25 March 2009: "Should I h8 AZNs?"

This post is about the People's Bank of China, and more specifically, its tacit practice of supporting the value of the dollar and sustaining global trade imbalances. Carles is concerned primarily about interferences in exchange rates, how this has affected savings rates, and the long-term cultural implications of this: "Sad about the economic crisis, and how AZNs have been smarter than us about saving ‘money’ and only spending what they have. I think America is beautiful. We’ve had a good run, but maybe we’re not as special as we thought we were. Kinda sad. I still feel ‘cooler’ than a lot of foreigners, and like smarter." China has been in effect financing American consumers going into debt and indulging in consumption practices that allowed the U.S. to become "really good at branding" -- both at the level of corporate marketing practice, serving a buoyant consumer marketplace, and at the level of personal self-actualization, in copious acts of self-branding. The underdeveloped consumer market in China has meant that Chinese consumers are exempt both from the dilemmas of self-branding and of mounting resistance to hyper-targeted brand-marketing campaigns. Hence Carles remarks that we still believe ourselves in America to be "'cooler'" even though the economic relations of production underlying that ideological notion have now begun to shift. The equation of "cool" with "smart" has never seemed more tenuous, even though the entire hegemonic consumerist superstructure of American quotidian existence has been built upon that equivalence, operating as reflexive common sense. Americ as hyperpower has always been based on the perceived supremacy of its "lifestyle". As Carles recognizes so clearly, that is eroding: "I used to feel safe about being an American, since we were #1 in everything, but now I don’t know if I want to bring a kid into this world without the United States of America being what it once was. Not sure if my kid could handle growing up in a place that’s ‘not the best.’"

As the cool-consumerist nexus is challenged, the temptations of fascism loom larger: "should we construct some ‘internment camps’ in the middle of the USA where we force all AZNs to live and do manual labor, even if they are respected within society? Not trying 2 be radical, just know that we have 2 hold some1 accountable for our crisis, and it might ‘unite’ our country if we single out a group of people who are responsible." Currently we are united by the integrity and supremacy of our brands, which rely ultimately on debt financing to fund their evolution and their circulation. With China threatening to mitigate its purchase of Treasurys, the unifying stratum of consumerism is threatened as well -- gravely. Individualism, which relied on brands, will be "out" -- community will be in, and in order to unite a mass society, the techniques of fascism are all too familiar, they sit on the shelf waiting for the right demagogue with an aggrandizing mission to seize them.

What will be our Reichstag fire? Carles seems to be asking. He points to our very ignorance of China as a vulnerability: "I don’t really know much about China, except that they are ‘commie reds’, violate a lot of human rights, and pollute a lot. Learned that from the newspaper." The fifth column could easily be subverted, made a source of inflammatory information to stoke populist fires.

Carles wonders if now is the time to go into exile: "should I move out of the USA and move to an authentic city like Paris/Beijing/Tokyo/Cairo?" Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Carles seeks a refuge where he can continue his investigations into the ideological underpinnings of post-Enlightenment culture without fear of persecution. May he find himself somewhere as improbable and intellectually galvanizing as Los Angeles in the 1940s. But for now, Carles remains in an apparent state of internal exile, an emigre from the warrens of his own ever-shifting philosophical problematic.