J UDE D AVIES Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity Who other than the politicians who commit them bothers to complain about the stupidities of politics? Are the clever parts of politics any cleverer? Karl Kraus 1 It would be easier to pay off the national debt than to neutralize the power of OUR NATIONAL STUPIDITY. Frank Zappa 2 Since the 1980s a series of figures have emerged in U.S.-American politics and media whose apparent stupidity has validated and empowered their status as heterosexual white men. Across a broad political and cultural spectrum, from Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael Moore, to the protagonists of films such as Being There, the Bill and Ted, Wayne’s World, and Dumb and Dumber series, and television shows like Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park and The Simpsons, stupidity has operated, in the phrase of Matthijs van Boxsel, “not as a failing but as a force.” 3 Of course, for Bush and Clinton, as for Homer Simpson, the identification with stupidity can function negatively, as a form of abjection. But the force of stupidity in each case testifies to the lingering presence of patriarchal gendered and/ or racialized power. Playing dumb is generally a much less effective strategy - and consequently a much less common one - among people whose intelligence and abilities have historically been denied or stigmatised. In a powerful sense then, the “stupid white men” are a ruse of power for the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a means of rejuvenat- 1 Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta [1923]. Trans. Jonathan McVity, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001, p. 50. Thanks for their feedback, criticism and suggestions on earlier versions of this work to Andrew Blake, Merrick Burrow, Lisa Merrill, Simon Newman, John Pollack, John Carlos Rowe, Carol Smith, and Ingrid Thaler. 2 Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York and London: Poseidon/ Picador, 1989, p. 239. Thanks to Paul Williams, host of the 2005 Frank Zappa Memorial Barbecue, for drawing my attention to Zappa’s discussions of stupidity, which range beyond this quotation and the scope of the present essay. See therefore Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. London: St Martin’s, 1996. 3 Matthijs van Boxsel, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans, The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity. London: Reaktion Books, 2003, p. 20. 190 J UDE D AVIES ing conservative forms of straight white masculinity in the public sphere. In contrast to the pre-culture wars construction of masculinity in terms of exemplarity and pretentions to a neutral or universal perspective, male authority is reconstituted around the admission of its limitations, and even - as will be seen à propos Arnold Schwarzenegger - its errors. As Frank Zappa’s reference to “our national stupidity” quoted above suggests, such struggles over gendered power have wider implications. One of the paradigm’s furthest developments, discussed below, is Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 film Forrest Gump. Here, the force of his stupidity positions heterosexual white masculinity, in the person of the eponymous protagonist played by Tom Hanks, at the center of recent American history, and enables that history to be re-narrated in such a way as to heal the traumas of Viet Nam, Watergate, racism, desegregation, the rise of Black Power and student politics, and the culture wars. Gump’s explanation of Ku Klux Klan racism, “sometimes people do things that just don’t make no sense,” goes for all and any fractures in the nation, his limited consciousness authenticating the film’s redemptive national narrative. Yet “stupid white men” are not exclusively bound up with reactionary power. Rather, the identification with stupidity plays all the way across a political spectrum from the right-wing Republicanism of George W. Bush to his would-be nemesis the satirist Michael Moore. In Moore’s 2002 book Stupid White Men the term is used to indicate some of his political targets, but it could also could be taken to refer to Moore’s own on-screen persona. Long before his political opponents appropriated the term to describe him, it was clear that Moore utilized the pose of stupidity for a variety of strategic purposes, including to confront the powerful and test their apologetics, and to establish his own blue-collar credentials. 4 In television shows such as The Naked Truth and TV Nation and films such as Roger and Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2001) Moore’s habitual method has been to present himself as an archetypal “ordinary guy” asking reasonable questions - questions which are frequently so obvious as to seem ignorant or stupid, but which are designed to have the effect of puncturing the aura of rationality around dominant economic and political discourse. It is only with Fahrenheit 9/ 11 (2004) that the persona shifts a little, since Moore is more explicitly intent on putting over an analysis of the War on Terror. Even so the film is largely organized around a series of simple, even simplistic, questions, whose aim seems to be to contest the Presidential persona of honest simplicity: What was George W. Bush thinking of as he carried on reading 4 Michael Moore, Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. David T. Hardy and and Jason Clarke, Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. New York: Regan, 2004. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 191 to children when told of the first attack on 11 September 2001? Why were relatives of Osama bin Laden allowed to take flights from the USA? Why do law-makers not read the legislation they are to vote on? , etc. “Stupid white men” also resonates widely outside the Moore-Bush conflict. Presidents Ronald Reagan 5 and Bill Clinton have also been associated with different forms of stupidity, as has Arnold Schwarzenegger in his position as Governor of California. The television serial “The West Wing,” well-known for dramatizing U.S. political issues, devoted a 2002 episode to the question of the relative merits of intellect and stupidity as desirable Presidential qualities. 6 The episode is initialized when, after a television interview has ended but while the cameras are still rolling, the show’s fictional President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) calls his Republican challenger stupid. This apparent gaffe is subsequently revealed to be a deliberate move, a ruse of intelligence feigning a mistake in order to brand an opponent as stupid. How such a strategy may be linked to the information disclosed in this episode that Bartlett graduated summa cum laude with a major in American Studies, (and a PhD from the London School of Economics), readers may speculate for themselves. It was then for good reason that Richard Hofstadter, in his pioneering Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), acknowledged anti-intellectualism as a redeemable heir to the Founding Fathers’ values of simplicity, individualism, and hostility to hierarchy, even as he excoriated the anti-intellectual strand that had been a powerful component of McCarthyism and still threatened the progressive civil rights project. This ambivalent national tradition renders “stupid white men” ideologically slippery, but the apparent fixity offered by many European perspectives on the USA is no better. U.S.-American power has provoked in Europe a populist anti-Americanism, whose embrace of the venerable binary of American stupidity versus European intelligence render it both reactionary and conceptually inadequate. 5 Rogin points out that Reagan presented himself as being highly ethical by virtue of what might be seen as three forms of stupidity: a basic inability to deliberately mislead, a simple faith in nation and God, and a natural, common-sense morality contrasted with an over-sophisticated world. See Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie And Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987, and Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC.: Duke UP, 1997, p. 184. 6 The West Wing, “The U.S. Poet Laureate,” teleplay by Aaron Sorkin, story by Laura Glasser, directed by Christopher Misiano. First aired March 27, 2002. An unofficial transcript is available at <http: / / www.westwingtranscripts.com> (consulted August 31, 2006.) The show portrays intellect/ stupidity along partisan lines - the former valued by Democrats, and treated with hostility by Republicans, one of whom raises the question “Doesn’t it concern you that the smartest presidents have been the worst? ” citing John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson. 192 J UDE D AVIES A mapping of stupidity then might be launched out of the juxtaposed epigraphs at the head of this essay. While the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus warns against the assumption that stupidity can be opposed in any direct way by intelligence, the American guitarist/ composer Frank Zappa responds directly to an ethical imperative to name that which is stupid. Zappa’s vernacular style precludes claims to expertise in such matters, but he nevertheless belongs to a recognisable American tradition of anti-anti-intellectualism. Another of his formulations, that “Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance has not” (Zappa 241) is reminiscent of Richard Hofstadter’s more measured assessment of anti-intellectualism. But overall Zappa’s scorching critique is ideologically closer to that of H.L. Mencken, whose battles against censorship and American Puritanism anticipated those of the musician seventy years later. Mencken warned in a 1917 essay, “Puritanism as a Literary Force” that The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution … have put an almost intolerable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States. 7 The instances of stupidity within the USA that Zappa cites - “people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos or Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons” (Zappa 239) - belong to another anti-intellectual national tradition, the Gunfighter Nation identified by Richard Slotkin, while Zappa’s description of U.S.-American externality - “we possess THE VERY BIG STUPID” - that is nuclear weaponry, anticipates the USA’s status as sole hyperpower, and the unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror, as well as Avital Ronell’s 2002 description of the “sinister history” of stupidity in America (evidenced by racism and the regulation of immigration) as “destroying an alterity.” 8 However, as Kraus’s question suggests, and as Ronell demonstrates at length, stupidity is a philosophical and linguistic problem exactly because it resists being fixed, banished, put in its place, located. “Stupidity is everywhere” (37) as she puts it, echoing Gustave Flaubert. Her 2002 work Stupidity explores the term as the quintessential example of linguistic différance; the fundamental dissonance between grammar and text, or discourse and thinking. Thus Ronell begins by referring to “[t]he temptation … to wage war on stupidity as if it were a vanquishable object,” a war which is futile 7 H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” 1917, quoted in Carl Bode, Mencken. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University P, 1969, p. 100. 8 Avital Ronell, Stupidity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002, p. 39. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 193 because stupidity “exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutches of denial - and returns.” 9 Although this makes fantastical the traditional self-positioning of the intellectual as the foe and eradicator of stupidity, Ronell nevertheless maintains the ethical imperative that “[i]t is undoubtedly someone’s responsibility to name that which is stupid” (37). What follows is an attempt to fulfil this imperative. Anti-Intellectualism and the Presidential Persona: Hofstadter Redux The situation of “stupid white men” at the intersection of politics with television and film reinforces the importance of reading political personae as cultural forms, and in particular as more or less politicized performances of identity which interact with the political economy in which they are embedded. 10 United in launching the U.S./ UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair justified the war to their respective constituencies very differently. Where Bush offered moral certainty, Blair presented himself as a man possessed of superior insight, of privileged knowledge - a would-be sophisticated player in global politics. Subsequently, the failure to discover the weapons of mass destruction whose existence was the pretext for the invasion, was hugely damaging to Blair, but it made little difference to Bush’s popularity, since his rationale was based more in moral right and machismo than on Intelligence. If Bush’s 9 Ronell, Stupidity, p. 3. Flow is a key theme in Victor E. Taylor’s exposition “Refusing Theory: Avital Ronell and the Structure of Stupidity,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4: 2 (April 2003), at <http: / / www.jcrt.org/ archives/ 04.2/ taylor.shtml>; consulted August 26 2006, as Taylor signals by his choice of a quotation from another Ronell text, The Telephone Book, for one of his epigraphs: “Remember: When you’re on the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even when that flow is unmarked.” 10 Ronell understands the performative nature of stupidity primarily in relation to philosophy and literature, as when she comments that stupidity “now belongs to the famous repertoire of Nietzschean poses, to the domain of fictions and the will to power” (4). This turn enables the project of Stupidity and has been profoundly enabling for my own work. However, I maintain the category of performance for several reasons. I am too much of a materialist to invest as heavily in philosophy and literature as Ronell does. More importantly, the category of performance allows us to contemplate stupidity simultaneously in terms of the politics of its forms, and as a set of cultural forms embedded in and shaped by power relations. This begs the question of the autonomy of stupidity as a cultural form in relation to political economy, a question to which this essay will return. 194 J UDE D AVIES approval ratings have fallen subsequently, this has been due to the high human cost of the war, especially among American service personnel, its extended duration, and the weakness of democracy in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. These very different leadership personae do not derive in any simple way from personality, but are identifiably shaped by specific national histories and cultural and political traditions. Some of these differences are suggested by the contrast between the slogan employed by Blair during the 1997 British general election, when his Labour party came to power: “Education, Education, Education”, and the articulate inarticulacy evidenced by the phenomena known as “Bush-isms.” The personae of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan suggest that antiintellectualism can be mobilized as a political virtue in the USA in ways that are unthinkable elsewhere - though that is not to underestimate the emotional appeal to nationalistic ethnic fantasies made by far-right political parties in much of Europe. Thus the BBC television show “Deadringers,” which regularly features comic impersonations of politicians, in a show first aired in July 2003 had “Blair” as the straight man deliver a complex, balanced speech, while a “Bush” figure inset into the screen at top right, after the manner of signers for the hard of hearing, glossed it into monosyllabic phrases such as “U.S. good; ” “Evil ones dead.” Hence also the pointed British joke about the war in Iraq: “Bush is an idiot, but what is Tony Blair’s excuse? ” and the response of the British satirical magazine Private Eye to Bush’s re-election in November 2004. Riffing on the Republican slogan “four more years,” its cover proclaimed “Four Moron Years.” The popularity of such representations in Europe testifies to the continued power of venerable discourses of American exceptionalism both within and outside the USA, drawing upon the opposition between the supposedly youthful, un-cultured and democratic New World, and cultured, hierarchical, old Europe. Although this was never an innocent formation ideologically, what is most striking about it now is its anachronism, given the current global pre-eminence of the USA in the fields of elite culture like classical music, high literature, and Higher Education and the flow of banality westward across the Atlantic in the form of European mass culture such as the reality television formats exported to the USA: Big Brother (originated in the Netherlands), Survivor (Sweden), and American Idol (the UK.) This internal production of lowbrow culture and its transmission to the USA, should have rendered obsolete the European tendency to view the populist mass media in terms of Americanization. Yet on both sides of the Atlantic this distinction has proved remarkably resistant to such challenges. If Europeans flatter themselves by the comparison, conversely, within the USA stupidity as a political virtue took its place in the early 2000s within a revitalized cultural and political discourse of exceptionalism - a Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 195 discourse whose political valency between Republican and Democrat was often explicitly configured by reference to Europe. This is the context that stigmatized John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic party Presidential candidate, for his cosmopolitanism: his youth spent partly in Berlin, and his ability to speak French. The presidential campaigns in 2000 and in 2004 reinvigorated the current that had been exposed brilliantly by Richard Hofstadter forty years previously in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter’s description of the prevalent view of intellect fostered by McCarthyism and the Cold War in 1950s and 1960s America, as “some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid” encapsulates negative media depictions of both Senator John Kerry and his predecessor as Democrat candidate for the presidency, Al Gore. 11 It was even more potent as a weapon against Kerry because of his biographical links with Europe, and particularly with France, referred to by the Herald Tribune in February 2005, only half-jokingly, as a “blue state,” that is, one of the Democrat-voting U.S. states. The Presidential elections of 2004 saw the activation of stupidity as a neoconservative political posture defined against the intellectual as European - a construction with which many Europeans have proved complicit, whatever their conscious political affiliations with President Bush or his opponents. Hence the popularity in Europe of the work of U.S.-American cartoonists who present Bush as stupid, such as Doonesbury, of liberal commentators and leftist satirists in general, and of jokes about Bush’s stupidity. While within the USA, such satire may serve to rally support for intellectual values against that which is labelled stupid, and therefore address a need for change, outside the USA it frequently slides into a generalized sense of the stupidity of the nation led by Bush, and can thereby reinforce European assumptions of superiority. Thus, on a television show previewing the 2004 election for British audiences, the American comedian Rich Hall opined that ‘The real rift in America is not between races - it is between the stupid, and the really stupid.’ More prominently Michael Moore spent a year at the top of the British bestseller lists with Stupid White Men, before his film Fahrenheit 9/ 11 won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2004, and played to packed cinemas from Salzburg to Glasgow. The limitations of this popular European view are demonstrated by contrasting transatlantic satirical depictions of Ronald Reagan during his presidency. The British television show “Spitting Image” featured a longrunning segment whose tone can be judged from its title, “The President’s Brain is Missing.” At the same time, the USA’s “Saturday Night Live” had 11 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963, p. 46. 196 J UDE D AVIES Reagan acting stupid while the cameras were on him, but, as soon as he is left alone in his office, reverting to a very knowing and intelligent persona, plotting world domination with his aides. Stupidity was key to the “teflon Presidency,” just as the lack of knowledge attributed to Reagan led later to his exoneration from responsibility for the Iran/ Contras debâcle. “They Misunderestimated Me” Like his opponents in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush is of course an Ivy League graduate, and the nature of his “stupidity,” as honest simplicity, as populist style, as mendacious performance, or simple intellectual deficiency, is by now subject to several degrees of irony. Still, it is relatively easy to discern some of the ideological formations that determine the valency of Bush’s “stupidity,” that enable it to function as weapon rather than as deficit. His persona mobilises secular and Christian biographical narratives of self-help and re-birth to make a virtue of recovery from past fallibility such as alcoholism and drug abuse. Jacob Weisberg, editor at Salon.com and author of The Deluxe Edition of Election Bushisms describes this as a shift from one form of ignorance to another one much more popular with conservative voters. As the reformed alcoholic and born-again Christian, Weisberg argues, “Bush’s old answer to hard questions was ‘I don’t know, and who cares? ’ His new answer was, ‘Wait a second while I check with Jesus.’” 12 In this sense Bush’s “stupidity” explicitly identifies him with the neoconservative Christian right and promulgates its values. However, stupidity in the sense of the acknowledgement of limited subjectivity is part of the deep structure of Bush’s persona in ways that transcend this explicit political affiliation. Symptomatic of this wider appeal are comments such as his response, on the eve of high-level trade meetings in Argentina in October 2005, to a journalist’s question as to how he would deal with Hugo Chavez, the leftist President of Venezuela and focus of opposition to U.S. power in Central and South America. Bush replied “I will be polite to him. I am a polite person.” At one level, by (deliberately? ) missing the point of such questions, Bush cleverly sidesteps a raft of geo-political issues. But the real power of such responses, and indeed of Bush’s persona, lies in the performance of two contrasting forms of stupidity; forms that Avital Ronell has labelled “idiocy,” and “stupidity.” Ronell draws this distinction from a reading of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: 12 Jacob Weisberg, “The Misunderestimated Man: How Bush Chose Stupidity,” <http: / / www.slate.com/ id/ 2100064/ > Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 197 The essential difference occurs in the perception of what can be known by the limited subject, and the degree of consciousness becomes a question of integrity: the idiot knows he is an idiot, names himself as such or confirms acts of diagnostic and social naming. The stupid subject, on the other hand, does not have this knowledge about himself […] He knows, he thinks, what’s up and never lets it get him down or turn his head around. The stupid man […] does not experience hesitation, is never caught up in the idiocy of undecidability. The stupid never question, whereas the Idiot concentrates one big question mark, an ineradicable stain, on the page of his destiny. (218-19) Implicit in Dostoyevsky, what Ronell makes explicit is the importance of the distinction between “idiocy” and “stupidity” as it relates to normative subjects, rather than as a means of differentiating between subjects defined as non-normal. The concern is less with the condition of marginalized others who lack the insight everyone else has, but rather a polarity between responses to the universal condition of limited subjectivity. While “stupidity” never doubts itself, in the case of “idiocy” consciousness of one’s fallibility leads into social interaction. At one pole is the closed, defensive rationalization of the limitedness of (heterosexual, white, male) subjectivity - stupidity as plenitude. Less familiar is its antithesis - stupidity as lack, whereby the acknowledgement of those limitations leads to a sympathetic engagement with the other. The appeal of Bush’s persona, powerful enough to be instrumental in securing two Presidential election victories, derives in part at least from its deployment of both of these, its alternating between stupidity as openness (“idiocy,” in Ronell’s terms) and stupidity as closure. The verbal mistakes, the acknowledgement of the limitations of perspective, and the explicit commitment to good manners, all suggest the positive engagement with the other that takes place under the sign of the idiot. But the moral certainty used to justify the exercise of military and economic power belies this consciousness of limited subjectivity, giving reign to stupidity as the “destruction of alterity” (Ronell 39): at the level of the individual, the refusal to contemplate the possibility of being wrong; at the national level, militarism and unilateralism. The combination of these two forms of stupidity, which can also be discerned in Ronald Reagan’s persona, in some ways reflects the institutional constraints of the modern presidency. By the early 1970s U.S.-American political commentators were remarking on the dissonance between the rhetoric of omnipotence and omniscience that surrounded the chief executive, and the actual limitations on presidential knowledge and power, both in terms of the necessity of devolving research and decision-making to advisers, and in terms of geopolitics. At the same moment the mediatization of political life epitomized in the phrase “the selling of the president” was becoming the 198 J UDE D AVIES focus of widespread discussion and some disquiet. Drawing these developments together from the disciplinary location of Political Science, Thomas E. Cronin saw the development of what was being called the “personalized presidency” as a response to the dissonance between popular investments in presidential power and the reality that … the American President is in no better position to control Bolivian instability, Chilean Marxism, or Vietcong penetration into Cambodia than he is to make the stock market rise or medical costs decline. 13 Introducing Cronin’s work in their 1973 collection Inside the System, Charles Peters and John Rothchild remark upon “the textbook illusion that one man, if he wanted to, could cure everything from inflation to conglomerates to pollution to crabgrass.” They imply that presidential omnipotence and omniscience are necessary fictions of the U.S. political process even though, cutting across this functional explanation, they do warn that “foreign and military affairs… have become increasingly seductive to modern Presidents faced with the necessity to prove their greatness.” 14 The observations of Peters and Rothchild, made at the height of America’s war in Viet Nam, appear prescient of the way in which the War on Terror temporarily redeemed the popularity of an administration mired in domestic problems and apparently powerless to ameliorate them. At time of writing, polls indicate that a majority of U.S.-Americans regard the invasion of Iraq as a mistake, and the administration’s ratings are low and continuing to fall. However, a brief comparison with Bill Clinton suggests that it is not the association with error by itself that determines popularity. As noted above, Bush’s appeal has rested to a partial extent on the appropriation by neoconservatives of religious codes of fallibility and redemption. This created a framework through which errors in Bush’s personal life such as problems with drugs and alcohol, could be forgiven and forgotten, in stark contrast to Clinton’s sexual incontinence, which resulted in long, drawn-out impeachment proceedings. Such frameworks are invaluable in determining whether error is read as evidence of humanity or evidence of incompetence, or worse. In this context Jacob Weisberg rightly emphasizes the importance of Christian religious ideas of being “born again.” But probably more important in activating and de-activating the association with stupidity is the manipulation of codes of class and race/ ethnicity. Absolutely crucial here is Bush’s assumption of a “good old boy” persona, both when being filmed “off duty” at his Texas ranch, and on public occasions, when he draws on 13 Thomas E. Cronin, “The Textbook Presidency,” in Charles Peters and John Rothchild (eds.), Inside the System: A Washington Monthly Book. New York: Praeger, Second Edition, 1973, pp. 6-19; pp. 18-19. 14 Peters and Rothchild, Inside the System, “Introduction,” pp. 3, 4. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 199 blue-collar diction, and establishes personalised dialogue with interviewers and foreign heads of state. This recapitulates and updates Reagan’s self-presentation as the common man, equipped with moral compass rather than intelligent insight, but in a way that is strikingly thin compared to Reagan’s ability to embody feelings of national redemption. This thinness is however very important, since it is what, in large part, has enabled Bush to manipulate the association with stupidity to his own advantage, and in marked contrast to the way that coded signifiers of Blackness were used to villify Bill Clinton (as Toni Morrison demonstrated in her often mis-read 1998 New Yorker article on the construction of Clinton as the “first Black president.”) There is indeed a coded racism in many right-wing satirical cartoons and sketches, where Clinton was represented as “Bubba,” which drew on racial stereotypes to cement his identification with negative forms of stupidity. 15 Consider by contrast Bush’s use of the greeting “Yo Blair,” picked up by a live microphone at the G8 summit meeting in July 2006. “Yo,” employed prominently by popular cultural figures such as “gangsta” rap artists, and Sylvester Stallone in his film role as the Italian American Rocky Balboa, circulated widely in the 1980s and 1990s as a sign of authentic racialized and ethnicized blue-collar or underclass identity. But the frequency of its use, and its appropriation by white suburbanites or “wiggaz” had exhausted much of its authenticating power well before Bush used the term. 16 This very mobility, coupled with the gesture toward a racialized and ethnicized working-class identity enable Bush, or any similarly privileged subject, to control their performances of identity - to inhabit stupidity, yet also to maintain a distance from it, and at will to “come out of” such a performance. 17 15 See also Harry Shearer, It’s the Stupidity, Stupid: Why (Some) People Hate Clinton and Why the Rest of Us Have to Watch. New York: Ballantine, 1999. 16 See <http: / / www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php? term=yo> for a lively debate over the origins of “yo” in which the claims of African American and Southern Italian immigrants to Philadelphia are advanced. Less disputed among contributors to the site is the sense of the term’s exhaustion by its appropriation by more privileged white suburbanites. Thanks to John Pollack for drawing my attention to this issue. 17 Compare for example the 1990 Florida prosecution of African American hip hop artists 2 Live Crew, which turned on the question of the extent to which their misogynistic lyrics were a self-conscious performance. The defence of 2 Live Crew by the eminent African American literary theorist Henry Louis Gates could be seen as insisting on the complexity of Black performativity in the face of “stupid,” that is culturally ignorant, white juridical power predetermined to characterise Blackness as stupid. Yet if at the level of “race” Gates and the defence team successfully resisted the operations of stupidity-as-power, at the level of gender the group may be considered as performing stupidity as a means of cementing male power. The work, persona and career of the white hip hop artist Eminem also plays out many of these racial and gendered tropes of stupidity. 200 J UDE D AVIES Reading Ignorance Stupidly In the dramatis personae of the Bush administration as popularly understood by Europeans, and many Americans, ex-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was usually positioned as the embodiment of (evil) genius, Svengali to Bush’s Trilby. It is partly for this reason that Rumsfeld’s comments at a media briefing on 12 February 2002 attracted a degree of satirical attention. At the briefing Rumsfeld was asked, Is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations? 18 His reply was reported as follows: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know …. 19 These comments were presented as a gaffe in the mainstream media and were widely ridiculed. Among the many citations in a crowded field, Rumsfeld was satirized in the online Salon magazine (predictably perhaps by a website that epitomizes liberal “cleverness” and disseminates Bush-isms), was featured in Bob Fenster’s 2005 book The Duh Awards and awarded the 2003 “Foot in Mouth” prize by the British-based organization the Campaign for Plain English, an annual citation for the “most baffling” statement by a public figure. 20 No doubt in part this reaction was due to Rumsfeld’s popular reputation as a clever manipulator. But these remarks are hardly “baffling” or comic. Rather, they quite accurately delineate the contingency of our knowledge of the world around us (Ronell’s sense of the limited subject, again) and in this case the state of military “intelligence” concerning the abilities and intentions of foreign powers. As such, these comments are far from “stupid.” They are, rather, deeply evasive. Rumsfeld’s intention is clearly to close off the question of the limitations upon military intelli- 18 Transcript: Defense Department Briefing, February 12, 2002; at <http: / / www.usembassyisrael.org.il/ publish/ peace/ archives/ 2002/ february/ 021301.html> consulted 2 December 2005. 19 Ibid. 20 See “Donald Rumsfeld ‘Honoured’ For Confusing Comments,” n.d., http: / / www. plainenglish.co.uk/ pressarchive.html, consulted 10 June 2006; Hart Seely, “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld: Recent Works by the Secretary of State for Defense,” April 2 2003, <http: / / slate.com/ id/ 2081042/ >, consulted 10 June 2006. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 201 gence, and to evade responsibility for the assertion of links, still unproven, between Saddam Hussein’s regime and global terrorist networks, which were the main justification given to U.S.-Americans for the invasion of Iraq. This particular briefing took place in the wake of an incident at Zawar Kili in Afghanistan, during which 3 people were killed by an American Hellfire missile. While the U.S. military initially claimed that the dead were highranking members of al-Queda, reports from Afghanistan suggested that these were three civilians doing nothing more subversive than gathering scrap metal. With this in mind, Rumsfeld’s comments become legible as, after all, a further strategic deployment of stupidity, by which violent deaths at the hands of the USA’s military are neutralised by being treated as mere operational incidents. This rhetorical manoeuvre keeps intact the exceptionalist rhetoric of the Bush White House made explicit elsewhere, as in October 2001, when Bush told a press conference How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? … I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am - like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are. 21 Bush’s construction of the essential goodness and democracy of the USA as archetypal “known knowns” completes the ideological circuit. Any understanding of U.S. military activity as imperialism is forestalled. Dead civilians, Abu Ghraib, and civil war in Iraq are presented as not what “we” are trying to do, and therefore not “our” responsibility. “This is not what I’m trying to do: ” The Apology as Gendered Strategy A more individuated example of the deployment of stupidity as a neoconservative performance can be seen in an incident from the Californian gubernatorial recall election in 2003. Confronted with a series of allegations concerning his past sexual behavior, on October 2 nd the Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to allegations of groping and sexual harassment dating to as late as 2000, published in that morning’s Los Angeles Times. Addressing a crowd of supporters in San Diego, Schwarzenegger denied some charges, but, allowing that “wherever there is smoke, there is fire” he went on to apologize. “I have behaved badly sometimes,” he admitted, 21 “President Holds Prime Time News Conference,” <http: / / www.whitehouse.gov/ news/ releases/ 2001/ 10/ 20011011-7.html#status-war>, consulted 10 June 2006. 202 J UDE D AVIES and I have done things that were not right which I thought then were playful but now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people who I have offended, I want to say to them that I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I am trying to do. 22 By paralleling an autobiographical narrative with a sense of historical changes in gender relations (the pivotal reference is to “things … which I thought then were playful”), the apology dismisses the social and political dimensions of such changes, and the feminist challenge to gendered hierarchies which brought them about. Instead, sexism is defined narrowly as behaviour inadvertently causing offence in the personal sphere. Having thus sequestered any gendered offence, Schwarzenegger turned immediately from his own status as a private citizen to envisage himself within the public sphere of politics. “When I am governor,” he continued, “I want to prove to the women that I will be a champion for the women, a champion for the women. And I hope that you will give me the chance to prove that.” 23 Having learned his lesson, the male self is envisaged as emerging from the personal sphere, where women are left behind, to do battle in the political arena on their behalf. These manoeuvres depend heavily upon Schwarzenegger’s star persona of protective hypermasculinity, but they derive ultimately from more wideranging neoconservative ideological formations of the 1980s and 1990s, formations that Lauren Berlant has termed the “privatization of citizenship.” Berlant argues that the “Reaganite revolution” must be understood in both cultural and political terms. As she explains, through an antipolitical politics that claims to be protecting what it is promoting - a notion of citizenship preached in languages of moral, not political, accountability - the national culture seeks to stipulate that only certain kinds of people, practices, and property that are, at core, “American,” deserve juridical and social legitimation. 24 The results of this cultural stipulation could readily be seen at the October 2 nd media conference. Schwarzenegger, flanked at the media conference by his wife Maria Shriver, was recognizable as belonging to the category Berlant identifies as the “modal normal American,” who “sees her/ his identity as something sustained in private, personal, intimate relations.” Defined against this are the “abjected, degraded, lower citizens of the United States 22 See “Arnold Apologizes for Bad Behavior,” Fox News 3 October 2003, and at <http: / / www.foxnews.com/ story/ 0,2933,98883,00.html>; see also “From Schwarzenegger, An Apology,” The Washington Post 3 October 2003 at <http: / / www.washingtonpost. com/ ac2/ wp-dyn/ A32971-2003Oct2>, both consulted 29 August 2006. 23 Ibid. 24 Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, p. 185. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 203 [who] will see themselves as sustained by public, coalitional, non-kin affiliations,” 25 in this case the women imagined by Schwarzenegger as channelling their consciousness of shared grievance into a need for him as “champion.” Seen through this lens, Schwarzenegger’s bid to be taken as an advocate can be seen as more post-feminist than anti-feminist - taking for granted a feminist sense of gender solidarity, only to contain it by invoking prefeminist notions of separate spheres. Schwarzenegger’s claim that “this is not what I’m trying to do” acknowledges the limitations of straight white masculinity as a subjectivity, but uses this acknowledgment to reconstitute white patriarchal power. The holding of entrenched power (here the privilege of evading punishment for carrying out sexual harassment) is construed as a variety of honest stupidity, a failure of judgment that leaves intact the moral and ethical probity of the harasser. Error is narrativized as an initial step in a sequence of giving offence, becoming conscious of having done so, making an apology, and aspiring to make good that offence by some unspecified advocacy in the public sphere. While these responses may have been adopted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in good faith, they do nothing to alter existing power relationships. Rather, the privileges that the identity movements attacked are redefined by being framed ideologically in terms of error and mistake, from which the white male subject emerges with renewed fitness for the exercise of power. Strikingly, exactly these ideological forms have been identified by feminist critics in Hollywood cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the socalled “male transformation” or “sensitive guy” films such as Parenthood, Regarding Henry, The Fisher King, Groundhog Day, and Schwarzenegger’s own Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Kindergarten Cop. 26 In retrospect, such films can be connected with another popular genre of the 1990s, which may be entitled the cinema of “stupid white men; ” including Wayne’s World, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; Dumb and Dumber, and their sequels, and the later American Pie series. In all these films stupidity is performed 25 Ibid. 26 See especially the work of Susan Jeffords and Fred Pfeil. The forms of masculinity discussed in this essay, emerging as they do in the wake of such films as Regarding Henry, Lethal Weapon II, and the Schwarzenegger vehicle Kindergarten Cop represent a significant further and more confident step in the production of neoconservative subjectivities. While the early 1990s moment can be seen as responding to the downsizing of the wages of blue-collar white males, and to feminist and Black critique by a turn to the interior health of white masculinity and its rejuvenation in the familial sphere, the tendency identified here builds on and consolidates this position to produce a renewed and overtly politicised white male subjectivity for the public sphere. 204 J UDE D AVIES with a certain charm; in many of them stupidity turns out to be a winning strategy whether in terms of romance, career, or simply, in the case of Bill and Ted, completing a history assignment. Even when most abject, as in the Dumb and Dumber series, stupidity nevertheless succeeds in exasperating the non-stupid characters. In all of these, the portrayal of white masculinity as stupid serves to regenerate its agency, within genres which have very little engagement with the national dimension. That dimension was articulated explicitly in one of the most popular films of the decade, Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump. Stupidity as Plenitude: Forrest Gump Reviewers of Forrest Gump spent much time decoding its eponymous protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, suggesting resemblances with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, as well as European literary models such as Candide and the Good Soldier Schweik, and cinematic precursors Zelig, and the protagonists of Being There, Rain Man, and Regarding Henry. Indeed the appeal of Gump as Southern white everyman echoed aspects of Clinton’s persona, while the ethical value attached to his good manners anticipated elements of George W. Bush’s. Commentators also debated the significance of Gump’s stupidity - defined in the film by the attribution of an IQ 5 points below “normal.” A pivotal comment here is Mrs Gump’s advice to her son that “stupid is as stupid does,” a phrase which Forrest repeats throughout the movie and, as Robyn Wiegman suggests, seems to be intended to universalize his story. However, as its echo of the saw “handsome is as handsome does” implies, the phrase and the film are concerned with creating hierarchies within masculinity, in which women, as witnesses, have the symbolically crucial, but socially limited, power of making the final judgement, or in the terms used for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apology, having something proved to them. Prominent as they are, discourses of gender and sexuality serve what is primarily a racial dynamic in Forrest Gump, reflecting the national traumas of the 1950s and 1960s, which it is the film’s ideological project to resolve in the terms prescribed by the neoconservative alliance between “business” values and the Christian Right. In work cited earlier Lauren Berlant has persuasively situated this project with respect to the coupling of a political trajectory of the privatization of citizenship with a cultural trajectory of expunging white guilt from American history. Building on this Robyn Wiegman has convincingly framed the film as an example of what she calls “liberal whiteness,” in which racially white subjects disaffiliate from Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 205 overt racism and invest instead in a notion of the U.S. as a post-traumatic society. 27 The success of the film in achieving this project alongside its popular and aesthetic appeal depends heavily upon the specific ways in which Gump’s stupidity is represented. As was registered in the multiple lineages proposed by contemporary reviewers, various traditions of stupidity, secular and Judeo-Christian, are utilized in order to frame the stupidity of Forrest Gump and make it symbolically resonant. So, he is in the words of P.J. O’Rourke “the ideal citizen for the modern world - a perfect idiot,” but also and simultaneously, in the epithet applied to Tom Hanks before the film’s release, “Hollywood’s last decent man.” 28 What this means for the film - and this is somewhat different from the satirical picaresque of Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, to which O’Rourke was referring - is to present Gump as a representative of a specific racialized and gendered identity (straight white masculinity), and simultaneously as the moral center of an apparently disinterested neoconservative narrative of national history. Forrest Gump the film was enjoyed by millions of Americans less for its rehabilitation of white masculinity, than for its use of the Gump figure as a surrogate for its redemptive narrative of U.S. history that dissolves away the tensions and shame of Viet Nam, the struggles for Civil Rights and desegregation, feminism, Watergate, et.al.. Most mainstream film critics observed in one way or another that the film’s overt message of social reconciliation and individual triumph over the odds was fatally compromised, and struggled to account for its popular appeal. 29 The particular forms of stupidity depicted in Gump are crucial in generating this redemptive narrative. In the first place, Gump’s stupidity corresponds exactly to the Dostoyevsky/ Ronell sense of term. It is manifested as dumbness, ignorance, an entire lack of self-consciousness, which extends to an utter failure to grasp politics, history (events such as the death of his best friend, an African American named Bubba, the shootings of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and others happen, according to Gump, “for no 27 Berlant, Queen of Washington, pp. 180-85; Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” in Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (eds) The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), pp. 269-304; especially pp. 276-98. 28 O’Rourke quoted on the cover and first page of Winston Groom, Forrest Gump. London: Black Swan, 1994; Richard Corliss, “Hollywood’s Last Decent Man,” Time 11 July 1994, p. 58. 29 For a fuller account of the critical debate occasioned by Forrest Gump on its release, see Jude Davies, “White Masculinity in Crisis? Hollywood Multiculturalism in Falling Down, Uncle Buck, and Forrest Gump,” in William Boelhower and Alfred Hornung (eds) American Multiculturalism and the American Self. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000, pp. 321-48; pp. 339-42. 206 J UDE D AVIES particular reason”), and the meaning of his own racial whiteness. As Lauren Berlant puts it, Gump “is too stupid to be racist, sexist and exploitative; that is his genius and it is meant to be his virtue”(183). In fact this provides Gump with several “virtues.” At a basic level it enables the film to implicitly equate his own disabilities (his low IQ, and a leg problem that necessitates braces) with the social and political handicaps imposed upon African Americans in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. This lays the groundwork for the portrayal of all forms of inequality as personal injuries, which require personal, not social and political, solutions. The film’s running joke with its audience is that Gump’s good manners produce acts with a historical impact that he cannot possibly intend, and does not understand. Hence most strikingly he is shown helping to desegregate the University of Alabama, in one of the film’s celebrated uses of digital technology to insert him into stock footage of historical events. Oblivious to the surrounding demonstrators, police, and Governor George Wallace, Gump picks up a Black student’s books and escorts her through the doorway. Gump wanders through the national flashpoints of the 1960s and 1970s, from desegregation to the Viet Nam war to Watergate, with his gentlemanly heroism intact. At such moments, his dumbness acts as a form of wish fulfilment for white liberal investments in a colorblind society, and, more invidiously, his lack of self-consciousness also functions to mask racial and gendered privilege. In this post-identity politics, post-modern rewriting of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, manners substitutes for politics - just as they do when George W. Bush prides himself on his politeness in his dealings with political opponents such as Chavez. In all of these ways Gump’s stupidity plays an ideological function, which may give audiences a certain intellectual satisfaction in its conciliatory but asymmetrical national narrative. However, the film’s popular appeal probably derives as much from the more direct, less intellectual pleasures it offers, especially through its playful incongruities and Gump’s frank enjoyment of his body. The obverse of his lack of self-consciousness is his figuring as a simply appetitive self. By emphasizing his enjoyment of ice cream and soft drinks, and censoring the sexual desire for women described in Groom’s novel on which it is based, the film presents Gump as experiencing desire that is utterly divorced from social context and purged of any sense of lack. The only possible exception is the sense of loss occasioned by Jenny’s sporadic absences, but this pales into insignificance in comparison to the other protagonists, whose character is defined by the intense and debilitating lack that constitutes their felt relation to history. Bubba, Gump’s best friend, dreams of developing a shrimping business. He dies in Viet Nam. Lieutenant Dan, Gump’s superior officer, longs to die a soldier’s death, as his male Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 207 ancestors have done for generations, but he is instead merely disabled and symbolically emasculated. Jenny, Gump’s childhood sweetheart, has her attempts to “reach people on a personal level,” cynically exploited, and ends up dead of a strange unnamed virus. These are sympathetic characters. Activists of various sorts, Black Panthers, students, and anti-war protesters, are all presented much more negatively. In stark contrast, Gump’s stupidity brings with it a sense of plenitude and enjoyment of physical activity - eating, drinking, running, playing table tennis, and farting - the unruly body as pleasurably subverting the intellect. Stupidity as Lack: Three Kings If the figuration of Gump’s stupidity in terms of plenitude helps authenticate that film’s conservatism, the figuration of other “stupid white men” in terms of lack may suggest a different politics. Such a figure is Conrad Vig (played by Spike Jonze) in David O. Russell’s 1999 film Three Kings. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Gulf War, Three Kings was re-released in 2002-3 in protest against the prospective invasion of Iraq. The four central characters in the film are soldiers called up for Operation Desert Storm who set out to secure for themselves a consignment of gold bullion belonging to Saddam Hussein. One of these four, Conrad Vig, is constituted by lack to the same extent that Forrest Gump emanates plenitude. Stereotyped as Southern white trash, when fellow soldiers flashback to memories of home life with their families or jobs, Vig remembers taking potshots at some soft toys propped up on a wrecked automobile. He begins the film as an embodiment of stupidity-as-racist-closedness. He does not know the difference between friendly and enemy Iraqis, and he cannot figure out where he is - maybe Egypt, he says at one point - and at first he does not care. But as he discovers very quickly, he needs to know the difference as a matter of survival. During the course of the film Vig changes as a result of his recognition of his own ignorance, moving from “stupidity” to “idiocy.” He is warned off from using racist terms by a Black superior officer (Ice Cube), whom he quickly comes to respect and admire. Later, he goes on to develop a strong sense of brotherhood with Iraqi refugees, and, following his discovery that they have “a good shrine” he adopts their Islamic religion. But he continues to make mistakes, as when he ululates enthusiastically along with some female refugees, and the gender-specific nature of this cultural practice has to be explained to him. Vig’s idiocy is continually manifested in terms of encounters with ethnic and cultural difference. At each encounter, he discovers that his preconceptions are wrong, and this discovery often leads directly into the question of how he should behave with respect to 208 J UDE D AVIES ethnic and cultural others, and what responsibilities he has to them. His trajectory is one of a developing understanding of Iraqi, Moslem others, but he continues to make cultural mis-readings throughout the film - what he learns above all is that he always has much to learn. Conrad Vig’s character and narrative reverse those of Forrest Gump. Gump’s experience of stupidity as plenitude shields him from anxiety, protects him from the historical disasters that kill or maim his friends (enemy fire in Viet Nam, AIDS in the USA), and generally forestalls any possibility of change through encounters with other human beings. In passing through history unscathed, as a constant, Gump holds together the film’s ideological and playfully pleasurable strands. By contrast, Vig’s experience of stupidity as lack (or “idiocy”) induces him to change, propelling him to a positive engagement with people of a different racial and ethnic and national identity. And whereas Gump is magically protected, Vig dies. He is shot and fatally wounded by members of Saddam Hussein’s imperial guard, and the ending of Three Kings depicts the refugees taking his body into Iran for the Moslem burial he had requested. These contrasting dynamics are amplified in the films as wholes. Whereas Forrest Gump places the limitations of individual consciousness in a magical narrative of national healing, in Three Kings the limitations of individual consciousness are compounded with fractures within the nation and a sense of the limitations of nation-bound perspectives. Three Kings is a politically compromised movie. Its central narrative of the “three kings” - American soldiers who sacrifice their selfish plan to steal looted gold in order to help Iraqi refugees to safety in Iran - belongs firmly within American generic forms and modes of address, reproducing several of the “white savior” tropes described by Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon. 30 But for all it limitations, the film does attempt to open up a space where the wish to escape domination can be construed as something other than the wish to be U.S.-American. And crucial to opening up this space is Vig’s idiocy, which acts as a reminder of the limitations of individual knowledges and national ideologies. Something of this was registered by none other than Bill Clinton, making a rare appearance as film critic, on the television show “Roger Ebert and the Movies” in February 2000. Clinton read the film as suggesting the need to face up to “society’s oldest, most primitive problem, our tribalism, our tendency to go beyond a natural pride in our group … [which results in] fear and distrust and dehumanization and violence against the ‘other.’” 30 Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 209 As I have argued elsewhere, 31 following the critiques of John Carlos Rowe and Vera and Gordon, Three Kings is in some ways still unconsciously subject to the limitations of a Western, U.S.-centered perspective, especially in its blurring of distinctions between Shia and Suni Moslems and its use of the “white saviors” trope. The political valency of the film largely depends, therefore, on the question of its being contained within - or breaking through the limitations of - the national narrative. Three Kings is embedded in specifically U.S.-American cultural forms (war movies, regeneration through violence, counter-cultural critique, icons like football and George Clooney) and even in its internationalism, appears markedly “American” to non-Americans, whether Europeans or from the mid-East (Three Kings is popularly understood to be one of only two U.S.-American films banned under the Saddam Hussein regime, the other being South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut in which he was portrayed as Satan’s lover) or elsewhere. Perhaps the best example of this is the way in which the American soldiers reach out to save the Iraqi refugees, in a typically exceptionalist, “American” trope. Moreover, in its contestation of the 1992 Gulf War, the film has sometimes been read as calling for U.S. imperialism to be redeemed rather than rejected. In such readings, which director Russell has felt obliged to explicitly reject, the film’s depiction of the manipulation, abandonment and betrayal of anti-Saddam rebels in 1992, is seen as requiring further intervention to topple Saddam Hussein a decade later. The “three kings” of the film’s title, the three central characters played by George Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg, tend to be contained within these exceptionalist national and imperial ideologies by their status as “saviors” of the Iraqi refugees. It is the comparatively marginal figure played by Jonze, the avowedly limited subject, who suggests a break with such ideologies, since he joins the Iraqis, dies and will be buried by them. In order to activate the progressive potential of this formation of idiocy or “stupidity as lack,” found in the figure of Conrad Vig, it is necessary to shift from a national to an international or trans-national conception of politics. Such encounters could move the stupidity/ intelligence formation beyond the exceptionalist rhetoric and trans-atlantic binaries that, all too frequently, continue to constrain its understanding. While it would be simplistic to characterize the “stupid white men” of the 1990s and 2000s as precipitates of the widely discussed but notional “crisis of white masculinity” of the early 1990s, such figures are clearly conditioned by the problematizing of straight white masculinity’s claims to uni- 31 For a fuller discussion of Three Kings see Jude Davies, “‘Diversity. America. Leadership. Good Over Evil: Hollywood Multiculturalism and American Imperialism in Independence Day and Three Kings,” Patterns of Prejudice 39: 4 (2005), pp. 397-415. 210 J UDE D AVIES versality and normativity effected by the identity movements (civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian liberation). The identification with stupidity has functioned as a strategic response to the prohibition on claiming universality, acknowledging the limited subjectivity of straight white masculinity but legitimating its agency nevertheless. The difference between Three Kings and Forrest Gump argues for a distinction between “idiocy” - or stupidity as lack, which has a progressive or liberal political character, and stupidity as plenitude, which is conservative. However, when we consider the sphere of politics, as opposed to culture, this opposition seems less effective. The persona of George W. Bush depends on the manipulation of both forms, stupidity as hostility to alterity, and, what appears as its opposite, a performance that acknowledges the limitations and fallibilities of individual subjectivity, anticipating and disarming criticism. Hence the above discussion of the films is concerned with the political values considered to be inherent in the forms of stupidity; their cultural politics, if you will; while Bush’s dualistic persona, and to a lesser extent those of Schwarzenegger and others, suggests that performances of stupidity must be understood as mere epiphenomena of political economy, overdetermined by political power and world-historical processes of a completely different order. Karl Kraus’s indifference would then be justified, stupidity and cleverness as the flipsides of one another, twinned strategies for the generation of political capital whose difference is only gestural, mere performance. This possibility cannot easily be dismissed. Nevertheless, in Europe it seems important to try to intervene in culture, in order to try to contest the simplistic, Euro-centric and nationalistic attitudes toward U.S.-American “stupidity.” At the same time, the homologies between a unilateralist foreign policy, and the various performances of stupidity with which the subject position of heterosexual white masculinity continues to be redeemed in U.S.-American culture, suggest a formative or causal relationship of some kind. And the stakes are high. As the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has demonstrated, quite apart from the political economy of the Imperial project, the consequences of stupidity, in the forms of misrecognition and failure to plan, can be catastrophic.