Illustrated by Kyle Fletcher and written by Michael Kiser

This is about masks. There are masks we wear as individuals. And there are masks we wear as groups. Micro/macro. And then there are the shiny helmets that astronauts wear as they peer point-blank into the future. I intend to argue that all these masks are useful. 

 

We’re expected to play innumerable roles in out lives, from friend to enemy, co-worker to client, patriot to traitor. And almost all of these roles, when broken down into their constituent parts, morph and bleed into each other to the point of indiscernability. I art thou.

The fear of the mask goes deep into our history as sentient beings. Even as we don our own characters, we hiss and bark at others when they tip their hand at being disingenuous. We throw feces like a bunch of monkeys calling out a tiger in the weeds. This is where American culture differs from our forbears. Most  cultures described as non-nationalistic are much more comfortable with the mess of truth and identity. And this is why our politics are becoming so dangerous — because we’re looking to purify identities when we should be looking to strut and fret upon the human stage. 

Enter Richard M. Daley, mayor. This is a man that understands his job. He “acts” as mayor, he doesn’t serve. And acting is delicate art. Do you think you know Daley? The moment you think you know a politician, you’ve been had. His aggressive, heavy-handed, scolding personality is what he’s learned, not who he is. His approach has been effective. It’s become his mask for acting as mayor. He’s a better method actor than Val Kilmer could ever hope to be. 

Where it gets tricky is when the public dons its own mask. They act the part of the duped public, always keeping their distance from their tyrannical leader and crying corruption. Daley calls a press conference to shout into a microphone, and the public re-elects him. It’s a dance really. A creepy, father-daughter dance, but it works. The corruption enables us all to act the way we’d like in one large masquerade. 

From the film, Syriana:

Corruption charges… Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddam Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is out protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the street. Corruption is why we win!

But even this level of realized corruption isn’t the troubling part for me. Where I get nervous is when we start to act like the system should be any different. Things get too exposed for which there’s no solution other than fundamentally changing human nature. Corruption isn’t a political concept, it’s how we’re wired. We’re built to exploit systems, take what we can, take care of our own. Empathy only goes so far before we’re sacrificing our own gain for something or someone we can’t qualify. When you start sacrificing yourself to an ideal that doesn’t directly benefit something or someone you can connect with, you’ve begun serving an idea instead of lives. And unfortunately, that’s how America was founded. We exist for freedom itself, not freedom for our selves. 

This type of masking gets complicated. It’s like going to a 3-ring circus where each ring is a circus about a 3-ring circus. The act breaks down. There’s no tangible story being told. No performances based in delight or surprise or awe. Or anything connected to the life of a circus at all. Just a constant dispersing of attention towards a concept. And that’s both boring and uninspiring. It’s what conservatives mean when they bitch about academics and intellectuals running the country. There’s no tangible effect, just positioning.

What the mask imperfectly brings to politics is the ability to experiment with ideas and identities without feeling like we’re permanently adopting any one position. For a time, we can put on the mask of liberal or conservative America, and it lets us get things done. But the pendulum of the political performance swings back and forth over periods of time to expose the long-term plot of indecision when it comes to our political identities. As a nation, we’ve never been liberal or conservative. We’ve always been both. But we’ve never been okay with that. Because from day one, both sides thought they had succeeded in achieving political purity — if they could just get rid of the other meddling party. Now that we’ve watched innumerable acts over the last 234 years, the act is getting old and the circus is getting exposed. 

America used to be jealous of Europe’s past. When we wanted “culture” we’d take the grand tour of the continent. We’d study its literature, it’s politics, its wars. As we were organ-rejecting the empire, we were scrambling to fill role of father. And there was no donor match.

As a result, these days, all you hear about is the future. We create technologies that make 6 months ago seem primitive. We obsess over the “new.” We buy and sell futures on the market. Our culture can’t seem to consume the next 5 years fast enough. 

If looking to the past created a conservative, steady approach to development in our culture, our future-focused obsessions create high levels of anxiety over the uncertainty of our assumptions. Should we buy a house or rent? Should we have a kid? Should we invest in Apple? What about GMO foods? We ask these questions as though we can actually determine the answers without having to wait for time to pass and answer them for us. We’ve accelerated our expectations to such a clip that we forget we don’t actually know anything about the future. Living in the now involves risks we’re not willing to take. 

A major outcome of that anxiety is war. War is not a defensive mechanism, as it would be with a historical, conservative approach to living. Today’s wars reflect our desire for control, not over others per se, but over our future. We enter into wars preeminently, not reactively or with justification in the here and now. Our wars will require history itself to prove them just or not, as George W would put it. 

It’s like with every bullet we fire we’re asking: “Can you see it? Can you see the future? Tell us where it is!” We’re contemporary conquistadors looking for the el Dorado of future time. And like the natives of old, there’s no point in telling us we’re mistaken. Just point us in the false direction of our obsession, and send us meandering to our end down some jungle river that will drive us mad. In other words, cultures that are fundamentally uninterested in democracy are coy enough to adopt the mask of wiling participant in order to get from us what they think they need, for as long as they’re getting it. They won’t pursue some ideal like democracy, as America pursues its ideal of the New Jerusalem. These cultures act the part, because they know it’s just a part, in order to serves themselves in the here and now.

America’s obsession with the future, including the eventual success of the shining city on a hill for all other nations, is no more apparent than in our space program. NASA represents American’s greatest ambition – if we’ve failed to create a more perfect nation here, we can do it somewhere else. But it also represents our willingness to experiment with different roles as humans. It enables us to play at being super-human, multi-planet beings, prototyping the future rather than simply being obsessed with it. As a politicized construct, NASA is a wasteful effort that both parties bitch about the other funding. But as a American, even human construct, it’s our past being perfectly realized. It’s beyond politic.

Our political theater often refers to conservatives as the puritanical overlords restricting our freedoms. But puritanism had higher targets than gay sex and witches. Puritans sought the perfection of ideas. And it’s this vein that still permeates our American culture, and our politics, and makes it impossible to wear effective masks to enact the play. Our bi-partisan attitudes force us to shout “mask!” with a finger pointed at others, while never acknowledging that we’re acting a part all our own. 

NASA and its funding is a major casualty in this mis-directed play. It’s the one real act playing out in a circus too self-referential to even consider jabbing a tiger with a stool to see what would happen. If there’s one mask worth wearing that can help us continue the human play, it’s an astronaut’s helmet, and it the purest form of American expression.