Restricted Frequency #201
Factionality and the Rise of the Single-Interest American
The September 1988 issue of PLAYBOY features a tasteful nude of Jessica Hahn on its cover along with the announcement of an exclusive interview with none other than Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from 1969-2004.
PLAYBOY: During these past months, the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza—and the Israeli reaction to it—has produced a dramatic change in the way people perceive the Palestinian cause. Despite that, do you think the P.L.O will ever succeed in shedding its terrorist label?
ARAFAT: Everyone has now discovered who is the real terrorist organization: It is the Israeli military junta who are killing women and children, smashing their bones, killing pregnant women. You just have to look at television to see this. So now it is clear and obvious who the terrorists are.
That’s how the interview kicks off (after a long two-page introduction), strong, no punches pulled. Encountering this interview—indeed encountering the entire publication really—has been rather sobering for more reasons than one.
The first most obvious reason I suppose is the acknowledgement that a version of what the world is going through right now has more or less happened before (numerous times in fact) and when it did happen before there was an assumption (at least by those in favor of the Palestinian cause) that the truth had finally been exposed and populations the world over would never allow for the oppression of the Palestinian people (or any people for that matter) by imperial powers to continue. This makes me doubtful about similar sentiments being expressed today, that somehow exposing that the state of Israel has murdered over 29,000 Palestinians in a handful of months will matter to politicians and world leaders. It won’t (well, at least in the one country that counts the most—see image below), because money talks, and what money is saying right now is that there is no economic incentive to liberate the Palestinian people, but plenty of economic incentive to continue propping the state of Israel.
I can, off the top of my head, name three such economic incentives:
Gaza’s Natural Gas — Of exceeding importance especially since the war in Ukraine.
Arms Deals — Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself is quoted as saying that the US is more or less good for three things: “Munitions, munitions, and munitions.”
So I’m afraid that unless there’s a very strong economic incentive to do otherwise—at least to those in the halls of American power—the Palestinian people will continue to perish. Alas, democracy in America does have its limits.
But the second reason why the discovery of the aforementioned Playboy issue has been so sobering—and the reason you might say is the core impetus behind this particular edition of RESTRICTED FREQUENCY is the notion of—for lack of a better word—intersectionality.
Now I know that Intersectionality with a capital I is often used in relation to critical race theory, but that’s not what I’m referring to in this case. What I mean is: Here we have a publication marketed as “Entertainment For Men” showcasing naked women for the primary purpose of exciting male libidos also featuring a powerful and candid interview with arguably one of the most controversial political figures of the era within the very same space. The same issue also includes a 2-page comic (granted, dumb as shit) and a short story by Joseph Heller that starts off like this:
Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer was himself contemplating the bust of Homer where it stood on the red cloth covering the square table in the left foreground and wondering how much money it might fetch at the public auction of his belongings that he was already contemplating would sooner or later be more or less inevitable.
The cigarette advertisement on the back cover features highly suggestive imagery of non-monogamous practices.
To encounter this very mainstream corporately-produced publication from over three decades ago in a time when the acknowledged spaces for public debate have gone out of their way to censor both nudity and the mere mention of the word “Palestine”—at least the case for Instagram, I’ve been off both Twitter and Facebook for a time—makes one wonder about far down we have regressed as a society. The only truly acceptable activity on these platforms seems to have become to buy and sell shit. Indeed, the only acceptable activity in America at large seems to have become to buy and sell shit. No need to carve out a specific time in the week to venture out to a specific location where the shopping mall beacons. Our every waking moment is the shopping mall, and the culture at large continues to carve the streams of our existence to flow directly into one grand river of mindless commerce, one that is heavily mucked up by the ever-multiplying debris of unquenchable consumerism.
I am in no way against the sale and purchase of goods and services, but it can be but one component of our lives, existing in conjunction with our many diverse interests. Case in point, the aforementioned Playboy magazine is chockful of advertisements for various consumer goods, but they exist together with a variety of other material. A genuine variety of other material. And in the case of one particular aforementioned cigarette advertisement, even that one does more than just try to sell you something. It attempts to also suggest an alternative to the widely-practiced heteronormative conventional relationships of the 1980s. Whether you agree with the nature of said material isn’t quite the point. The variety in the material’s very nature is the point.
Now of course, neither Playboy as a publication nor the 80s as a time period were ever considered the high mark of American intellect, but that makes the case of where we are today even more sad. Just to diversify my examples, allow me to point you in the direction of another item from my library: AVANT-GARDE #10, published in 1970, showcases a series of nudes in a forest, an extensive feature under the title “The Doctor Who Called the A.M.A. the ‘American Murder Association’”, a celebratory photo-essay on Israel, an essay predicting the de-separation of church and state in America, and another making a case for direct-democracy rather than the far from actually representative representative-democracy still in effect in the United States today, as well as a series of paintings by Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
Where oh where are the spaces for diversified interests in our time? Art publications today seem to me to focus exclusively on the aesthetic qualities of artistic output, design publications exceedingly focus on the commercial applications of design, for politics you go to Foreign Policy or the American Prospect, comics are in comicbooks (and even then 99% of them are costumed fight fests for some reason), nudity is only to be seen in purely pornographic outlets, fiction in anthologies, novels, and literary journals, queer magazines specifically for all the queer going-ons, so on and so forth.
This kind of ultra specialization, I find, is socially detrimental, as it has been contributing to the proliferation and even normalization of single-interest individuals; comics nerds who only read comics and cannot be bothered with the sight of any other kind of book, addicted porn fiends who cannot dissociate the slightest bit of nudity from outright prostitution, fiction readers who hate non-fiction, non-fiction readers who find fiction to be a waste of time, politicians who lack the imagination to think outside of the political spectrum of the last century or more, tech bros who believe a line of code will be the key to saving the universe and more importantly their ticket to amassing excessive wealth, gymrats who etc.
The world isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. But only if we let it.
Ganzeer
Houston, TX
NOTICE:
This is my last blast on Substack. Moving RESTRICTED FREQUENCY to another service for, well, reasons. Proliferation of neo-fascists aside, I’m not entirely fond of Substack’s social-mediafication of newsletters nor am I fond of their emphasis on monetization. Given the history of my relationship with multiple other social media platforms to date (quit Facebook at 40k followers, quit Tumblr after can’t remember, quit Twitter twice, and kind of already souring towards Instagram), I can sort of foresee all the standard social-media issues that are likely to arise with Substack. Anyway, just to reiterate, if you’re already subscribed to RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, there’s nothing you need to do. You’ll receive the newsletter in your inbox as per usual. If however you’re reading this on the Substack webpage without having subscribed and would like to read future letters, you can subscribe here.
MORE:
Copies of my short autobio comix THE CURSE OF I are now available at Partners & Son in Philadelphia. Alternatively, you can get them directly from me at Mythomatic.com
Mythomatic is also where you can scoop up print-installments from my still ongoing sci-fi epic, THE SOLAR GRID.
A variety of original art can be scored from Garage.Ganzeer.com
I also blog at Ganzeer.Today