THIRDEYEJ[0]EL

JESUS SAID TO MARLEY: “WELCOME TO MY WORLD”

It’s cool to wear a belt of red and yellow and green stripes. It is cool to stink of grass and to stare into space with vacuous red eyes. It’s cool when you’re in the subway and your Skull Candy headphones leak reggae beats. It’s even cooler when you unzip your jacket and a Bob Marley face pops out from within… Somehow, along the lines of inanely associating Bob Marley to everything he’s not, we’ve successfully dispose him of all that he stood for. Lost in translation, Bob Marley’s reggae beats, his dedication towards the Rastafarian movement and his use of marijuana for spiritual purposes are all but hidden behind veils of mistaken facades, only to be so shallowly and commonly perceived as nothing more than insignificantly ‘feel good’ exploits. In “Get Up, Stand Up: The Redemptive Poetics of Bob Marley”, Anthony Bogues, chair of Africana Studies at Brown University projects precisely this: coming to terms with the common fallacies of Bob Marley, Bogues presents a more unconventional view, that more than just a musical icon, the ‘dread-lock Rasta’ is an activist who is committed to ‘[chanting] down Babylon (Bogues 563)’ – the capitalist world of the West. Bogues‘ analysis of the hegemonic agencies working against Marley is also reflective of the furtive leverage our capitalistic hegemony exerts upon many popular cultural icons. A figure born two thousand years ago was, and is still victimized — and to an extent far more unforgivable than Marley. Allow me to introduce to you: Jesus Christ. As He was whipped, crowned with thorns, tortured and pierced to an extent where the chunk of meat nailed upon the cross barely resembled anything human-like, the process of crucifying the messiah repeats yet again in our contemporary world – only this time, it is not to please an angry mob yelling “Blasphemy!” and “Crucify him!”, it is to feed our ever so hungry and greedy capitalistic hegemonic system. 

CAPITALISTIC HEGEMONY

For most of the essay, Bogues explores and brings into focus “the ways in which Hegemonic ideology operates, how it is able to rework the most radical ideas and practices of individuals into a mélange of difference, and then claim ownership (Bogues 563).” On a very broad note, hegemony refers to any antibiosis social or political system in which the superior class furtively asserts their powers and influences on subordinated classes. Unlike oppression, the subordinated class are willing receptacles who complacently consent the imposers. In Bogues‘ essay, one of the main agents of capitalistic hegemony is “commodification” – the act of assigning monetary value to something that had previously no monetary value all: like an idea. Before an idea can be commodified, it must first take on a form. This is done by picking on a symbol that best represents the idea (and in the case of Bob Marley, it was his face) and then transforming it into tangible commodities such as posters, t-shirts, videos etc. And while the act of imprinting the symbol onto goods, or modeling goods after this symbol doesn’t necessarily kill the symbol, it is essentially the mass production of these goods that ultimately dilutes the ideas within the symbol. Recognizing these operations of the hegemonic system against Marley’s radicalism, Bogues expresses that “the entire paraphernalia of international commodification and communication, including the Walt Disney theme park of freedom, seem to work overtime to make the Rastaman… into a fangless musician, a symbol of exotic difference, trapped and captured in an illusionary rainbow world of dreamers (Bogues 563).”

To work ‘overtime’, as Bogues coins the expression, is essentially the driving force of capitalistic hegemony; that is, the superiors’ intense need to constantly and rapaciously feed their infinite want of more money and hence, more power. In the case of Jesus Christ, the most popular contemporary representation of the Messiah comes in the form of a symbol of a cross. And just as Marley was killed through the processes of commodification and mass production, these selfsame weapons of capitalistic hegemony too act upon the cross in as much magnitude as it did upon Marley and as consequence, created a diluted cross evident upon the many bosoms of non-believers. Essentially a result of easy accessibility, the cross simply becomes a thing we easily take for granted. It vaguely serves as a recollection of the Messiah’s dogmas and, withal, barely holds any spiritual significance any longer. I have personally witnessed a stripper pole-dance to Nickelback’s “Animal” and in between her bosoms was a huge cross dangling to the beat… Such perversion of the holy symbol is not uncommon since the symbol barely invokes spirituality nor religiousness anymore. As our capitalistic hegemonic system continues to work ‘overtime’ in mass producing the cross symbol, the complete transformation of the cross symbol into a ‘floating signifier’ is a guaranteed ‘payoff’. And even if a minor extent of people still associate the cross symbol to Christianity, ultimately, the extinction of the cross’s role as a means for religious remembrance and spiritual contemplation is simply a matter of time. 

SELECTS, BENDS & RESHAPES

In “Get Up, Stand Up: The Redemptive Poetics of Bob Marley”, Bogues also disinters how “hegemony is not static but constantly shifts its internal arguments and symbols while renewing and re-creating itself… The depoliticized representation of Marley, then, is of a successful singer and a cultural icon, not a prophetic social critic, since hegemony selects, bends, and reshapes figures who contest it (Bogues 564).” Thus here we see that Bogues underlines not only the system’s forceful alterations of Marley insurrections, but also the system’s social leverage upon us. That is, as the system selects which fragments of a popular figure to promote, it subordinates us to its arbitrary ruling of what should and shouldn’t be seen; and as it bends and reshapes the figure, how the figure should be seen. The three main representations of Christ: Christ as represented through the symbol of the cross, Christ as represented through Santa Claus and Christ as represented through bunnies and eggs, are testament to the capitalistic hegemonic processes of“selecting, bending and reshaping”. 

Here, allow me to highlight the fact that the processes of “selecting, bending and reshaping”, as Bogues’ coins the terms, are the capitalistic hegemony’s fiercer antecedent processes, taking place before the processes of “commodification” and “mass production”. In the first popular instance, the cross sign is selected to represent Christ’s death, the paragon of altruism in which the Christian faith is build upon. As follows, the magnitude of His sacrifice is reflected through the excruciating pain and humiliation He had to endure for the forgiveness of our sins. Yet, on account of the capitalistic hegemony’s canon of “marketability”, the contemporary version of the cross symbol seems to demonstrate absolute indifference towards the violence and cruelty of the crucification. Drastically bent and reshaped into acceptable fashionable accessories and ornaments — and here it is only obvious that the violence and the idea of suffering which the cross should represent is perhaps not as marketable — rarely will we stumble upon a cross symbol with a naked bloody figure gruesomely pinned on it. Just as the system deliberately misrepresents Marley by popularizing only partial aspects of what he stood for, what we’re made to see of Christ’s death is merely the fact that He was executed on a cross. Everything that happened before and upon the cross is utterly ignored; the magnitude of the Messiah’s sacrifice silenced indefinitely…  Moreover, as the processes of“selecting, bending and reshaping” precedes the processes of “commodification” and “mass production”, it suffices to say that the dilutive consequence of the latter processes is simply an extended dilution of an already diluted representational symbol. By way of explanation, the cross symbol was killed twice before finding itself dangling on the bosoms of a stripper I saw. Thus, reiterating a point I had previously made: the complete transformation of the cross symbol into a ‘floating signifier’ is certainly a guaranteed ‘payoff’.

Furthermore, besides the Messiah’s death, His birth and resurrection are equally consecrated events in the Christian faith. They mark the beginning of a period of change as God becomes readily accessible to everyone — for in the days before, a high priest was a mediator between the people and God — and that the faith should not just be confined between the Jews, but that it should also be spread out to the Gentiles. Alas, in the process of capitalizing this divine figure, His birth and resurrection too are drastically bentand reshaped, redefined into figures as unthinkable and as far-fetched as Santa Claus and Easter bunnies. Here, the reason for bending and reshaping these events are the same: “marketability”. Santa Claus and the idea of “gift exchange” stimulates the economy, singing hymns to a baby Jesus doll in a cathedral does not; easter bunnies and eggs appeal to kids and at the very least commodifiable whilst the idea of “the resurrection” on the other hand is so vague in that it is barely comprehensible leave alone commodifiable. Thus, just as the cross symbol barely represents Christ’s suffering, Christmas and Easter are celebrated for all the wrong reasons — or more precisely, are made into reasons for celebration. Today, neither Christmas nor Easter is about Jesus Christ. They are merely another reason for gifts and family gatherings. They are merely another reason for the textile industry to promote exclusive clothing. They are simply another reason for Playboy magazine to produce thicker, more expensive special edition issues. 

SOME CONCLUSIONS

Although Jesus’ radicalism generally centered at deconstructing the religious hegemony of His time, the bulk of His teaching nonetheless sought to transcend society from the grasps of capitalistic hegemony. Evident in His preaching are the conceptions of eternal life and the frivolities of pursuing a materialistic life. When a rich man asked Him if he qualifies to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus told him to sell all his richness and to follow Him. During the last supper, He tells His disciples that they shouldn’t focus on the material world, but on the spiritual world. There was even a recorded incident when He was extremely furious at how the synagogue, a holy place for prayer, was corrupted and turned into a marketplace. Chasing the vendors away and scattering the commodities, Jesus even went as far as to pour out all their money and overthrew the tables. Borrowing Bogues’ words, it is indeed “the irony of ironies” to see how that very capitalistic system the Messiah despises working against Him up till today. Just like the vendors who bent and reshaped the holy synagogue into a marketplace, the capitalistic hegemonic system of our world is constantly bending and reshaping Jesus into everything else but Him.