John Bolton and Paula DeSutter have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Cold War Missile Treaty That’s Doing Us Harm” that calls for the US to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

I found it perplexing that an article subtitled “The U.S.-Soviet INF pact doesn’t address the Iranian threat” contained absolutely no discussion of how, you know, building intermediate range nuclear forces would address the Iranian threat.

Then it dawned on me: John Bolton is just like that girl in school who dressed like a witch.

Or maybe the punk kid with a safety pin through his nose.  Or perhaps even French author Jean Genet, whose picture once hung above my toilet.

I realized that my error was in trying to understand the op-ed as a form of persuasion or policy analysis.  It is, in fact, better understood as the expressive form or ritual of a distinct subculture. I will let Dick Hebdige, in the first few paragraphs of Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), explain:

In the opening pages of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet describes how a tube of vaseline, found in his posession, is confiscated by the Spanish police during a raid.  This “dirty, wretched object”, proclaiming his homosexuality to the world, becomes for Genet a kind of guarantee — “the sign of a secret grace which was soon to save me from contempt”. The discovery of the vaseline is greeted with laughter in the record-office of the station, and the police “smelling of garlic, sweat and oil, but … strong in their moral assurance” subject Genet to a tirade of hostile innendo.  The author joins in the laughter too (“though painfully”) but later, in his cell, “the image of the tube of vaseline never left me”.

“I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw down upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages.” (Genet, 1967).

I have chosen to begin with these extracts from Genet because he more than most has explored the subversive implications of style.  I shall be returning again and again to Genet’s major themes: the status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of Refusal, the elevation of crime into art (even though, in our case, the “crimes” are only broken codes).  Like Genet, we are interested in subculture – in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups — the teddy boys and mods and rockers, the skinheads and the punks — who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons.  Like Genet also, we are intrigued by the most mundane objects — a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle — which, none the less, like the tube of vaseline, taken on a symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile.  Finally, like Genet, we must seek to recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders these objects meaningful.  For, just as the conflict between Genet’s “unnatural” sexuality and the policeman’s “legitimate” outrage can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between the dominant and subordinate groups can be found in the surfaces of subculture — in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning.  On the one hand, they warn the “straight” world in advance of a sinister presence — the presence of difference — and draw down upon themselves vague suspicions, uneasy laughter, “white and dumb rages”. On the other hand, for those who erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.  Recalling his humiliation at the hands of the police, Genet finds consolation in the tube of vaseline.  It becomes a symbol of his “triumph” — “I wold indeed rather have shed blood than repudiate that silly object” (Genet, 1967).

The meaning of the op-ed becomes clear only if we do not mistake the words for an exercise in persuasion, just as we would not confuse the safety-pin through a punk’s nose with a careful analysis of strategic stability. The op-ed as an object, like Genet’s tube of vaseline, is meaningful only in the sense that Hebdige describes — as an object that permits the tensions between the dominant and subordinate groups to be found in the surfaces of subculture.

Its meaning, as Hebdige might explain, is as a Refusal. It is difficult to tie all these strands together into a conclusion, but allow me to defer to Keith Morris who provides a reasonable summation.