[PARLEY] “On activism and outrage: The importance of recognizing the Man”

[This is a response to “It’s Not Pro-Democracy – It’s Anti-Expert” by NHN]

    Not long ago I had lunch with a friend, and the TSA came up as a topic. Now, if a topic has ever been hashed over by the internet hype machine echo chamber, it is the Transportation Security Administration. There is a reason for this, of course— most of the time, internet users are firmly ensconced in private or semi-private locations which are arranged for the users’ convenience and comfort. Much of modern American existence is so structured. 

Thus, moving through a TSA checkpoint is a jarring experience: everything seems sacrificed for the sake of some arcane and arbitrary rule set that is suddenly imminent in the traveler’s experience. This is the root of all this hullabaloo, right? That Americans are so generally comfortable that endless complaints are issued at any discomfort more sustained than the ten minute wait at a busy Starbucks?
    Or is it rather the case that discomfort over TSA procedures is symbolic over a larger feeling of disempowerment in modern America? Even if the TSA had a public review process that took place before new equipment and procedures were initiated, it is doubtful that critical comments would truly be taken into consideration. Indeed, the internet has coined a self-conscious new term for letters to congresspeople and bureaucratic agencies: slacktivism. What a disempowering act that is, the creation of a disparaging term for previously acceptable modes of democratic communication! If you hit that “sign the petition now!” button from Planned Parenthood or Moveon.org, this term declares that you aren’t really participating in anything. You are gesturing emptily.
    In other words, Americans are free to complain, unofficially or through established channels. But that’s all the substance there is to it: it’s just a steaming pile of empty complaints. Is this activism in the modern era? A suggestion box where all of the notes that aren’t marked with approval are immediately thrown out? To turn my friend’s question on its head: what role does the electorate get to play in its governments decisions? Does a modern system remain in which the people truly have a voice?
    I contend that many modern movements that gain high levels of internet exposures are rooted in this perceived disempowerment. What is at root here are not body scanners or “slippery slope” objections but the concern that we have already arrived at the bottom of the slope. We think in terms of slacktivism, and its prevailing message is that political action without practical consequence is empty. Unfortunately, with an unresponsive government it can feel as though all political action is now empty. Activism is dead, long live slacktivism.
    A recent case in point is the conversation over Stacy Armato’s actions at a TSA checkpoint. When people like Armato are perceived to have been done wrong by a government agency, not to have done wrong, themselves, the question is partly one of the actual substance of what her action constitutes and partly one representation and mood. I contend that the question as to whether Armato’s actions were just is a small one compared to the question of why her case holds power. For one thing, I doubt that it is out of some residual puritanical concern for privacy. That seems unlikely, as many of the people supportive of Armato’s actions in resisting TSA officers’ confiscation of her breast milk and subsequent publicizing of her ordeal are of a liberal bent when it comes to social attitudes. I suggest that it is rather because the TSA represent, to put it in so few words, the Man.
    Perhaps I myself am succumbing to poor framing by invoking the idea of the Man, that vaguely authoritarian entity who is representative of those who would put us down. All the same, I think that the Man can be a useful heuristic tool in getting to the bottom of why scenes of airport resistance attract the attention they do. I do not wish to sidestep the issue of the substance of the scene, and whether Armato was correct in her actions, and I will take it up head-on further down. But before doing so, I want to follow my own advice (“Emotional Framing”) and look at the frames and representations at work, asking why it is that we are concerned at all with Armato’s case. Many people opted out from using the backscatter scanners when the were introduced at many airports just prior to Thanksgiving in 2010, but few individual stories resonated as far as this one. So, I ask again: what gives this scene power?
    Part of it, no doubt, lies in the sensational details. Backscatter machines exposed those who stood in them quite literally, raising the specter of TSA agents with prurient interests. Then this story appears, concerning not only that but breast milk, a precious (to put it in Kubrickian terms) bodily fluid. Furthermore, Armato appeared to be within the bounds of reason: she knew the regulations governing bringing bottled breast milk through TSA security checkpoints and onto aircraft, and thought that she was not doing wrong. And perhaps this is where the real identification of the TSA with the Man begins in this story: Armato was no activist, stripping nude or wearing a costume or otherwise intending to disrupt the checkpoint. Instead, hers was an unintentional disruption. If the Man can put us down, even when we follow his arbitrary, seemingly un-American and un-democratic rules, then what choice do we have but to denounce him as, well, the Man?
    The spread of Armato’s story has to do with larger moods of disempowerment throughout the American public. I do not think the mood is so low as during the second Bush administration, when it seemed as though even honest democratic action in the form of booting representatives out of congressional office was not enough to ensure that poor policies were not enacted or rescinded. However, the cultural climate in the United States continues to be one of frustration, in which seemingly nobody gets their way. Obama and blue dog democrats swept in as a consequence of the 2008 elections, and by the 2010 elections many had been tarred as the bums that must be thrown out, bums responsible for perpetuating or enlarging the distance between people and their government.
    NHN acknowledges Armato as a representative of this desire for direct democracy, and criticizes that desire on the grounds that it is, itself, undemocratic. He is right to argue that American democracy does not consist of giving yourself over to the rule of your neighbor, but rather giving yourself over to a government of your duly elected representatives. Here is where the substance of Armato’s actions, and the actions of the TSA, come into play: we have now an idea of what their actions might represent, and who is (as a collective) doing the representing. Every piece of analysis, every drop in the internet text, audio, and visual bucket, crafts a perception of this case as one of a citizen in conflict with an unpopular agency, an agency that most of us who have flown recently view with a wary eye. So, is this just? Is it just for an individual citizen to act out our frustrations with the agencies born of our representative government? Or are these actions of frustration to be constrained by time and place?
    Why shouldn’t they be so constrained? We have many constraints that attempt to promote security, and the TSA is supposed to be in the business of crafting and implementing them. The time and place for legislating the TSA, NHN claims reasonably, is within the legislature. Furthermore, the place for regulating the legislature is at the ballot box, after a long and vocal electoral campaign. This is representative democracy, simple as that, and Armato sure doesn’t seem as though she has a better idea. So much the worse for her that we must operate within the constraints so established: perhaps her story will encourage people to agitate for change during the next election cycle. After all, what were the real consequences of the TSA’s actions in her case? Tears and some spilled milk?
    I think that this takes away the wrong message from this case. If we pay attention to Armato and the TSA, it is because we feel disenfranchised. It is simply not enough to attempt to change our government through the vicissitudes of electoral process. We pay attention to Armato because her case catalyses action, if only the action to engage in public discussion or to add our electronic signatures to petitions. It is the case that bureaucracy is meant to be a way of, as NHN writes, representing “the harmonic alignment of meritocratic administration with the democratic spirit”. The bureaucracy itself is an institution designed with an eye towards action, no matter how atrophied they become. All one has to look at are those ineffectual legislative houses to understand that parts of the government that take action need some distance from the electorate in order to function.
    Yet this doesn’t really go any distance towards addressing that mood of disaffection, does it? What should we do, write it off as a mass cultural phase, something the American people will just mature out of? I think not. I may not have a proposal on hand regarding repairs to our democracy that would alleviate the mood responsible for belittling our hopes of engaging with government. However, I do know that the representation that is Armato’s case is significant. We need new ways of making our government hear us, and we must avoid denigrating attempts at their creation. Sensationalizing an episode at a TSA checkpoint may not be the way forward, but there is no doubt that progress on the front of direct democracy is demanded and required.

by Don Everhart

(photo via federaltimes.com)