The Third Worldwide Web

In the nearly two months and 15 entries that comprise the Deconstructing Phil. lifespan, no episode has presented such a dire need of drastic interpretation as this evening's. “Bringing Home Katherine” part one aired today (the second half set to hit the small screen tomorrow) where Dr. Phil introduced his audience to Katherine, a girl who, at 16, fell in love via myspace with Abdullah, a 20 year old Palestinian man, and procured a passport to leave the country surreptitiously. When she was then reported missing, the FBI intercepted her in Amman, but after she later turned 18, with her family unable to stop her, she “ran away” from home again to live with Abdullah and her sister called Dr. Phil for help. Dr. Phil, of course, agreeing that Katherine is in danger, blames the internet. The real culprit is Orientalism. As Edward Said wrote in his groundbreaking work Orientalism, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there.” Instead, Said writes, such concepts, in all their geographic and cultural facets, are “man-made.” It is clear that the Orientalist picture of Palestine presented on the Dr. Phil show is one manufactured and in many ways fantastic. In fact, the dialogue was eerily similar to one of the most famous pieces of literature addressing the topic: Othello. Mary, Katherine’s sister, described her as being “under a spell,” the same way Brabanzio, Desdemona’s father, describes how his daughter was “corrupted/ By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” (I.iii.60-61). The family also repeatedly alleged (with no apparent factual basis) that Katherine had been brainwashed. At least Brabanzio said it with a bit more sophistication and panache when he bemoaned “O, treason of the blood!/ Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds.” (I.i.170-171). They also characterized both of Katherine’s premeditated, voluntary, and mostly unaided journeys to the middle east as “kidnappings.” This is, of course, the jaundiced and Janused voice of Iago, starting the whole tragedy with the cry of “thieves, thieves, thieves!/ Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags./ Thieves, thieves!” (I.i.79-81). The similarities are astounding, and it would be interesting to further compare Katherine’s story with that of Desdemona and the famous Moor (who, interestingly, some Shakespeare commentators read as an Arab). The main point here, though, is that the picture of the middle east presented by Katherine's family (with the help of Dr. Phil) is very much based on and promoting a fiction. It is extremely unlikely that any of the guests, or even Dr. Phil, ever visited Palestine, and certainly none were experts. The next important thing that Said tells us about Orientalism is that “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” (Orientalism). As Shawn [sic!], Katherine’s mother says: “I don’t know anything about Abdullah.” Such lack of knowledge is utterly unacceptable for a hegemonic figure (an American, a matriarch, a mass media product, etc.) Instead, it must be filled in—with xenophobic, racist, and jingoist notions if those are all that’s available. Katherine’s liberal international relations stance was stated quite adroitly and succinctly when she said: “I respect [Abdullah’s] culture, and he respects mine.” Though no one explicitly voiced it, the ideological position of those left in California was clearly: I don’t respect his culture (hell, I don’t even know it), but he needs to respect mine. If more evidence is needed that this is really a power struggle in every sense of the word, simply consider the fact that Katherine’s mother was outraged that at “18, according to the state of Michigan, [my daughter is] an adult.” While most people would probably see this as an entirely reasonable, acceptable, and just matter of law, Shawn was so outraged at her lack of control over her daughter that she “considered taking her passport or having her kidnapped.” Here, we can see Said’s point that “Orientalism…as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” (Orientalism). Here Said seems very indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis—the self being defined through the Other—when he writes, “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist…makes the Orient speak.” When Katherine returned to America after her first, unsuccessful expatriation attempt, her sister Mary said “I’m glad she’s here on American soil and alive.” The Orient is where danger is located, the Occident is, by way of contrast within an artificially constructed binary, the place of safety. But in this globalized, post-September-the-11^th-of-2001 world, how far does Mary have to broaden the Other in order to make herself and the place she lives safe seem safe? Of course, her secure and harmless Occident could not include the inner city, or the American military "nuclear" family. Could it include NRA members' houses, where every room has 3 loaded guns? The first generation immigrant living next door to the vigilante Minuteman border patrol? The very idea of liminality seems to become the territory of the Orient as exteriority and “a re-presence, or a representation” become vital since there is, in fact, no interiority and “no such thing as a delivered presence” (Orientalism). When Dr. Phil says “that situation over there…is highly unstable” he was apparently talking about Palestine, but he could have just as easily been talking about dozens of “Oriental” countries from Iraq and Iran to Venezuela and Cuba. But it masks (or, in fact, redefines) a more important question: in what way is the United States “highly stable”? Every episode from the Dr. Phil canon illustrates precisely how unstable America is. In this particular case, Shawn was so worried that Abdullah and his family would “kidnap” Katherine and prevent her from filing the proper paper work to travel across the Atlantic, yet that is precisely what she had previously contemplated. Katherine’s aunt callously cried that “Katherine needed her butt whipped” and yet expressed horror that the Oriental Arab/Muslim might be abusing her. Similarly, when she complained to Dr. Phil, “in America, men don’t call women ‘bitch,’” Dr. Phil could only respond “well, I wish that was true.” In fact, this reveals it all. The essence of Orientalism, wherever it may be found, is that it expresses what Orientalists want for their Orient and (perhaps more subversively) what they would like to see in their Occident too. When Dr. Phil says, so matter-of-factly, “at 16, Katherine shocked the world” he is—as an Orientalist—the one applying the questionable shock therapy to the world, re-shaping (and not just reporting) the Orient in his own warped and equally dangerous western space. Said is insistent, though, that Orientalism is not escaped or surpassed by academics, instead Orientalism is precisely “a distribution of geopolitical awareness in aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts.” (Orientalism, see also the picture from The XXth Century Citizen's Atlas, John Bartholomew, Edinburgh, pp7). Perhaps the most important question, then, is: in this supposed critique of Dr. Phil’s Orientalism, even in breaking down his superficially Occidental world, have we really helped to define a true Orient? No, of course we can’t, nor can anyone. There isn’t one.

We "Other Genians"

The premise of today’s episode of Dr. Phil, if it is to be believed, is that last Friday’s episode was so controversial, so action packed, so mind-blowingly amazing, that it had to be extended to a second show. Thus we are again entertained (it is, after all, a daytime television show) by the racially motivated violence and bitter division among the inhabitants of the small Louisiana town of Gena. In honor of Louisiana’s French roots, I suggest we take shelter with the esteemed French post-structuralist, Michel Foucault. Let us consider a few thoughts from his essay “We ‘Other Victorians’”:

[I]f repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics (5).

This passage, from Foucault’s book The History of Sexuality does, of course, focus on sexuality, though it seems just as applicable to our study of race. The story of the Gena six and perhaps all racial conflict is the story of a corrupted and uneven politics of language. As evidence, we see that members of Gena’s African-American community refer to the hanging of the 3 nooses on the schoolyard tree as a “terrible hate crime” and the beating of the white student as “a school fight” while the white citizens represented on the Dr. Philippe show had the exact opposite view of the magnitude of each event. Systemically, there is no resort, of course, otherwise Dr. Phillippe would not need to be talking to these people and their would have been fair and equitable treatment for all parties. More importantly, though, there’s also no easy remedy in the philosophical discourse. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy’s entry for “race” is shorter than its entry for “comedy.” Tying and hanging a noose is surely less insidious (though more overt) than the real injustice: there’s no statute to prosecute the act under. It is obvious, further disturbing the situation, that the problem is not with Gena, but rather the entire culture. Indeed, the power behind society seems to, quite literally, quarantine and segregate such problems to the geographically remote “Other” which is no longer quantifiably associated—except that it is everywhere within it. Perhaps there is something latently teleological and dialectical about any binary—male and female, modern and postmodern, black and white—which does not only allows, but leads to the power struggle over linguistics and knowledge. Even by looking forward and claiming that compromises can be reached is only a matter of affirming the repression (The History of Sexuality 7). It is not enough to be weary of politics, the system, or society, one must also take a critical eye to the language and knowledge controlled under the hegemonic dominance of the aforementioned institutions. To watch Dr. Philippe is to actively take part in racism; then again, to not watch Dr. Philippe is also to engage actively in racism. In a Foucauldian universe, there is perhaps more benefit to all sitting down and admitting that we are each alike and united in our socially embedded, inescapable racism.