Limited, Inc.

I did two things yesterday. I mailed in my vote for Clinton. And I watched Weiner, the documentary. The latter was a mistake. It – the whole it of it – reminded me of the one and only time I watched COPS. Cops was obviously a lineal descendent of the lynching postcard. Americans used to enjoy their lynchings, and liked nothing better than photographing themselves stringing up, pouring hot tar over, or castrating black men.  If you have ever seen a “postcard of the hanging” – to quote Dylan – you will notice the hectic, satisfied faces of the spectators. Looking is an act. Weiner plays with different spectorial pleasures, but it also operates within the condition that the spectator is not at all implicated by the scene. But the spectator is. Watching Weiner and his wife Huma Abadin was painful – these people have grown up without any consciousness of the complicity of the spectator.  A documentary is a picture document, watch it, is  probably what went through their minds when,