Given that I’ve long been under the spell of Norman O. Brown who famously (and rather convincingly) threaded together the teachings of Jesus, Marx and Freud, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that I’m somewhat inclined to making such audacious connections myself. And so here I am about to make a fool of myself connecting the dots between Badass Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, psycho killer Aaron Hernandez, and the woman whose hips don’t lie, Shakira.
It all began with the Super Bowl halftime show that Shakira put on last Sunday with sister in arms, legs, and butts, J-Lo. It was a fully entertaining event, but much more than that it was a joyous declaration, not of resistance to the current oppressive state of American affairs, but a declaration of liberation from it. Before the largest national audience our divisiveness will allow, one subversively sensual Latina and her army of carnal insurgents announced that in the face of the lies, the corruption, the bigotry and the repression, the show will go on. It was an epic show of musical, hip-grinding, gloriously sexual humanism…dancing in the streets will result, babies will result, and a new world will be born. It was a celebration ripped out of the pages of Norman O. Brown:
Knowledge is carnal knowledge. A subterranean passage between mind and body underlies all analogy; no word is metaphysical without first being physical; and the body that is the measure of all things is sexual.
After a full Washington week of intellectual gymnastics, constitutional contortions, and legalistic limbo (both meanings of the word: a state of neglect or oblivion; a dance in which the dancer bends backward to pass under a horizontal bar that is progressively lowered), it was answered by a full frontal assault of Shakira’s Miami heat…a triumph of body fucking over mind fucking.
As I’ve written before, unserious students of Nobby have tried to pigeonhole him as the father of “anything goes” sexuality. Serious students know better, one of those being Richard A. Koenigsberg:
Brown did not focus upon the genitals and orgasm — rather on the pursuit of pleasure through the activity of “any and all organs of the human body.” Brown’s advocacy of “polymorphous perversity” is an important source of the world in which we live today, where each individual believes he or she is entitled to his or her “sexual preference;” where it is considered offensive to morally judge an individual’s sexual “life style,” however eccentric it may seem. The power of Brown’s advocacy derived from his ability to build upon the idea of Freud and Reich that sexual repression constitutes the source of illness or mental disorder.
Now allow me to make a leap. When Nancy Pelosi literally ripped to pieces Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech after months of politically calculated pronouncements, she was letting her body talk…rips don’t lie. It is significant that when she was asked later if she had any regrets about her action she said she felt very liberated by it. Orgasms notwithstanding, that’s precisely what Norman O. Brown was getting at.
A few days later on the floor of the US Senate Mitt Romney made major news by being the first Senator to vote against a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. The most significant moment of a truly powerful speech, given the circumstances, is when he choked up upon referencing his faith in God as guiding him to his bold decision. Through that verklempt episode, Romney’s physicality was asserting itself over his intellectuality. It was in essence what Nobby puts forth in his works, especially Love’s Body — the body is the great truth teller.
Coincidentally in this week when Shakira was shaking it up and Nancy Pelosi was ripping it up and Mitt Romney was tearing it up, I was also watching the Netflix documentary on former New England Patriots star tight end Aaron Hernandez who after being convicted of murder hung himself in his prison cell. Hernandez’s life seemed to be a perfect storm of factors that could drive a man (and usually it is a man) to violence — bad parenting, the wrong crowd, a simultaneously indulgent and dangerous profession that extols masculinity while exposing its participants to traumatic brain injury. It’s hard to single out any one of those as the main cause, but the documentary advanced another cause for the killer within which makes Hernandez the poster boy for a book Norman O. Brown did not write, Hate’s Body. The documentary makes a credible case that Hernandez was a deeply closeted homosexual filled with fear and self-loathing…and through violence, both on the field and off, he was striking out against something in himself he hated. As Brown wrote:
Murder is misdirected suicide, to destroy part of oneself; murder is suicide with mistaken identity. And suicide is also a case of mistaken identity, an attack on the (introjected) other.
During the week I also read a news report on a Trump rally in Iowa that focused on the fun the rally goers were all having. They show up early and tailgate outside the venue like football fans. Then they pile inside high on testosterone and the smell of victory, dressed in colorful Trump gear, eager to laugh at the insults, cheer the lies, boo all the “others” called out by name for their collective contempt. That upbeat spirit may invite comparisons with the joy Shakira and crew created at the Super Bowl, but the contrasts between the two couldn’t be more telling. Brown again:
It is the erotic sense of reality that discovers the inadequacy of fraternity, or brotherhood [read: tribalism]. It is not adequate as a form for the unification of the human race: we must be either far more deeply unified, or not at all. This true form of unification — which can be found either in psychoanalysis or in Christianity, in Freud or Pope John, or Karl Marx — is “we’re all members of one body.”
While Trump rallies are a celebration of walls and cages and us against them, Shakira and J-Lo enlisted their erotic power for liberation. If it’s true (and I believe it is) that rock ‘n roll brought down the Soviet Union as much if not more than any nuclear stockpile, it’s probably true too that Shakira’s hips will do more to get us through this sick era than any stockpile of subpoenas.
