triumphant in a hostile world, » as Louis Heren conceives it (qtd. in French 123).
A chivalric reading necessitates that these cavalier figures, X and Davis, obey « rules of honor » binding them « to persist in a chosen course even when it [is] doomed to fail » (Fraser 42). Thus, X exhibits fatalism from the outset of his Autobiography: « It has always been my belief that I . . . will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared » (2). Chivalry is also evoked in the commitment of oneself to a course of action by swearing one’s word, for « the desire to comport oneself with maximum honor can subject a man to excessive strains, particularly given the elusiveness at times of the idea of honor and the related problem of determining what the honorable course of action really is » (Fraser 69-70). This existential crisis besets X when he confronts the scarring truths that Elijah Muhammad is an adulterer and, worse, that members of the Nation of Islam, to which he had devoted himself for twelve years, are plotting his assassination. X reveals the extent of his disillusionment in his comment that, with his exit/ouster from the Nation of Islam and the resultant threats against his life, « I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun, or the stars » (Autobiography 304, his italics). He decides to live each day « as if I am already dead » (Autobiography 381). Here X fashions himself as a cool, isolated hero. Less fatalistically, Davis, too, embraced isolation–once during his work on the soundtrack of Louis Malle’s film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958), when he « discovered the true characteristics–tragic, solitary, impenitent–of his artistic make-up » (Williams 73), and, later, more severely, when he entered his Silent Period.
Even the outlaw activities of X and Davis possess chivalric elements. Fraser notes that « the criminal [or outlaw] was almost certain to come from a chivalric-martial group » (178) whose members « were not only governed by coherent codes of their own but were sometimes governed by better ones than technically law-abiding citizens » (187). For instance, X « became a Bad Nigga, » Imani Perry alleges, « due to his adherence to an alternate social code rather than his absolute non-adherence to a social contract » (175). Such an alternate code informs X’s abortive showdown with West Indian Archie (Autobiography 126-130), but also Davis’s account of the agonistic bebop milieu in New York City, circa 1944: « Minton’s [a jazz club] kicked a lot of motherfuckers’ asses, did them in, and they just disappeared–not to be heard from again. But it also taught a whole lot of musicians, made them what they eventually became » (54). In both instances, alternate standards of excellence arise from « power-charged individuals or groups meeting in certain essential respects as equals and acting according to jointly agreed-upon rules » (Fraser 186). (In specific reference to Davis, Gilroy’s thesis that within black expressive culture « it is musicians who are presented as living symbols of the value of self-activity » [79] is pertinent.) X achieves oratorical distinction by jousting with police, reporters, scholars, and religious and political foes, while Davis earns respect by duelling with jazz musicians and critics. Both men construct attractive cerebral, physical, and sexual personas.
X and Davis participate in chivalric styles that resonate throughout Western civilization–and African-American culture. According to Robert Stone, historian Fox Butterfield advances the thesis that « the black population of the antebellum South, while violently subject to the Scotch-Irish slave owners, nevertheless absorbed and internalized their values, particularly on the subject of manliness and ‘honor' » (21). African-American writer Eddy L. Harris, chronicling his solo motorcycle ride across the American South in his South of Haunted Dreams (1993), bears witness to this spirit by celebrating the chivalric behaviour of the Confederate troops:Of all the men who emerged heroic from battlefields in the Civil War to capture my imagination, only one wore a Yankee uniform. All the rest were Confederates. . . . They were Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.Forget for a moment the cause for which they fought. They were romantic figures to me. They were outmanned and outgunned and still they managed to avoid defeat during four long years of war. At times they seemed on the edge of victory. They were bold and flamboyant, they were brave and they were lucky. They were passionate about a cause, albeit an unworthy cause, and they had a valor about them that the inept Northern soldiers seemed to lack. (153)
Michael Eric Dyson provides a more orthodox African-American conception of chivalry, observing that, during slavery, « heroes were seen as figures who resisted racial dominance through slave insurrections, plantation rebellions, work slowdowns, or running away » (147). One such figure, escaped slave Frederick Bailey, derived his new, now-famous surname, « Douglass, » from the Scottish chieftain-hero of Sir Walter Scott’s medievally-situated, metrical romance, The Lady of the Lake (1810). [17] Not surprisingly, then, given his chivalric predilections, Douglass, in his slave narrative, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, accents his fistic triumph over Covey, a slavebreaker, for it teaches him that « a man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity » (142-143). In addition, his only published short story, significantly titled « The Heroic Slave » (1853), is the fictionalized account of the historical 1841 mutiny aboard the slave ship Creole. Countenancing the use of violence to eliminate oppression, the story elaborates a theme that was sounded, according to Ronald T. Takaki, throughout Douglass’s texts: « In order to protect himself and redeem his humanity and in order to bring an end to a world of might and slavery and usher in a world of softness and freedom, [one] was compelled to act masculinely, to use violence against his male oppressors » (32-33). Gilroy finds that, for Douglass, « the slave actively prefers the possibility of death to the continuing condition of inhumanity on which plantation slavery depends » (63). Yet, this salve of violence–the currency of liberty–« involved not only the possible destruction of white kinfolk and friends trapped in a masculin[ist] system . . . , » Takaki relates, « but also the abandonment of the virtues of gentleness and love Douglass admired in women . . . and needed to be human » (33, his italics). Takaki highlights a suggestive paradox in Douglass’s endorsement of violence: If black masculinity must be redeemed by massacreing the white patriarchs who ordain slavery, must civilizing ‘feminine’–or simply human–values of tenderness and softness perish in that sanguine catastrophe?
This dichotomy between a desirable pastoral and pacific femininity and an agonistic and militaristic masculinity is re-enacted in the stances of some black males vis-à-vis women. It is difficult, indeed, to square the potentially ennobling (and enabling), martial appeal of X and Davis with the repugnant misogyny they also amply demonstrate. Yet, the attempt must be made if they are to be rehabilitated, at least in part, as quasi-progressive figures meriting emulation. Certainly, one must avoid, as Tricia Rose avers, the popular « hypervalorization of the hard, invincible, young black male who has no chinks in his armor, who is always ready for battle, grandly refusing most forms of emotional vulnerability, » whose « intense imperviousness has grave liabilities… » (155). Even so, there is a progressive side of cool–or chivalric–codes, particularly its communication of a charismatic style of honour, and this mode or fashion of being is worthy of notice and recuperation.
Significantly, chivalric/cool codes can be utilized to hammer, chisel, and saw away at the Bastilles of the status quo. Fraser witnesses that chivalric codes empowered such groups as the International Workers of the World « to act with full commitment, sometimes at great personal cost, without any nagging feeling of being inferior to their adversaries morally or intellectually » (149). U.S. Civil Rights Movement participants also made effective use of such codes, mobilizing a democratic mass of men, women, and children to act against oppression with dignity, courage, and an attractive degree of style, including the dusting off of folk ballads, union songs, and spirituals and their rewriting–even electrification (thus altering the domain of popular song)–into tools of contemporary protest. Arguably, then, there is no reason why codes of honour cannot be wielded against rapacious capitalism, sexism, frivolous violence, and racism. Davis suggests as much when he insists, « we’ve just got to let them [white people] know that we know what they are doing and that we’re not going to lighten up until they stop » (408, his italics). X argues that one « has the right to do whatever is necessary to get his freedom that other human beings have done to get their freedom » (Malcolm 113). Both men’s positions bespeak investments in the chivalric–and cool–codes of dignified self-assertion and self-defence.
Though chivalric codes can serve « to intensify aspirations and make for heroic action »–behaviour that can spark violence, « they also [help], » Fraser affirms, « to control violence and render it less wanton, brutal, and destructive » (67). This assertion suggests a resolution of the issues raised by Douglass’s contradictory attitudes towards male-enacted violence. If violence is justified, especially as a means of opposing oppression, its use must yet be disciplined. As Elizabeth Gurley Flynn finds, assessing the 1913 Patterson strike, « I contend that there was no use for violence. . . . that only where violence is necessary should violence be used. This is not a moral or legal objection but a utilitarian one. I don’t say that violence should not be used, but where there is no call for it, there is no reason why we should resort to it » (217). This point calls eerily to mind X’s own formula demanding African-American liberation « by any means necessary » and providing moral grounds for appropriate self-defence. In reference to his art, Davis declares, « great musicians are like great fighters who know self-defense » (400). Militancy and assertiveness are efficacious instruments to be wielded in every arena of African-American struggle, including art.
But adherence to cool/chivalric codes can also produce tenderness. Most accounts of X take pains to adumbrate his humour, his concern for his family, and his selflessness. As for Davis, his softer side was evinced in performance: « In spite of Davis’s desire to create an almost exaggerated masculine identity, as early as the 1940s he was using his trumpet to reveal emotional depth and introspection, even vulnerability. When Davis made a ‘mistake’–when his tone faltered or he seemed to miss a note–the cause was soulfulness and sensitivity rather than some shortcoming of technical prowess » (Gabbard 111). In their utilization and expression of cool/chivalric codes, Davis and X reconfigure the black male body as a site of both strength and gentleness, force and grace, power and tenderness, as a site where resistance to white supremacist ideologies can be made flesh, and not necessarily through violence.
Perhaps the most important chivalric/cool code enacted by X and Davis is integrity-that is, the ability to act with firm commitment to just principles as well as the flexibility to adjust them when necessary. X’s career affirms this precept: « My whole life had been a chronology of–changes » (Autobiography 339, his italics). When he returned from Mecca in 1964, preaching a rapprochement with white Muslims and progressive/radical whites, he acknowledged that this stark shift in his beliefs would disturb many of his followers, but he defended himself as « a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experiences and knowledge unfold it » (Malcolm 60). Likewise, Davis acknowledges that « if anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change » (394). Both men are able, in good cool style, « to mainstream or evolve other forms of consciousness » (Majors & Billson 42). X depicts this improvisational quality with an analogy that Davis could laud: « The white musician can jam if he’s got some sheet music in front of him. He can jam on something he’s heard jammed before. But that black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before » (By 63). Robert Walser emphasises Davis’s propensity for just such performative danger:Despite his dislike of failure, Davis constantly and consistently put himself at risk in his trumpet playing, by using a loose, flexible embouchure that helped him to produce a great variety of tone colors and articulations, by striving for dramatic gestures rather than consistent demonstration of mastery, and by experimenting with unconventional techniques. Ideally, he would always play on the edge and never miss; in practice, he played closer to the edge than anyone else and simply accepted the inevitable missteps, never retreating to a safer, more consistent performing style. (176)
Just as the black jazz musician can create radically new sounds, so can black people devise new political and social theories. [18] There may be a productive alliance between cool/chivalric codes and a jazz aesthetic promoting adaptability, syntheses, and innovation.
Another engaging chivalric/cool element in X and Davis is their interest in the culturopoesis of young black males and black folk in general. In his Autobiography, X lauds the lindy dancers and their audiences at Roxbury’s Roseland as « connoisseurs of styles » (66). As well, he is literate in « the ghetto’s language » (Autobiography 310). Whether « he was standing tall beside a streetlamp chatting with winos, or whether he was firing his radio and television broadsides to unseen millions of people.., » writes Haley, « [X] had charisma and he had power » (Autobiography 403, his italics). X revelled in the attention of the African-American masses, Haley witnesses, « and they loved him » (402). Imani Perry notes « the charm [X] exuded during speeches, a combination of good looks, intellect, street sensibilities and passion, » and their « significant impact on today’s youth » (181). Davis, too, reaches out to young African-American men, attempting to incorporate in his music the styles of popular black singers and musicians to ensure that a new generation would continue to find their voices and concerns noised in jazz:Black kids were listening to Sly Stone, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and all them other great black groups at Motown. After playing a lot of these white rock halls I was starting to wonder why I shouldn’t be trying to get to young black kids with my music. They were into funk, music they could dance to. It took me a while to really get into the concept all the way, but with this new band I started to think about it. (320)
One result of this rethinking was On the Corner (1972), an album which inaugurated the jazz-fusion movement, [19] and which represented Davis’s bid for popularity with a younger audience. « ‘I don’t care who buys the records,' » Davis confided to Melody Maker, « ‘as long as they get to the black people so I will be remembered when I die' » (qtd. in Milkowski 5). Williams also hypes Davis’s « re-engagement with black street styles, either musical (funk-based) or sartorial . . . » (11). Both men invested themselves in communicating with–and learning from–their key audience, a leadership technique in dire need of resurrection.
Critical study of the lives of X, Davis, and other (especially folk) black heroes and heroines can recover styles of honour, grounded in the African-American chivalric (or cool) tradition, which can serve to remobilize folks, especially men, to work cooperatively, to suffer when need be, to apply moral, intellectual, spiritual, and physical force against oppression, to realize that some behaviour is dishonourable or self-destructive or both, to pursue ‘truth’, to act with integrity, to oppose sexism, to recoup progressive and honourable notions of heroism, self-sacrifice, and nobility. [20] The commitments of X and Davis to many of these ideals of honour explains their continued vigour in African-American culture. They symbolize notions that, even now, can be used to uplift African-American males and to re-energize resistive and progressive political movements. [21] Hence, one can glean progressive, modern notions of chivalry, or cool, from the texts of X and Davis (as well as those of other black pop culture idols) and traditionally heroic narratives (slave autobiographies, Civil Rights Movement freedom songs, spirituals, certain blues, soul, and hip-hop/rap lyrics), thus mining all black cultural productivity to liberate every potentially inspirational discourse therein. [22]
Notes
The full title of the order is The Knights of the Grand Cross in and for the Sovereign Military Hospitaler Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. See Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (388). Back
Miles Davis and Scott Gutterman, The Art of Miles Davis (1991). Back
More tributes to Davis than to Coltrane are likely to be produced in the future as black neo-nationalists and ‘Generation X’ artists find in Davis the symbol that the ‘Baby Boom’ generation’s nationalists and artists found in Coltrane. Jazz critic Richard Williams praises Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Coltrane, for their several achievements, « but, » he continues on to opine hagiographically, « Miles Davis was somehow more than this » (10). « Like Ali and Picasso, he was much larger than his chosen medium » (10). Back
Adolph Reed Jr. argues that X « appealed to the urban male sensibility that associated failure to fight back with cowardliness » (230) and that he remains popular with contemporary youth « in part because he was attractive to young people when he was alive » (208). Williams locates the attractiveness of Davis in his image as « the elegant outsider, » as « the symbol of jazz as the hipster’s music » (10). Significantly, too, both men represent the city, « the locale of cool, » the site « where black popular styles are born » (Jeffries 159). Back
The favour has been returned, for male, African-American youth have perpetuated the popularity of both men. Black youth, Theresa Perry states, are those « who canonized The Autobiography of Malcolm X as the quintessential post-colonial text and the contemporary urban slave narrative » (1). African-American youth have also canonized Davis’s On the Corner. « Universally dismissed by critics and colleagues alike when it was released in 1972, » says jazz critic Bill Milkowski, it has been embraced by, circa 1992, « a generation of angry, alienated musical renegades who took to those proto-punk-funk grooves like yuppies to happy jazz » (3). Back
Such a movement should respond to the critique suggested by my friend, Jacqueline Barclay, that, in the 1960s, « the Left chose justice, the Right chose morality, » as their respective motivations. Any new progressive movement must reject this false division. Back
In stating this intention, I am not unaware that, as Michael Friedly judges, « political groups from all across the spectrum have been able to seize portions of Malcolm X’s beliefs and claim them as their own . . . » (213). Indeed, Michael Eric Dyson has « identified at least four Malcolms who emerge in the intellectual investigations of his life and career: Malcolm as hero and saint, Malcolm as a public moralist, Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist » (24). His name has become an exponent–X to the tenth power–of multiplying agendas. In reading X–and Davis–in the pragmatic terms I propose, I also demand a critical interrogation of their contradictions, lacunae, and outright nastiness. Back
My critique of X’s representation of women is indebted to Collins’s invaluable essay, « Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism Reconsidered » (59-85). Back
X’s imagery shadows the stock « ‘strong self-reliant Amazon' » black woman who « ‘secretly hates black men' » and « ‘love[s] white men' » (151, 148), limned by The Accused, a character in Cleaver’s « The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, » in his Soul on Ice (1968). Back
Though one should like to dismiss these observations as the pinched thought of the pre-freelance, public intellectual X, one must note that they are given in the present-tense, suggesting that X held these antediluvian views at least as late as early 1963, when his collaboration with Haley commenced. Back
According to The Accused in Cleaver’s « The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, » « ‘there is a war going on between the black man and the black woman, which makes her the silent ally, indirectly but effectively, of the white man' » (151). Back
See her classic exposé of black male chauvinism, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979). Back
To verify this assertion, insert any taxonomy of rap videos and recordings here, and virtually any selection of recent, urban-oriented African-American films, including John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood (1991) and, of course, Lee’s X (1992), with its gangsta Kitsch, racial epiphanies, and ludic, Othello-esque replication of sad, race-gender stereotypes. Back
X was one of the last political orators of the say-what-you-mean, mean-what-you-say school, prior to the onset of what Canadian writer B.W. Powe pronounces the « Age of Angelism, » an era in which « issues dissolve; attention is on a politician’s pose; orgasmic drives determine victories; media attention turns into cinema; reportage into gossip and opinion; people into stereotypes; debate and analysis into received opinion and spectacle » (108). In our Common Era, politics seem to evaporate in the glare of television lights, leaving only ephemeral slogans and fake poses. Back
Jazz critic Pete Welding underscores the revolutionary nature of the twelve tracks recorded by the Miles Davis Nonet in 1949 and partially released by Capitol that same year (a full release did not occur until 1957):
There can be little doubt that the [group], through the example of its disciplined, lucid, quietly audacious music, introduced to jazz a refreshing new musical sensibility which helped set it on a new course of development. The implications of the approach signaled in its recordings have carried jazz through several decades of sustained growth and creative discovery, influenced countless groups, musicians and arrangers, and altered the very fabric of the music itself (6). Back
X and Davis are even more valuable as heroes in an age when black males are social metaphors for crime and, in accordance with that favourite, historical stereotype, sexual deviance. X and Davis transcend such reductive limits. Back
See Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (343). Back
See Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970), 65-66. Kofsky also reports, intriguingly, that he attended a 1963 rally in Los Angeles at which X’s appearance « was preceded by 45 minutes of jazz from the organ trio of Groove Holmes. » In his opening remarks, X then made « explicit reference to the music . . , saying that he had been in the back of the auditorium patting his foot while Holmes was on stage » (256). Back
Milkowski writes that « On the Corner offended and angered more people than any other album in Miles Davis’ lengthy discography » (3). In his Autobiography, Davis admits that « old-time jazz people » rejected the album, but it had not been « made for them » anyway: « The music was meant to be heard by young black people . . . » (328). Its avant-garde nature also reflects the band’s « settl[ing] down into a deep African thing, a deep African-American groove, with a lot of emphasis on drums and rhythm, and not on individual solos » (329). Finally, the last track on the recording, « Mr. Freedom X, » might allude to Malcolm X. Back
Such values need generate no sexism. Philosopher Mark Kingwell posits that « [male] self-control, the ability to withstand pain, and athletic prowess are things to be proud of; they have no necessary connection to oppressing women » (136-137, his italics). Back
Progressive use of these two men has begun. Sue Coe’s X (1986), her collection of neo-expressionist paintings envisioning a fascistic USA, reads X, somewhat ahistorically, as anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-sexist. Cornel West imagines a powerful X whose flexible, improvisational politics render him a model « jazz freedom fighter, » one who stresses « the interplay of individuality and unity » (57), a description which can apply equally to Davis. Imani Perry asks, « should we not support Malcolm, the folk Malcolm, the legendary Malcolm, to ease our pain and foster our activism? » (185) Twenty years after the release of Davis’s On the Corner, Milkowski sees, « a whole new generation of punk-funksters hungry for these subversive sounds » (7). Back
Incidentally, it is time to extend rap/hip hop music such a consideration. In defence of this music, Marvin J. Gladney argues that it has remained true to « many of the convictions and aesthetic criteria that evolved out of the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s, including calls for social relevance, originality, and a focused dedication to produce art that challenges American mainstream artistic expression » (291). This new, youth- and urban-oriented music has brought « much needed dialogue to issues affecting America’s Black community in a manner that no popular art form has . . . » (291). Rap groups which attempt to raise social consciousness as well as noise levels include De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Public Enemy. Back
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Voir encore:
The Coolhunt
Who decides what’s cool? Certain kids in certain places–and only the coolhunters know who they are.
Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
2005
1.
Baysie Wightman met DeeDee Gordon, appropriately enough, on a coolhunt. It was 1992. Baysie was a big shot for Converse, and DeeDee, who was barely twenty-one, was running a very cool boutique called Placid Planet, on Newbury Street in Boston. Baysie came in with a camera crew-one she often used when she was coolhunting-and said, “I’ve been watching your store, I’ve seen you, I’ve heard you know what’s up,” because it was Baysie’s job at Converse to find people who knew what was up and she thought DeeDee was one of those people. DeeDee says that she responded with reserve-that “I was like, ‘Whatever’ “-but Baysie said that if DeeDee ever wanted to come and work at Converse she should just call, and nine months later DeeDee called. This was about the time the cool kids had decided they didn’t want the hundred-and-twenty- five-dollar basketball sneaker with seventeen different kinds of high-technology materials and colors and air-cushioned heels anymore. They wanted simplicity and authenticity, and Baysie picked up on that. She brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanized, suède, low-top classic old-school sneaker from the nineteen-seventies, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the retro era. Remember what Kurt Cobain was wearing in the famous picture of him lying dead on the ground after committing suicide? Black Converse One Stars. DeeDee’s big score was calling the sandal craze. She had been out in Los Angeles and had kept seeing the white teen-age girls dressing up like cholos, Mexican gangsters, in tight white tank tops known as “wife beaters,” with a bra strap hanging out, and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. DeeDee recalls, “I’m like, ‘I’m telling you, Baysie, this is going to hit. There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal.’ ” So Baysie, DeeDee, and a designer came up with the idea of making a retro sneaker-sandal, cutting the back off the One Star and putting a thick outsole on it. It was huge, and, amazingly, it’s still huge.
Today, Baysie works for Reebok as general-merchandise manager-part of the team trying to return Reebok to the position it enjoyed in the mid-nineteen-eighties as the country’s hottest sneaker company. DeeDee works for an advertising agency in Del Mar called Lambesis, where she puts out a quarterly tip sheet called the L Report on what the cool kids in major American cities are thinking and doing and buying. Baysie and DeeDee are best friends. They talk on the phone all the time. They get together whenever Baysie is in L.A. (DeeDee: “It’s, like, how many times can you drive past O. J. Simpson’s house?”), and between them they can talk for hours about the art of the coolhunt. They’re the Lewis and Clark of cool.
What they have is what everybody seems to want these days, which is a window on the world of the street. Once, when fashion trends were set by the big couture houses-when cool was trickle- down-that wasn’t important. But sometime in the past few decades things got turned over, and fashion became trickle-up. It’s now about chase and flight-designers and retailers and the mass consumer giving chase to the elusive prey of street cool-and the rise of coolhunting as a profession shows how serious the chase has become. The sneakers of Nike and Reebok used to come out yearly. Now a new style comes out every season. Apparel designers used to have an eighteen-month lead time between concept and sale. Now they’re reducing that to a year, or even six months, in order to react faster to new ideas from the street. The paradox, of course, is that the better coolhunters become at bringing the mainstream close to the cutting edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes. This is the first rule of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains the triumphant circularity of coolhunting: because we have coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie, cool changes more quickly, and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie.
DeeDee is tall and glamorous, with short hair she has dyed so often that she claims to have forgotten her real color. She drives a yellow 1977 Trans Am with a burgundy stripe down the center and a 1973 Mercedes 450 SL, and lives in a spare, Japanese-style cabin in Laurel Canyon. She uses words like “rad” and “totally,” and offers non-stop, deadpan pronouncements on pop culture, as in “It’s all about Pee-wee Herman.” She sounds at first like a teen, like the same teens who, at Lambesis, it is her job to follow. But teen speech-particularly girl-teen speech, with its fixation on reported speech (“so she goes,” “and I’m like,” “and he goes”) and its stock vocabulary of accompanying grimaces and gestures-is about using language less to communicate than to fit in. DeeDee uses teen speech to set herself apart, and the result is, for lack of a better word, really cool. She doesn’t do the teen thing of climbing half an octave at the end of every sentence. Instead, she drags out her vowels for emphasis, so that if she mildly disagreed with something I’d said she would say “Maalcolm” and if she strongly disagreed with what I’d said she would say “Maaalcolm.”
Baysie is older, just past forty (although you would never guess that), and went to Exeter and Middlebury and had two grandfathers who went to Harvard (although you wouldn’t guess that, either). She has curly brown hair and big green eyes and long legs and so much energy that it is hard to imagine her asleep, or resting, or even standing still for longer than thirty seconds. The hunt for cool is an obsession with her, and DeeDee is the same way. DeeDee used to sit on the corner of West Broadway and Prince in SoHo-back when SoHo was cool-and take pictures of everyone who walked by for an entire hour. Baysie can tell you precisely where she goes on her Reebok coolhunts to find the really cool alternative white kids (“I’d maybe go to Portland and hang out where the skateboarders hang out near that bridge”) or which snowboarding mountain has cooler kids-Stratton, in Vermont, or Summit County, in Colorado. (Summit, definitely.) DeeDee can tell you on the basis of the L Report’s research exactly how far Dallas is behind New York in coolness (from six to eight months). Baysie is convinced that Los Angeles is not happening right now: “In the early nineteen-nineties a lot more was coming from L.A. They had a big trend with the whole Melrose Avenue look-the stupid goatees, the shorter hair. It was cleaned-up aftergrunge. There were a lot of places you could go to buy vinyl records. It was a strong place to go for looks. Then it went back to being horrible.” DeeDee is convinced that Japan is happening: “I linked onto this future-technology thing two years ago. Now look at it, it’s huge. It’s the whole resurgence of Nike-Nike being larger than life. I went to Japan and saw the kids just bailing the most technologically advanced Nikes with their little dresses and little outfits and I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is trippy!’ It’s performance mixed with fashion. It’s really superheavy.” Baysie has a theory that Liverpool is cool right now because it’s the birthplace of the whole “lad” look, which involves soccer blokes in the pubs going superdressy and wearing Dolce & Gabbana and Polo Sport and Reebok Classics on their feet. But when I asked DeeDee about that, she just rolled her eyes: “Sometimes Baysie goes off on these tangents. Man, I love that woman!”
I used to think that if I talked to Baysie and DeeDee long enough I could write a coolhunting manual, an encyclopedia of cool. But then I realized that the manual would have so many footnotes and caveats that it would be unreadable. Coolhunting is not about the articulation of a coherent philosophy of cool. It’s just a collection of spontaneous observations and predictions that differ from one moment to the next and from one coolhunter to the next. Ask a coolhunter where the baggy-jeans look came from, for example, and you might get any number of answers: urban black kids mimicking the jailhouse look, skateboarders looking for room to move, snowboarders trying not to look like skiers, or, alternatively, all three at once, in some grand concordance.
Or take the question of exactly how Tommy Hilfiger-a forty- five-year-old white guy from Greenwich, Connecticut, doing all- American preppy clothes-came to be the designer of choice for urban black America. Some say it was all about the early and visible endorsement given Hilfiger by the hip-hop auteur Grand Puba, who wore a dark-green-and-blue Tommy jacket over a white Tommy T-shirt as he leaned on his black Lamborghini on the cover of the hugely influential “Grand Puba 2000″ CD, and whose love for Hilfiger soon spread to other rappers. (Who could forget the rhymes of Mobb Deep? “Tommy was my nigga /And couldn’t figure /How me and Hilfiger / used to move through with vigor.”) Then I had lunch with one of Hilfiger’s designers, a twenty-six-year-old named Ulrich (Ubi) Simpson, who has a Puerto Rican mother and a Dutch-Venezuelan father, plays lacrosse, snowboards, surfs the long board, goes to hip-hop concerts, listens to Jungle, Edith Piaf, opera, rap, and Metallica, and has working with him on his design team a twenty-seven-year-old black guy from Montclair with dreadlocks, a twenty-two-year-old Asian-American who lives on the Lower East Side, a twenty-five-year-old South Asian guy from Fiji, and a twenty-one-year-old white graffiti artist from Queens. That’s when it occurred to me that maybe the reason Tommy Hilfiger can make white culture cool to black culture is that he has people working for him who are cool in both cultures simultaneously. Then again, maybe it was all Grand Puba. Who knows?
One day last month, Baysie took me on a coolhunt to the Bronx and Harlem, lugging a big black canvas bag with twenty-four different shoes that Reebok is about to bring out, and as we drove down Fordham Road, she had her head out the window like a little kid, checking out what everyone on the street was wearing. We went to Dr. Jay’s, which is the cool place to buy sneakers in the Bronx, and Baysie crouched down on the floor and started pulling the shoes out of her bag one by one, soliciting opinions from customers who gathered around and asking one question after another, in rapid sequence. One guy she listened closely to was maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a diamond stud in his ear and a thin beard. He was wearing a Polo baseball cap, a brown leather jacket, and the big, oversized leather boots that are everywhere uptown right now. Baysie would hand him a shoe and he would hold it, look at the top, and move it up and down and flip it over. The first one he didn’t like: “Oh-kay.” The second one he hated: he made a growling sound in his throat even before Baysie could give it to him, as if to say, “Put it back in the bag-now!” But when she handed him a new DMX RXT-a low-cut run/walk shoe in white and blue and mesh with a translucent “ice” sole, which retails for a hundred and ten dollars-he looked at it long and hard and shook his head in pure admiration and just said two words, dragging each of them out: “No doubt.”
Baysie was interested in what he was saying, because the DMX RXT she had was a girls’ shoe that actually hadn’t been doing all that well. Later, she explained to me that the fact that the boys loved the shoe was critical news, because it suggested that Reebok had a potential hit if it just switched the shoe to the men’s section. How she managed to distill this piece of information from the crowd of teenagers around her, how she made any sense of the two dozen shoes in her bag, most of which (to my eyes, anyway) looked pretty much the same, and how she knew which of the teens to really focus on was a mystery. Baysie is a Wasp from New England, and she crouched on the floor in Dr. Jay’s for almost an hour, talking and joking with the homeboys without a trace of condescension or self-consciousness.
Near the end of her visit, a young boy walked up and sat down on the bench next to her. He was wearing a black woollen cap with white stripes pulled low, a blue North Face pleated down jacket, a pair of baggy Guess jeans, and, on his feet, Nike Air Jordans. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen. But when he started talking you could see Baysie’s eyes light up, because somehow she knew the kid was the real thing.
“How many pairs of shoes do you buy a month?” Baysie asked.
“Two,” the kid answered. “And if at the end I find one more I like I get to buy that, too.”
Baysie was onto him. “Does your mother spoil you?”
The kid blushed, but a friend next to him was laughing. “Whatever he wants, he gets.”
Baysie laughed, too. She had the DMX RXT in his size. He tried them on. He rocked back and forth, testing them. He looked back at Baysie. He was dead serious now: “Make sure these come out.”
Baysie handed him the new “Rush” Emmitt Smith shoe due out in the fall. One of the boys had already pronounced it “phat,” and another had looked through the marbleized-foam cradle in the heel and cried out in delight, “This is bug!” But this kid was the acid test, because this kid knew cool. He paused. He looked at it hard. “Reebok,” he said, soberly and carefully, “is trying to get butter.”
In the car on the way back to Manhattan, Baysie repeated it twice. “Not better. Butter! That kid could totally tell you what he thinks.” Baysie had spent an hour coolhunting in a shoe store and found out that Reebok’s efforts were winning the highest of hip-hop praise. “He was so fucking smart.”
2.
If you want to understand how trends work, and why coolhunters like Baysie and DeeDee have become so important, a good place to start is with what’s known as diffusion research, which is the study of how ideas and innovations spread. Diffusion researchers do things like spending five years studying the adoption of irrigation techniques in a Colombian mountain village, or developing complex matrices to map the spread of new math in the Pittsburgh school system. What they do may seem like a far cry from, say, how the Tommy Hilfiger thing spread from Harlem to every suburban mall in the country, but it really isn’t: both are about how new ideas spread from one person to the next.
One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross’s analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the nineteen-thirties. The new seed corn was introduced there in about 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades. But it wasn’t adopted all at once. Of two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1933. In 1934, sixteen took the plunge. In 1935, twenty-one more followed; the next year, there were thirty-six, and the year after that a whopping sixty-one. The succeeding figures were then forty-six, thirty-six, fourteen, and three, until, by 1941, all but two of the two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied were using the new seed. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed corn at the very beginning of the thirties were the “innovators,” the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group that followed them was the “early adopters.” They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild innovators were doing and then did it themselves. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938-the “early majority” and the “late majority,” which is to say the deliberate and the skeptical masses, who would never try anything until the most respected farmers had tried it. Only after they had been converted did the “laggards,” the most traditional of all, follow suit. The critical thing about this sequence is that it is almost entirely interpersonal. According to Ryan and Gross, only the innovators relied to any great extent on radio advertising and farm journals and seed salesmen in making their decision to switch to the hybrid. Everyone else made his decision overwhelmingly because of the example and the opinions of his neighbors and peers.
Isn’t this just how fashion works? A few years ago, the classic brushed-suède Hush Puppies with the lightweight crêpe sole-the moc-toe oxford known as the Duke and the slip-on with the golden buckle known as the Columbia-were selling barely sixty-five thousand pairs a year. The company was trying to walk away from the whole suède casual look entirely. It wanted to do “aspirational” shoes: “active casuals” in smooth leather, like the Mall Walker, with a Comfort Curve technology outsole and a heel stabilizer-the kind of shoes you see in Kinney’s for $39.95. But then something strange started happening. Two Hush Puppies executives-Owen Baxter and Jeff Lewis-were doing a fashion shoot for their Mall Walkers and ran into a creative consultant from Manhattan named Jeffrey Miller, who informed them that the Dukes and the Columbias weren’t dead, they were dead chic. “We were being told,” Baxter recalls, “that there were areas in the Village, in SoHo, where the shoes were selling-in resale shops-and that people were wearing the old Hush Puppies. They were going to the ma-and-pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and there was this authenticity of being able to say, ‘I am wearing an original pair of Hush Puppies.’ ”
Baxter and Lewis-tall, solid, fair-haired Midwestern guys with thick, shiny wedding bands-are shoe men, first and foremost. Baxter was working the cash register at his father’s shoe store in Mount Prospect, Illinois, at the age of thirteen. Lewis was doing inventory in his father’s shoe store in Pontiac, Michigan, at the age of seven. Baxter was in the National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention, in Chicago, and was stationed across the street from the Conrad Hilton downtown, right in the middle of things. Today, the two men work out of Rockford, Michigan (population thirty-eight hundred), where Hush Puppies has been making the Dukes and the Columbias in an old factory down by the Rogue River for almost forty years. They took me to the plant when I was in Rockford. In a crowded, noisy, low-slung building, factory workers stand in long rows, gluing, stapling, and sewing together shoes in dozens of bright colors, and the two executives stopped at each production station and described it in detail. Lewis and Baxter know shoes. But they would be the first to admit that they don’t know cool. “Miller was saying that there is something going on with the shoes-that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes for his personal use,” Lewis told me. We were seated around the conference table in the Hush Puppies headquarters in Rockford, with the snow and the trees outside and a big water tower behind us. “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was.”
By late 1994, things had begun to happen in a rush. First, the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies as accessories in his spring collection. Then Anna Sui called. Miller, the man from Manhattan, flew out to Michigan to give advice on a new line (“Of course, packing my own food and thinking about ‘Fargo’ in the corner of my mind”). A few months later, in Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzpatrick put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound on the roof of his store on La Brea Avenue and gutted his adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies department, and even before he opened-while he was still painting and putting up shelves-Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple of pairs. Pee-wee Herman! “It was total word of mouth. I didn’t even have a sign back then,” Fitzpatrick recalls. In 1995, the company sold four hundred and thirty thousand pairs of the classic Hush Puppies. In 1996, it sold a million six hundred thousand, and that was only scratching the surface, because in Europe and the rest of the world, where Hush Puppies have a huge following-where they might outsell the American market four to one-the revival was just beginning.
The cool kids who started wearing old Dukes and Columbias from thrift shops were the innovators. Pee-wee Herman, wandering in off the street, was an early adopter. The million six hundred thousand people who bought Hush Puppies last year are the early majority, jumping in because the really cool people have already blazed the trail. Hush Puppies are moving through the country just the way hybrid seed corn moved through Greene County-all of which illustrates what coolhunters can and cannot do. If Jeffrey Miller had been wrong-if cool people hadn’t been digging through the thrift shops for Hush Puppies-and he had arbitrarily decided that Baxter and Lewis should try to convince non-cool people that the shoes were cool, it wouldn’t have worked. You can’t convince the late majority that Hush Puppies are cool, because the late majority makes its coolness decisions on the basis of what the early majority is doing, and you can’t convince the early majority, because the early majority is looking at the early adopters, and you can’t convince the early adopters, because they take their cues from the innovators. The innovators do get their cool ideas from people other than their peers, but the fact is that they are the last people who can be convinced by a marketing campaign that a pair of suède shoes is cool. These are, after all, the people who spent hours sifting through thrift-store bins. And why did they do that? Because their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing. A company can intervene in the cool cycle. It can put its shoes on really cool celebrities and on fashion runways and on MTV. It can accelerate the transition from the innovator to the early adopter and on to the early majority. But it can’t just manufacture cool out of thin air, and that’s the second rule of cool.
At the peak of the Hush Puppies craziness last year, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers’ awards dinner, at Lincoln Center. The award was accepted by the Hush Puppies president, Louis Dubrow, who came out wearing a pair of custom-made black patent-leather Hush Puppies and stood there blinking and looking at the assembled crowd as if it were the last scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” It was a strange moment. There was the president of the Hush Puppies company, of Rockford, Michigan, population thirty-eight hundred, sharing a stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and Isaac Mizrahi-and all because some kids in the East Village began combing through thrift shops for old Dukes. Fashion was at the mercy of those kids, whoever they were, and it was a wonderful thing if the kids picked you, but a scary thing, too, because it meant that cool was something you could not control. You needed someone to find cool and tell you what it was.
3.
When Baysie Wightman went to Dr. Jay’s, she was looking for customer response to the new shoes Reebok had planned for the fourth quarter of 1997 and the first quarter of 1998. This kind of customer testing is critical at Reebok, because the last decade has not been kind to the company. In 1987, it had a third of the American athletic-shoe market, well ahead of Nike. Last year, it had sixteen per cent. “The kid in the store would say, ‘I’d like this shoe if your logo wasn’t on it,’ ” E. Scott Morris, who’s a senior designer for Reebok, told me. “That’s kind of a punch in the mouth. But we’ve all seen it. You go into a shoe store. The kid picks up the shoe and says, ‘Ah, man, this is nice.’ He turns the shoe around and around. He looks at it underneath. He looks at the side and he goes, ‘Ah, this is Reebok,’ and says, ‘I ain’t buying this,’ and puts the shoe down and walks out. And you go, ‘You was just digging it a minute ago. What happened?’ ” Somewhere along the way, the company lost its cool, and Reebok now faces the task not only of rebuilding its image but of making the shoes so cool that the kids in the store can’t put them down.
Every few months, then, the company’s coolhunters go out into the field with prototypes of the upcoming shoes to find out what kids really like, and come back to recommend the necessary changes. The prototype of one recent Emmitt Smith shoe, for example, had a piece of molded rubber on the end of the tongue as a design element; it was supposed to give the shoe a certain “richness,” but the kids said they thought it looked overbuilt. Then Reebok gave the shoes to the Boston College football team for wear-testing, and when they got the shoes back they found out that all the football players had cut out the rubber component with scissors. As messages go, this was hard to miss. The tongue piece wasn’t cool, and on the final version of the shoe it was gone. The rule of thumb at Reebok is that if the kids in Chicago, New York, and Detroit all like a shoe, it’s a guaranteed hit. More than likely, though, the coolhunt is going to turn up subtle differences from city to city, so that once the coolhunters come back the designers have to find out some way to synthesize what was heard, and pick out just those things that all the kids seemed to agree on. In New York, for example, kids in Harlem are more sophisticated and fashion-forward than kids in the Bronx, who like things a little more colorful and glitzy. Brooklyn, meanwhile, is conservative and preppy, more like Washington, D.C. For reasons no one really knows, Reeboks are coolest in Philadelphia. In Philly, in fact, the Reebok Classics are so huge they are known simply as National Anthems, as in “I’ll have a pair of blue Anthems in nine and a half.” Philadelphia is Reebok’s innovator town. From there trends move along the East Coast, trickling all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Reebok has its headquarters in Stoughton, Massachusetts, outside Boston-in a modern corporate park right off Route 24. There are basketball and tennis courts next to the building, and a health club on the ground floor that you can look directly into from the parking lot. The front lobby is adorned with shrines for all of Reebok’s most prominent athletes-shrines complete with dramatic action photographs, their sports jerseys, and a pair of their signature shoes-and the halls are filled with so many young, determinedly athletic people that when I visited Reebok headquarters I suddenly wished I’d packed my gym clothes in case someone challenged me to wind sprints. At Stoughton, I met with a handful of the company’s top designers and marketing executives in a long conference room on the third floor. In the course of two hours, they put one pair of shoes after another on the table in front of me, talking excitedly about each sneaker’s prospects, because the feeling at Reebok is that things are finally turning around. The basketball shoe that Reebok brought out last winter for Allen Iverson, the star rookie guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, for example, is one of the hottest shoes in the country. Dr. Jay’s sold out of Iversons in two days, compared with the week it took the store to sell out of Nike’s new Air Jordans. Iverson himself is brash and charismatic and faster from foul line to foul line than anyone else in the league. He’s the equivalent of those kids in the East Village who began wearing Hush Puppies way back when. He’s an innovator, and the hope at Reebok is that if he gets big enough the whole company can ride back to coolness on his coattails, the way Nike rode to coolness on the coattails of Michael Jordan. That’s why Baysie was so excited when the kid said Reebok was trying to get butter when he looked at the Rush and the DMX RXT: it was a sign, albeit a small one, that the indefinable, abstract thing called cool was coming back.
When Baysie comes back from a coolhunt, she sits down with marketing experts and sales representatives and designers, and reconnects them to the street, making sure they have the right shoes going to the right places at the right price. When she got back from the Bronx, for example, the first thing she did was tell all these people they had to get a new men’s DMX RXT out, fast, because the kids on the street loved the women’s version. “It’s hotter than we realized,” she told them. The coolhunter’s job in this instance is very specific. What DeeDee does, on the other hand, is a little more ambitious. With the L Report, she tries to construct a kind of grand matrix of cool, comprising not just shoes but everything kids like, and not just kids of certain East Coast urban markets but kids all over. DeeDee and her staff put it out four times a year, in six different versions-for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin-Dallas, Seattle, and Chicago-and then sell it to manufacturers, retailers, and ad agencies (among others) for twenty thousand dollars a year. They go to each city and find the coolest bars and clubs, and ask the coolest kids to fill out questionnaires. The information is then divided into six categories-You Saw It Here First, Entertainment and Leisure, Clothing and Accessories, Personal and Individual, Aspirations, and Food and Beverages-which are, in turn, broken up into dozens of subcategories, so that Personal and Individual, for example, includes Cool Date, Cool Evening, Free Time, Favorite Possession, and on and on. The information in those subcategories is subdivided again by sex and by age bracket (14-18, 19-24, 25-30), and then, as a control, the L Report gives you the corresponding set of preferences for “mainstream” kids.
Few coolhunters bother to analyze trends with this degree of specificity. DeeDee’s biggest competitor, for example, is something called the Hot Sheet, out of Manhattan. It uses a panel of three thousand kids a year from across the country and divides up their answers by sex and age, but it doesn’t distinguish between regions, or between trendsetting and mainstream respondents. So what you’re really getting is what all kids think is cool-not what cool kids think is cool, which is a considerably different piece of information. Janine Misdom and Joanne DeLuca, who run the Sputnik coolhunting group out of the garment district in Manhattan, meanwhile, favor an entirely impressionistic approach, sending out coolhunters with video cameras to talk to kids on the ground that it’s too difficult to get cool kids to fill out questionnaires. Once, when I was visiting the Sputnik girls-as Misdom and DeLuca are known on the street, because they look alike and their first names are so similar and both have the same awesome New York accents-they showed me a video of the girl they believe was the patient zero of the whole eighties revival going on right now. It was back in September of 1993. Joanne and Janine were on Seventh Avenue, outside the Fashion Institute of Technology, doing random street interviews for a major jeans company, and, quite by accident, they ran into this nineteen-year- old raver. She had close-cropped hair, which was green at the top, and at the temples was shaved even closer and dyed pink. She had rings and studs all over her face, and a thick collection of silver tribal jewelry around her neck, and vintage jeans. She looked into the camera and said, “The sixties came in and then the seventies came in and I think it’s ready to come back to the eighties. It’s totally eighties: the eye makeup, the clothes. It’s totally going back to that.” Immediately, Joanne and Janine started asking around. “We talked to a few kids on the Lower East Side who said they were feeling the need to start breaking out their old Michael Jackson jackets,” Joanne said. “They were joking about it. They weren’t doing it yet. But they were going to, you know? They were saying, ‘We’re getting the urge to break out our Members Only jackets.’ ” That was right when Joanne and Janine were just starting up; calling the eighties revival was their first big break, and now they put out a full-blown videotaped report twice a year which is a collection of clips of interviews with extremely progressive people.
What DeeDee argues, though, is that cool is too subtle and too variegated to be captured with these kind of broad strokes. Cool is a set of dialects, not a language. The L Report can tell you, for example, that nineteen-to-twenty-four-year-old male trendsetters in Seattle would most like to meet, among others, King Solomon and Dr. Seuss, and that nineteen-to-twenty-four-year- old female trendsetters in San Francisco have turned their backs on Calvin Klein, Nintendo Gameboy, and sex. What’s cool right now? Among male New York trendsetters: North Face jackets, rubber and latex, khakis, and the rock band Kiss. Among female trendsetters: ska music, old-lady clothing, and cyber tech. In Chicago, snowboarding is huge among trendsetters of both sexes and all ages. Women over nineteen are into short hair, while those in their teens have embraced mod culture, rock climbing, tag watches, and bootleg pants. In Austin-Dallas, meanwhile, twenty-five-to- thirty-year-old women trendsetters are into hats, heroin, computers, cigars, Adidas, and velvet, while men in their twenties are into video games and hemp. In all, the typical L Report runs over one hundred pages. But with that flood of data comes an obsolescence disclaimer: “The fluctuating nature of the trendsetting market makes keeping up with trends a difficult task.” By the spring, in other words, everything may have changed.
The key to coolhunting, then, is to look for cool people first and cool things later, and not the other way around. Since cool things are always changing, you can’t look for them, because the very fact they are cool means you have no idea what to look for. What you would be doing is thinking back on what was cool before and extrapolating, which is about as useful as presuming that because the Dow rose ten points yesterday it will rise another ten points today. Cool people, on the other hand, are a constant.
When I was in California, I met Salvador Barbier, who had been described to me by a coolhunter as “the Michael Jordan of skateboarding.” He was tall and lean and languid, with a cowboy’s insouciance, and we drove through the streets of Long Beach at fifteen miles an hour in a white late-model Ford Mustang, a car he had bought as a kind of ironic status gesture (“It would look good if I had a Polo jacket or maybe Nautica,” he said) to go with his ’62 Econoline van and his ’64 T-bird. Sal told me that he and his friends, who are all in their mid-twenties, recently took to dressing up as if they were in eighth grade again and gathering together-having a “rally”-on old BMX bicycles in front of their local 7-Eleven. “I’d wear muscle shirts, like Def Leppard or Foghat or some old heavy-metal band, and tight, tight tapered Levi’s, and Vans on my feet-big, like, checkered Vans or striped Vans or camouflage Vans-and then wristbands and gloves with the fingers cut off. It was total eighties fashion. You had to look like that to participate in the rally. We had those denim jackets with patches on the back and combs that hung out the back pocket. We went without I.D.s, because we’d have to have someone else buy us beers.” At this point, Sal laughed. He was driving really slowly and staring straight ahead and talking in a low drawl-the coolhunter’s dream. “We’d ride to this bar and I’d have to carry my bike inside, because we have really expensive bikes, and when we got inside people would freak out. They’d say, ‘Omigod,’ and I was asking them if they wanted to go for a ride on the handlebars. They were like, ‘What is wrong with you. My boyfriend used to dress like that in the eighth grade!’ And I was like, ‘He was probably a lot cooler then, too.’ ”
This is just the kind of person DeeDee wants. “I’m looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set himself apart from everybody else, who doesn’t look like his peers. I’ve run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy. I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hardcore band playing, and I say to myself ‘Omigod, what’s that guy doing here?’ and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, ‘Hey, you’re really into this band. What’s up?’ You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I’m going to gravitate toward him, because, hey, what’s Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?”
We were sitting outside the Fred Segal store in West Hollywood. I was wearing a very conservative white Brooks Brothers button-down and a pair of Levi’s, and DeeDee looked first at my shirt and then my pants and dissolved into laughter: “I mean, I might even go up to you in a cool place.”
Picking the right person is harder than it sounds, though. Piney Kahn, who works for DeeDee, says, “There are a lot of people in the gray area. You’ve got these kids who dress ultra funky and have their own style. Then you realize they’re just running after their friends.” The trick is not just to be able to tell who is different but to be able to tell when that difference represents something truly cool. It’s a gut thing. You have to somehow just know. DeeDee hired Piney because Piney clearly knows: she is twenty-four and used to work with the Beastie Boys and has the formidable self-possession of someone who is not only cool herself but whose parents were cool. “I mean,” she says, “they named me after a tree.”
Piney and DeeDee said that they once tried to hire someone as a coolhunter who was not, himself, cool, and it was a disaster.
“You can give them the boundaries,” Piney explained. “You can say that if people shop at Banana Republic and listen to Alanis Morissette they’re probably not trendsetters. But then they might go out and assume that everyone who does that is not a trendsetter, and not look at the other things.”
“I mean, I myself might go into Banana Republic and buy a T-shirt,” DeeDee chimed in.
Their non-cool coolhunter just didn’t have that certain instinct, that sense that told him when it was O.K. to deviate from the manual. Because he wasn’t cool, he didn’t know cool, and that’s the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one. That’s why Baysie is still on top of this business at forty-one. “It’s easier for me to tell you what kid is cool than to tell you what things are cool,” she says. But that’s all she needs to know. In this sense, the third rule of cool fits perfectly into the second: the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermeneutic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them. Baysie says that she can see a coat on one of her friends and think it’s not cool but then see the same coat on DeeDee and think that it is cool. It is not possible to be cool, in other words, unless you are-in some larger sense-already cool, and so the phenomenon that the uncool cannot see and cannot have described to them is also something that they cannot ever attain, because if they did it would no longer be cool. Coolhunting represents the ascendancy, in the marketplace, of high school.
Once, I was visiting DeeDee at her house in Laurel Canyon when one of her L Report assistants, Jonas Vail, walked in. He’d just come back from Niketown on Wilshire Boulevard, where he’d bought seven hundred dollars’ worth of the latest sneakers to go with the three hundred dollars’ worth of skateboard shoes he’d bought earlier in the afternoon. Jonas is tall and expressionless, with a peacoat, dark jeans, and short-cropped black hair. “Jonas is good,” DeeDee says. “He works with me on everything. That guy knows more pop culture. You know: What was the name of the store Mrs. Garrett owned on ‘The Facts of Life’? He knows all the names of the extras from eighties sitcoms. I can’t believe someone like him exists. He’s fucking unbelievable. Jonas can spot a cool person a mile away.”
Jonas takes the boxes of shoes and starts unpacking them on the couch next to DeeDee. He picks up a pair of the new Nike ACG hiking boots, and says, “All the Japanese in Niketown were really into these.” He hands the shoes to DeeDee.
“Of course they were!” she says. “The Japanese are all into the tech-looking shit. Look how exaggerated it is, how bulbous.” DeeDee has very ambivalent feelings about Nike, because she thinks its marketing has got out of hand. When she was in the New York Niketown with a girlfriend recently, she says, she started getting light-headed and freaked out. “It’s cult, cult, cult. It was like, ‘Hello, are we all drinking the Kool-Aid here?’ ” But this shoe she loves. It’s Dr. Jay’s in the Bronx all over again. DeeDee turns the shoe around and around in the air, tapping the big clear-blue plastic bubble on the side-the visible Air-Sole unit- with one finger. “It’s so fucking rad. It looks like a platypus!” In front of me, there is a pair of Nike’s new shoes for the basketball player Jason Kidd.
I pick it up. “This looks . . . cool,” I venture uncertainly.
DeeDee is on the couch, where she’s surrounded by shoeboxes and sneakers and white tissue paper, and she looks up reprovingly because, of course, I don’t get it. I can’t get it. “Beyooond cool, Maalcolm. Beyooond cool. »
Voir enfin:
Monthly Updates on the Covert War
Almost 2,500 now killed by covert US drone strikes since Obama inauguration six years ago: The Bureau’s report for January 2015
Jack Serle
Bureau of investigative journalism
February 2, 2015
At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals.
Of the total killed since Obama took his oath of office on January 20 2009, at least 314 have been civilians, while the number of confirmed strikes under his administration now stands at 456.
Research by the Bureau also shows there have now been nearly nine times more strikes under Obama in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than there were under his predecessor, George W Bush.
And the covert Obama strikes, the first of which hit Pakistan just three days after his inauguration, have killed almost six times more people and twice as many civilians than those ordered in the Bush years, the data shows.
The figures have been compiled as part of the Bureau’s monthly report into covert US drone attacks, which are run in two separate missions – one by the CIA and one for the Pentagon by its secretive special forces outfit, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
The research centres on countries outside the US’s declared war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The first strike of the Bush administration, outside Afghanistan, was on November 3 2002, in Yemen. However there was not a reported drone strike outside Iraq or Afghanistan for 18 months, until the CIA killed 6-8 in Pakistan on June 17 2004. That was more than three years into President Bush’s first term.
In total, there were 52 strikes under Bush, killing 416 people, of whom 167 were civilians.
According to the Bureau’s latest report, January 2015 saw an intensification of the US campaign in both Pakistan and Yemen.
Most strikes in January in Pakistan since July 2014.
Highest monthly casualty rate in Pakistan for six months.
A confirmed CIA drone strike in Yemen reportedly kills a child.
Two possible US strikes kill at least 45 in a day in Somalia.
Follow our drones team Jack Serle and Abigail Fielding-Smith on Twitter.
Sign up for monthly updates from the Bureau’s Covert War project, subscribe to our podcast Drone News, and follow Drone Reads on Twitter to see what our team is reading.
Monthly report: January 2015
Pakistan
January 2015 actions
Total CIA strikes in January: 5
Total killed in strikes in January: 26-37
All actions 2004 – January 31 2015
Total Obama strikes: 362
Total US strikes since 2004: 413
Total reported killed: 2,438-3,942
Civilians reported killed: 416-959
Children reported killed: 168-204
Total reported injured: 1,142
For the Bureau’s full Pakistan databases click here.
The US has stepped up its drone campaign in Pakistan in January, launching more strikes and killing more people in a month than any since July 2014.
The CIA killed at least 26 people in five strikes giving January the highest casualty rate in six months.
The casualty rate – minimum number of people reported killed – in Pakistan from July 2014 to January 2015 (source: TBIJ data)
Four of the five strikes reportedly targeted the Shawal area – a thickly wooded region with steep valleys that crosses the borders of North and South Waziristan, and of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is reportedly a major stronghold for armed groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The Pakistan military has continued its air and ground operation in North Waziristan. The ongoing offensive has reportedly pushed Arab and Central Asian fighters out of Pakistan, into Afghanistan, according to the Wall Street Journal. US drone strikes have continued across the border, despite the Nato mission there having come to an end.
Every strike this month reportedly killed foreigners as well as local men. The nationality of these foreign fighters was not always clear, though they were often described as being Uzbeks. It is not clear if this is a reference to their nationality or ethnicity.
Some of the dead were described in media reports as being loyal to Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a well known warlord from the tribal areas. There were reports he was killed in the first strike of the year, but they later turned out to be false.
Also this month, the Bureau has completed an audit of its Pakistan drone data. It has now available to download as a spreadsheet.
Yemen
January 2015 actions
Confirmed US drone strikes: 1
Further reported/possible US strike events: 1
Total reported killed in US operations: 3-7
Civilians reported killed in US strikes: 1-2, including 1 child
All actions 2002 – January 31 2015*
Confirmed US drone strikes: 88-107
Total reported killed: 424-629
Civilians reported killed: 65-96
Children reported killed: 8
Reported injured: 86-215
Possible extra US drone strikes: 71-87
Total reported killed: 307-439
Civilians reported killed: 26-61
Children reported killed: 6-9
Reported injured: 75-102
All other US covert operations: 15-72
Total reported killed: 156-365
Civilians reported killed: 68-99
Children reported killed: 26-28
Reported injured: 15-102
Click here for the full Yemen data.
* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range we have recorded in US drone strikes and covert operations reflects this.
Two reported US drone strikes left at least six people dead in the final week of January. An unnamed US official confirmed the first attack was carried out by the CIA. It reportedly killed a child. The second strike remains unconfirmed.
These attacks came as armed rebels took over the streets of the capital, toppling the government of former president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi. It is the worst political crisis in Yemen since the 2011 revolution that ultimately forced Hadi’s predecessor from power. The fall of Hadi’s government has robbed the US of a close ally. It has left the US “facing increasing difficulty acquiring intelligence” for its drone programme.
The first strike on January 26 hit four days after Hadi’s government resigned and the day after President Obama declared the US would continue its counter-terrorism operations in Yemen, despite the political situation. The CIA attack killed Mohammed Toaymen, a child reportedly aged between 12 and 15. He died alongside Awaid al Rashidi, a Saudi in his 30s, and Abdel Aziz al Zidani, a Yemeni.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said all three were members of the group, though an unnamed AQAP source made a distinction between a supporting member of the group and an operative with an active roll.
“Be logical,” an AQAP source told the Yemen Times. “How can a 12-year-old be a member of al Qaeda? Our aim was to convince him to join us in the future, especially considering that his father was killed in a drone strike.”
A US official confirmed to the New York Times that the CIA carried out the strike. It was the first reported US attack in the country for 51 days.
Related story: Analysis: What next for Yemen?
A second attack was reported on January 31. This unconfirmed US drone strike killed 3-4 people in a car in southern Shabwa province.
The attacks hit during one of the worst crises to affect the country, according Yemen expert Adam Baron at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He told McClatchy: “The phrase, ‘Yemen on the brink’ is one of the most pervasive clichés in coverage of the region. But Yemen is clearly more on the brink than it’s ever been in its history of being on the brink.”
The ongoing political crisis is “obviously a fantastic opportunity for al Qaeda”, Baron told the Bureau. The armed group took advantage of instability during the 2011 revolution that unseated then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh. It took control of a large swathe of the southern province of Abyan, setting itself up as the local government – providing people with power and meting out justice to petty criminals.
Also this month, the Bureau has completed a thorough audit of its drone strike data in Yemen. The number of confirmed drone strikes has consequently increased and the number of possible drone strikes has decreased. The data is now available for download as a spreadsheet.
Somalia
January 2015 actions
Total reported US operations: 2
Total reported killed: 45-69
All actions 2007 – January 31 2015
US drone strikes: 7-12
Total reported killed: 18-102
Civilians reported killed: 0-5
Children reported killed: 0
Reported injured: 2-7
All other US covert operations: 7-11
Total reported killed: 40-141
Civilians reported killed: 7-47
Children reported killed: 0-2
Reported injured: 11-21
Click here for the Bureau’s full data on Somalia.
There were two possible US drone strikes in Somalia on January 31, with between 45 and 69 people reported killed.
It was not clear from the reporting when the strikes took place. Both attacks reportedly killed al Shabaab fighters, though their identities were unknown. Both attacks were reported to have been US attacks. The US Department of Defense, which runs the US drone programme in Somalia, declined to comment on the reported strikes. A spokesman for Amisom, the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, told the Bureau it was not responsible for the attack. And the Kenyan Defence Force (KDF), which has launched air strikes in Somalia, did not respond to Bureau requests for comment.
South-western Somalia. Click to see the full map (Based on OCHA/Relief Web)
The first strike was reported to have killed at least 40 people when it reportedly hit an al Shabaab training camp in the Lower Shabelle region, south of the capital Mogadishu. The region’s governor told reporters the strike was carried out by drones. However the death toll was disproportionately higher than any other drone strike in Somalia. If US involvement is confirmed, it would be the most fatal drone strike recorded anywhere by the Bureau since Jun 2009 when CIA drones killed at least 60 in Pakistan.
The KDF reportedly targeted al Shabaab in southern Somalia with greater frequency last year than the US. This January 31 attack could have been a KDF strike – the Kenyan air force operations tended to have high reported death tolls, though these casualty counts were according to the KDF itself and not independently verified. For example, in November 2014 100 al Shabaab were reportedly killed by a Kenyan strike.
A second strike also reportedly hit on Saturday. It was said to have killed at least five people and reportedly hit either an al Shabaab convoy or an al Shabaab house in the Bay area, to the west of Mogadishu. A local resident told AFP the strike may have killed some civilians. Ali Yare said “four civilians were among the casualties” though did not specify if they were injured or dead.
jcdurbant 