6 - White Noise

Summary

President Bush: I was hoping the Prime Minister would want to come to Graceland . . . This visit here shows that not only am I personally fond of the Prime Minister, but the ties between our peoples are very strong, as well. Prime Minister Koizumi: There's Elvis song: To Dream Impossible. (Singing Elvis song.) (Laughter.) My dream came true . . . Thank you very much for treating me nice, the Elvis song. (Singing Elvis song.) Thank you.

The (postmodern) way we live now

The pilgrimage to Graceland that capped Junichio Koizumi's 2006 visit to the United States testified to more than just a mutual appreciation of rockabilly's favorite son, the outfitting of Air Force One with Elvis DVDs, an all-Elvis public address system, and grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches notwithstanding. According to the New York Times, in fact, the trip to Graceland was “partly a reward” to the Japanese prime minister for supporting the US president on Iraq and, more recently, for reopening Japan's markets to US beef after a ban related to concerns over mad cow disease. More than just a result of George Bush's desire to “treat” Koizumi “nice,” then, the pilgrimage to Graceland proved that those ties between the USA and Japan that Bush found “very strong” were as much political and economic as they were (pop) cultural. This inextricable link between politics, the economy, and culture attests to the way we live now, to borrow the title of an Anthony Trollope novel. Just how that “we” has come to be constituted and whether there remain any grounds for recovering an “I” of individual subjectivity in such a climate are issues at the heart of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). They inform not only the acts of DeLillo’s protagonist, a college professor forced to realize that he is just every man in any city, but also the task faced by DeLillo himself, namely, finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it.