4. The Size of Domesticity 2

Subcomandante Marcos’s On-the-Run Dispatches Repurpose Cold War Anxiety

We come to an interesting supplement to the Cold War, where enormity again encounters smallness and where fellow travelers negotiate both gradations. This played itself out just after the Cold War was technically over, and not on the global stage, but in the middle of nowhere—in the backcountry—during a small indigenous revolt in Mexico. The Zapatista uprising of 1994–96 offers another wandering interconnection between North America and Latin America.

A much-anthologized jungle communiqué by rebellion spokesman Subcomandante Marcos, dated March 11, 1995, was composed in the midst of a hasty retreat from a military crackdown. The circumstances were these: after the initial uprising of January 1, 1994, there had been nearly a year of tense peace. The far-superior force of the Mexican federal forces poised to annihilate the poorly armed rebels had decided to pull out its troops and allow the insurgents a small region of semiautonomy—mostly because of the vast public outcry generated by Marcos’s widely circulated Internet communiqués. But, in 1995, all of this changed.

In the middle of the prolonged negotiation between the Zapatistas and the government, the Mexican Army was brought in to take back the area. In his lengthy communiqué, written in the frenzied style that would become his hallmark, Marcos wove revolutionary slogans and demands, straightforward news from the front, and fanciful narratives. As had become the norm for his writing, this one went viral in various Web and print venues. In this particular communiqué, Marcos tells how he and two other colleagues are engaged in a “strategic withdrawal”—which, he grudgingly admits, really means they are on the run, fleeing for their lives, as the army chases them through the jungle (see fig. 6).

As Marcos relates it, one morning while setting up camp (he and his comrades sleep during the day so they can travel at night to avoid detection), he almost steps on an insect. This cartoon-like beetle, Durito, or “little hard one,” would soon become his frequent interlocutor, a fellow traveler and sidekick. After nearly being crushed, it takes a while for the bug to calm down and recognize the masked man, whom he now remembers from before he became an officer. Durito, prickly fellow, gives Marcos some friendly grief, sponges some tobacco off of him, and asks about his current plight. They are, Marcos admits, on the run.

The year 1992 had been symbolic for North America in terms of its world importance. It was the quincentenary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World. More important, it was the year that the major North American economies—the United States, Canada, and Mexico—signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), widely condemned by the Left as a tool of US economic imperialism. According to this view, the treaty meant the most significant move away from local interests and toward an unequal, globalized economy on a par with the advent of the European Union. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in their book Empire (2000), virtualizing the location of the means of production—a “non-place”—offered a new way of sublimating ownership and furthering class war (208–10). An organized resistance to this orchestrated grand gesture away from the local and toward the global was not surprising. What was surprising, at least in Mexico, was that the embodiment of this resistance was the small and very local conflict by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN).

This ragtag movement, with its recycled uniforms and barely functional weapons, at first blush seems like a familiar fixture from Latin America’s long history, almost a throwback: a land-reform peasant uprising with racial underpinnings. The name “Zapatistas” itself invoked indigenous revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, a land-rights fighter during the disastrous Mexican Revolution of 1910–25. It could easily be grouped with the Cuban Revolution–inspired Central and South American movements of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (also named for a previous revolutionary icon) or the Peruvian Shining Path.

Yet, during the initial stages, the Zapatista rebellion announced a much larger project attached to its armed insurrection. It aimed to become an international pressure organization against the forces of globalizing neoimperialism. The date chosen for the actual military uprising clearly illustrated this double agenda: January 1, 1994, was when NAFTA went into effect. The uprising’s push for wider relevancy—its antiglobalization angle—brought with it an unprecedented new battleground. When the Zapatistas launched their bullets-and-bombs attack on local military garrisons, they also invaded the Web in an assault against free-market trade agreements.

This double mission was clearly embodied in the EZLN’s equally unprecedented choice of spokesman—the anonymous and masked “subcomandante,” nom de guerre Marcos. Clearly an educated and urbane mestizo and not a member of the indigenous population for whom he was fighting and speaking, Marcos unleashed an eclectic torrent of erudite communiqués, postings, emails, and other creative output. These showed a comfortable engagement with classic Marxist and Latin American revolutionary discourse, a keenly ironic voice, and a mastery of the short forms required by electronic media, and made knowing references to both high and popular culture. Many surprised members of the world media called him the first postmodern revolutionary.

Of course, when the educated mestizo Marcos became the public persona of the indigenous rebels, it raised a lot of complicated questions about racial and class identity, authority, legitimacy, ventriloquy, and appropriation, not to mention rhetorical strategy.1 Marcos claimed that his main role was to educate outsiders, or become an intérprete, as he often called himself. His role, he said, was that of a methodical, deliberate teacher. The figure of the teacher is everywhere in Marcos’s considerable output, especially in the initial years of the rebellion (1994–96). There is “Old Man Antonio,” a shamanistic indigenous character who shares his ageless wisdom with Marcos; the arrogant beetle Durito, political expert and traveling companion; and Marcos himself (real name Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, he had been a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana). A vital function of these teachers was to educate the rebels themselves: Marcos often shows them explaining the nature of the enemy to the troops. And one consistent aspect they keep hammering home is the link between the local aims of the rebellion and global causes. There is a clear connection between the frightfully immediate and the looming, perhaps more frightening, global implications of the struggle.

Marcos’s double-voiced version of Zapatismo both channels and refashions an unusual source: the culture and poetics of the 1950s, the “high” Cold War, explored in the previous chapter. Both the high Cold War discourse and Marcos’s teacherly figures voice the calming certainty of victory in the face of an overwhelming new enemy—a reassurance, a deep belief of being on the right side. The academic exudes moral certainty, despite the awareness (real or contrived) of being embattled and even surrounded. The circumstantial elements of these two discourses—on the surface quite distant from each other and perhaps even diametrically opposite—share more than appears at first blush.

As discussed in the last chapter, anxiety about encirclement at the highest point of the world conflict led to “containment culture.” As historian Alan Nadel details, the foreign policy task of containing the enemy—Soviet expansionism—was profoundly echoed in the prosperous, consumerist, but ultimately stifling cultural containment of the time. I do not suggest that this Western bourgeois phenomenon was the exact response of the Zapatistas; rather, there is a striking similarity in how both discourses respond to a sense of siege—of being encircled by an overwhelming enemy—and invoke similar strategies in their widely different contexts. Both force a tense, eye-of-the-storm peace; both resort to “placid” domesticity, sometimes to the point of infantilization; and, most important, both elevate hieratic figures, often academics, to explain the desperate times. As Che Guevara wrote in his manual on guerrilla warfare:

The organization, combat capacity, heroism, and spirit of the guerilla band will undergo a test of fire during an encirclement by the enemy, which is the most dangerous situation of the war. In the jargon of our guerrilla fighters in the recent war, the phrase “encirclement face” was given to the face of fear worn by someone who was frightened. The hierarchy of the deposed regime pompously spoke of its campaigns of “encirclement and annihilation.” However, for a guerrilla band that knows the country and that is united ideologically and emotionally with its chief, this is not a particularly serious problem. (Guerrilla 90)

The professorial aspect of Marcos’s persona makes sense given the announced goals of the rebellion, which frankly needed a little explaining. But his double role can sometimes come across as jarring, if not contradictory. A spokesperson educating the public needs to offer a consistent front; he is there to explain, to sell the aims of the revolution. But this often stands at odds with the role of the representative leader: someone who must encompass both his followers and his skeptics, collectively and democratically, via engagement and charisma, using humanizing, individual examples.

Marcos’s double-tasked shaman-professor is a new kind of emitter of dispatches from the backcountry. He attempts to explain resistance against the metropole to (mostly) educated observers watching from the outside. But the frame narrative, the conceit he uses to do so, is to present scenes of teaching, of providing strength, to his less-educated fellow fighters. Marcos’s teachers explain to the public, through their explanations to the troops, the reasons behind the fight, which provides a deeply necessary encouragement to the combatants themselves. The function of a wartime professor is to decipher the essence of a supposedly inscrutable enemy. To his fellow travelers/fighters, he is a hieratic figure, the confident possessor of privileged knowledge about the enemy. And he often implies—and sometimes says outright—that this knowledge is the key to victory. His knowledge is certainty.

Marcos’s double discourse is natural, given the double nature of the Zapatista uprising itself, at least in its initial years. Scholars Herman Herlinghaus and Kristine Vanden Berghe have each argued that the one struggle gradually transformed into the other out of necessity. After the initial defeat, the armed struggle was replaced, in vastly different terms, by a larger and more indefinite struggle that had worldwide significance. These scholars observe in the language of the revolt a progression from the traditional dead earnestness of the anti-imperial revolutions of the past—Cuba, Central America, the Peruvian Communist Party (Shining Path)—to a more playful, ironic, and literary tone, as it moves toward the larger and more indefinite arena of cyberspace and into the unquantifiable space of postnational global politics.

The Mexican intellectual Carlos Fuentes famously called Zapatismo the “first post-communist” rebellion.2 But, at least initially, both straight-ahead Marxism and post-Marxism existed in an almost schizophrenic alternation. Consider the straightforward language in writings like the “Primera declaración desde la selva Lacandona,” which earnestly quotes Article 39 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, guaranteeing the right of an aggrieved people to rise up in arms against an unacceptable government. Contrast this with the fanciful and provocative stories featuring Durito or Old Man Antonio, or personal vignettes about some of the guerillas. These two registers exist in an oddly eclectic flow.3 Yet despite the technical and stylistic novelty of Marcos’s discourse from these early years, with its command of new media and high irony, it still relied on familiar Marxist tropes and is informed by a typical Latin American Marxist critique of the effects of domination at the individual level. Marcos’s bifurcated discourse during these initial war years appears to be an internal contradiction within a single teacherly voice—a traveling self-dialogue. His voice is at once local and global, speaking both to the guerillas gathered around him and to a much larger listening audience.

In the communiqué of March 1995, Marcos explains to Durito why he finds himself on the run at that particular moment. On the way to the negotiation conference, the Mexican government had been informed when to expect the delegates, and it used this information to mount an attack. Marcos was able to escape with two fellow guerillas:

Durito went on smoking, and waited for me to finish telling him everything that had happened in the last ten days. Durito said: “Wait for me.” And he went under a little leaf. After a while he came out pushing his little desk. After that he went for a chair, sat down, took out some papers, and began to look through them with a worried air. “Mmmh, mmh” he said with every few pages that he read. After a time he exclaimed: “Here it is!”

“Here’s what?” I asked, intrigued.

“Don’t interrupt me!” Durito said seriously and solemnly. And added, “Pay attention. Your problem is the same one as many others. It refers to the economic and social doctrine known as ‘Neoliberalism.’”(53)4

The conversation leaps from three insurgents fleeing through the jungle in a desperate attempt to save their skin to a detailed explanation of that global threat of “Neoliberalism.” This points to the well-documented mid-1990s paradox at the heart of Zapatismo itself: it is double-voiced. This discourse, especially as expressed by Subcomandante Marcos, is simultaneously global and profoundly local, and personal.

In the encounter with Durito, we see a clear manifestation of how Marcos approaches his double mission. What do you do when you are under hot pursuit, terrified that the surviving few are about to be overrun by the enemy? You teach. About big things. Che Guevara again, on individual guerrilla tactics:

The education of the guerrilla fighter is important from the very beginning of the struggle. This should explain to them the social purpose of the fight and their duties, clarify their understanding, and give them lessons in morale that serve to forge their characters. Each experience should be a new source of strength for victory and not simply one more episode in the fight for survival.

One of the great educational techniques is example. Therefore, the chiefs must constantly offer the example of a pure and devoted life (89).

In the jungle narrative, Durito pulls out his desk and his papers and begins to explain the whole situation in terms of an abstract concept: neoliberalism. One can imagine him wiping the blackboard, or setting up a PowerPoint presentation. Marcos reacts understandably to this arbitrarily enforced lesson (as perhaps many of his readers do as well): “‘Just what I needed . . . now classes in political economy,’ I thought. It seems like Durito heard what I was thinking because he chided me: ‘Ssshh! This isn’t just any class! It is a treatise [cátedra] of the highest order!’” (90). The Spanish word cátedra is significant here; it refers both a lecture and the physical place of the lecture, the professor’s “chair” (a double meaning to which I will return later). In any case, a pattern emerges: the local and pressing battle sublimates into a vast, abstract war of ideas. This scene of teaching in the heat of a local engagement is meant to be seen—and disseminated—on a much larger scale.

We can look to the culture of the Cold War for insight into the sort of relationship that can occur between the small-scale, domestic front and a much larger global standoff. Both Marcos’s discourse and the Cold War culture come at a time of crisis created by the threat of an inscrutable and enormous enemy, and both look toward a teacherly figure who must carry out multiple roles to counter that threat. Before World War II, US administrations including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s had drawn heavily for leadership from professional politicians, the party faithful, and an experienced, select few from business and industry. Academics had been called upon as experts, typically in advisory roles; if they had actual leadership positions where they could effect policy, it was because of a previous administrative track record that had effectively been a career change, as was the case with Woodrow Wilson. They stopped being sages and became leaders and politicians.

But, in postwar administrations, beginning with Harry Truman’s, there was a clear turn toward technocracy, toward handing actual decision-making authority to the authorities. In order to fill important economic, scientific, intelligence, diplomatic, and policy positions, a new breed of leaders was recruited directly from the academy, based primarily on knowledge rather than any sort of practical government experience. These men had not typically risen through the traditional political ranks but, rather, belonged to the most elite universities and think tanks. This trend culminated in John F. Kennedy’s idealistic but misguided “best and the brightest” coterie of policymakers—men such as Arthur Schlesinger and McGeorge Bundy, who eventually shaped the disastrous Vietnam War policy.

During the Cold War, this turn toward technocrats was largely due to a pressing need that only they could fill. For one, the high-tech nature of nuclear armaments required unusual scientific expertise. But, most important, the communist Russians were deeply unknown, to the point of abstraction and inscrutability, and required expert decipherment. The “new professors” were there to make them less imposing. Because they had gained their insight into the Russian mind the hard way, often learning the language in a vacuum and scrounging as much information as they could about a closed society, the Russia experts achieved a role that went far beyond that of mere specialists; these Cold Warriors were defenders of the capitalist faith. And, like any priestly figure, they had attained this position by having a reach to unseen forces that extended beyond the grasp of the average coreligionist.

Recall Winston Churchill’s opening rhetorical salvo of the Cold War mentioned in the previous chapter, his “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946: “Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to fight the wars. But now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell, between dusk and dawn” (7289). The enemy is as pervasive as the morning light, and all legitimate democracies need to unite against this new foe. When Churchill delivered this speech, it was not to a political body—not to the British Parliament, the US Congress, or the United Nations. Instead it was to a rather intimate academic audience at Westminster College, a small liberal arts school in Missouri. Churchill was wearing professorial garb appropriate to the honorary degree he was being awarded, presaging the coming ivory-tower technocrats, the “best and the brightest” tapped to lead the country through the conflict. Also recall American diplomat George F. Kennan (one of those best and brightest), who wrote another foundational text of the Cold War, the “Long Telegram” sent to the state department from Moscow in 1946. He then fleshed out his views in a 1947 Foreign Affairs article under the mysterious mask of “Mr. X.” The spirit of these documents—Churchill’s and Kennan’s—would shape the Truman Doctrine and subsequent anti-Soviet policy for decades. “[The Soviets’] success will really depend on the degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western World can muster” (16–17), Kennan wrote, implying that the enemy is incoherent, amoral, and flaccid, ultimately doomed, but only if “cohesion, firmness and vigor” are maintained effectively in the face of this looming threat.

This is not unlike the oddly optimistic Professor Durito, who ignores the dangerously close Mexican Army, pulls out his little desk and papers, and expounds professorially from his cátedra about the enemy. But, according to him, the enemy is not the Mexican soldiers (or the Soviet menace), but rather the looming specter of neoliberalism:

“It is a metatheoretical problem! . . . Well, it turns out that ‘Neoliberalism’ is not a theory to confront or explain the crisis. It is the crisis itself made theory and economic doctrine! That is, ‘Neoliberalism’ hasn’t the least coherence; it has no plans or historic perspective. In the end, pure theoretical shit.”

“How strange . . . I’ve never heard or read that interpretation” I said with surprise.

“Of course! How, if it just occurred to me in this moment!” says Durito with pride.

“And what has that got to do with our running away, excuse me, with our withdrawal?” I asked, doubting such a novel theory.

“Ah! Ah! Elementary, my dear Watson Sup! There are no plans, there are no perspectives, only i-m-p-r-o-v-i-s-a-t-i-o-n. The government has no consistency: one day we’re rich, another day we’re poor, one day they want peace, another day they want war, one day fasting, another day stuffed, and so on. Do I make myself clear?” Durito inquires.

“Almost . . .” I hesitate and scratch my head.

“And so?” I ask, seeing that Durito isn’t continuing with his discourse.

“It’s going to explode. Boom! Like a balloon blown up too much. It has no future. We’re going to win” says Durito as he puts his papers away. (53–54)

Because the neoliberal Mexican government is reactive, devoid of “plans,” and incapable of true insight, Durito concludes (with the inevitability of a true believer) that, despite the incredibly long odds, the besieged rebels will win. Both George Kennan and Durito characterize their looming enemy as “improvisational” and “not schematic,” essentially an instinctual and unreflective creature, like some overgrown lower-order organism. It effectively manages its colonizing mission by mindlessly regulating its own survival functions, keeps all its moving parts moving; it will respond only to significant changes in its environment, or to irritation.

A Mouse’s Tour d’horizon

It is difficult to argue for a direct analogy between the anxieties of the US high Cold War and Marcos’s brand of Zapatismo—after all, they belong to opposite sides of the political spectrum. They are obverse in both scale and function, but the correspondences are there. A somewhat facile parallel could be drawn with the semiautonomous enclave of the “five towns” that the Mexican government allowed to exist during the first three years of the Zapatista uprising, while negotiations were ongoing. This enclave, understandably, existed in an anxious sense of siege: a bizarro Levittown.

But the link runs deeper. During the 1950s there were sharp outbreaks of actual “hot” war in Korea and Vietnam, but for the majority culture in the US the Cold War was a distant rumble. It involved an edgy public trusting the informed few to maintain a deep, schematic, and theoretical knowledge about the enemy and its methods in order to forestall total annihilation. The rank-and-file population’s fight was mental. It consisted of keeping anxiety at bay and staying one step ahead, heartened by a fierce faith in the inevitability of success: Kennan’s call for “cohesion, firmness and vigor.”

The main strategy was to staunchly maintain everydayness, to keep doing what one always did, to demonstrate grace under pressure. The enemy was so large and so myopic that ultimately it would trip itself up in the face of this constancy. The strategy was steadiness in the face of the Other’s “improvisation.” This imperative toward enforced everydayness held true whether the enemy was Stalinism or, in the case of Marcos, the Mexican Army in particular and neoliberalism in general. Recall the duality within Marcos’s discourse about strength in the face of the enemy: some of it is for internal consumption, its intended audience his fellow camaradas, and some of it is meant for the outside world. The complicating factor is that within that larger message is inscribed the image of Marcos—the teacher, cheerleader, prophet of certainties—telling his fellow combatants on the ground how to win this mental war. This is an integral part of the message projected to the world at large. Marcos shows the rebels learning about and thus winning the mental war over anxiety, if not the real war against the government. This is shrewd recycling of Cold War methods and modes of thought. When Marcos’s performative (and teacherly) discourse channels these coping mechanisms and refashions them for his immediate struggle, it brings us to two specific strategies used effectively during the Cold War: simplistic “children’s” narratives and masked superheroes.

During a particularly difficult time for the Zapatistas in the late 1990s, Marcos went oddly silent, leading to intense speculation that he had been killed or captured, or that he had given up the struggle for some reason. Then he suddenly returned to the fray with a memo titled “Subcomandante Marcos Breaks Silence after 4 Months” (July 15, 1998):

This, of course, is a reference to popular Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1950s. Besides playing with the racial stereotype of a character like Speedy, Marcos invokes the cartoons because of their central place in the culture of the Cold War. The reference is so familiar that Marcos can rely just on Speedy’s signature interjection: he only needs to repeat the nonsensical “Eepa, eepa, eepa!” for readers to make the connection.

A curious connection, this is. The apparently lighthearted cartoons of the 1950s were tied to the anxious gravity of Cold War psychology. During that decade an important state project was spreading the gospel of free-market economics as the only viable alternative to communism. As the animation historian Steven Watts has written, the massively popular, optimistic worldview offered by cultural institutions like the Disney studios “legislated a kind of cultural Marshall Plan. They nourished a genial cultural imperialism that magically overran the rest of the globe with the values, expectations, and goods of a prosperous middle-class United States” (107). Another significant voice in this globalizing task was the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (created by the longtime president of General Motors) which disseminated the capitalist gospel through more traditional venues; it funded academic research, cultural outreach, and educational and commercial exchange programs, both domestically and abroad. It also paid Hollywood studios to produce popular films to aid its efforts.

Among these was a sequence of three animated films commissioned from the Warner Bros. animation outfit. Issued as part of the very popular Looney Tunes series, these were made in the standard six- to seven-minute formula and tapped established stars such as Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd. “By Word of Mouse” (1954), “Heir Conditioned” (1955), and “Yankee Dood It” (1956), all funded by the Sloan Foundation, were directed by the legendary Isidore “Friz” Freleng. The initial setting of “By Word of Mouse” is the postwar German town of “Knockwurst-on-der-Rye,” where a large German mouse family begs Hans to tell everyone about his recent trip to America. His country-mouse/city-mouse tale begins with Hans disembarking from an ocean liner and meeting his American friend Willy, who agrees to take him on a tour of the splendors of the land.

The fellow traveling mice visit the sights of the great city, and Hans—impressed by the number of cars and other consumer goods—exclaims that all Americans must be rich. Willy corrects him. “They’re not all rich. Most of ’em are just working guys,” he says. When Hans asks how “working guys” can afford such luxuries, Willy struggles to explain mass consumption and production, and economies of scale. He gets nowhere. So he takes Hans to Putnell University, where he hopes a mouse professor can clarify the concept of free-market capitalism. The professor gladly attempts to explain and pulls out a series of flip charts. But in the middle of his lesson about mass production lowering costs and competition nurturing innovation, Sylvester the Cat appears out of nowhere, sees them, and thinks of lunch. The bulk of the cartoon consists of the three mice fleeing the cat, trying to find places to hide and continue their ersatz economics lesson. They escape into the drawer of a filing cabinet (see fig. 7), then a desk drawer, and finally a paper boat floating inside the water-cooler bottle. Each time Sylvester finds them the professor foils him—by slamming drawers on him, pummeling him with a hammer, or making him fall down a manhole.

In the end Hans finally understands the concept of free markets, but he also decides that, given the pursuing cat, the situation has become just too dangerous for him. He goes back to the ocean liner to return to his Marshall-plan homeland. After making Sylvester fall down a hole one last time, the professor shouts after the hurrying Hans, “Don’t forget! All of this has raised our standard of living to the highest level in the world!”

The correspondences between this cartoon and Marcos finding Professor Durito while on the run are more than incidental. Again, setting aside the diametrically opposed political ideologies of these two fleeing pairs, the two stories mirror each other. In the cartoon the learners travel to consult a professor in order to untangle the meaning of what they have seen on their tour d’horizon. They’re trying to make sense of the orthodoxy of capitalism, which is everywhere, but seeking this consultation puts them right in the sights of a random predator, turning them into refugees in the midst of all of this wealth. In the Zapatista story, the refugee Marcos, who is already fleeing, runs into the professor in the middle of his flight who then turns him into a (reluctant) learner of a new, revolutionary heterodoxy.

The main point of commonality between these two pursuit narratives is the oddly out-of-place scene of improvised teaching, which is still somehow connected to being on the run. Both sets of travelers becomes recipients of knowledge, but this happens while they are on the run. And the substance of both teaching scenes is even odder, given the danger from a real pursuing enemy. Both cátedras deal with Big Ideas, with implications that reach well beyond the immediate threat of—respectively—hungry cats and government patrols. But one gets the definite sense that these immediate dangers, and the Big Ideas, are connected.

So what do you do when you are about to be overrun by an overwhelming enemy? From two diametrically opposed political agendas and worldviews comes the same plan. You stop. To teach. About big things. And, in the case of the Warner Bros. cartoon (as in most studio cartoons of the period), these pauses make the ultimate outcome possible: unquestionable victory. The “puddytat” (or the coyote, or the tongue-twisted hunter) will always be foiled by the supposedly weaker prey, the urgently needed professor, and the brave resourcefulness this “vulnerable” prey demonstrates in defeating his pursuer extends to the context of his lessons about greater things. The implication is that the broader doctrine of mass production and free markets will ultimately outwit any predator, foreign or domestic, who is trying to eat him and those interested in learning about what he has to say.

Why cartoons to evangelize the Big Ideas? Why resort so often, and at times flippantly, to simple children’s allegories or folk tales (like Marcos’s 1996 children’s book, The Story of Colors)? The simple answer is that a time of siege calls for calming and fanciful forms that divert attention away from the desperate circumstances—as Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman argued two generations ago in How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971). Consider the triumphalist and euphoric graphics of posters printed during the siege of cities such as Barcelona and Stalingrad: it is only natural to seek solace and shelter in forms that rely on a steadying fantasy world that runs contrary to the desperate realities of the moment—a centrifugal source of psychic energy away from the center of crisis.

But the more credible reason for resorting to simplicity is to tame the enemy by simplifying it. The cartoon cat is an uncomplicated predator who is unsurprisingly defeated by the wily teacher, but during the Cold War the enemy was notoriously wily: abstract and invisible. This speaks to overcoming anxiety in a way that can only exist inside the forced fantasy of a cartoon, which turns the enemy into a quite visible and surmountable cartoon. In the scene with Durito, however, the enemy is no cartoon, and neither are the fleeing soldiers, but Durito, the teacher who is supposed to have all the answers, is cartoonish: a curious inversion. Both cases share the representation of a scene of counterfactual conviction: we see believers reaffirming their beliefs, acting on a certainty of what they stand for, despite the odds. For Marcos and his teachers, it is not a question of “if” but “when.” Marcos’s writings often carry a lyrical tone more fitting to a victorious commander waiting for the surrender of his enemy and considering the humane terms than to a desperate refugee.

A 1995 communiqué features another teacherly interlocutor, the indigenous wise man Old Man Antonio:

At the committee meeting we discussed throughout the whole afternoon. We searched for the word in [indigenous] language that would mean “surrender” and we could not find one. There is no translation for it, either in Tsotsil or in Tseltal, and no one remembers such a word existing in Tojolabal or Chol. . . . Silently, Antonio comes close to me, coughing with tuberculosis, and whispers in my ear: “That word does not exist in true language, because our people never give up and rather die.” (27, my translation)

It is worth noting that the ambitious and totally unrealistic military goal of the Zapatista offensive of January 1, 1994, as announced on Zapatista radio broadcasts, was to “advance to the Capital of the Republic, conquering the Federal Army”—an objective Marcos still insisted upon for several months after the military defeat (Bartolomé 18; Henck 186–68). Of course, triumphalist posturing—characterized by an insistence on the sheer impossibility of failure, an almost irrational conviction of a certain victory—is not unique to Marcos or to the Zapatistas; it is as old as desperate uprisings and resistance movements themselves. The Spanish Civil War motto no pasarán (“They shall not pass!”) and countless Romantic martyrs ranging from Lord Byron to José Martí and Che Guevara come to mind. But for Marcos and his teacherly alter egos, such as Durito and Old Man Antonio, this response is never jingoistic or shrill, or merely meant to fire up the troops. Instead, the tone is personal and ruminative, and ironic of previous such iterations.

This complicates the one-note sloganeering of the Sandinistas or the Shining Path, and brings to mind the end of Che Guevara’s personal Bolivian Journal. Just before his capture and death in October 1967, he confides in his diary about a discouraging, growing list of desertions, casualties, material losses, and failures to recruit local support: “It was, without a doubt, the worst month we have had so far” (202). Almost bafflingly, though, he concludes with an optimistic note to himself: “I should mention that Inti and Coco [two of the Cuban guerillas with him] are becoming ever more steadfast revolutionary and military cadres” (202). And then he reports that the “morale of the rest of the men remains fairly high” (220). Is he rallying himself with such statements?

When Marcos is recounting his own desperate retreat from the advancing Mexican Army, “Durito asks with pity, as if afraid to hurt me, ‘And what do you intend to do?’ I keep smoking, I look at the silver curls of the moon hung from the branches. I let out a spiral of smoke and I answer him and myself: ‘Win’” (56). The difference between the declarations of faith in an improbable victory in Che’s Journal and Marcos’s output is that Marcos’s expression of optimism is represented: it is a self-aware act meant for external consumption by a Web-browsing public. This accounts for the common line of descent in these two such dissimilar projects, both in their politics and in their scale—on the one hand the mainstream anticommunist discourse of the Cold War, and on the other the decolonizing discourse of Marcos. Both address the looming Other counterintuitively.

While the Cold War often drove the collective psyche inward—toward comforting, in-charge figures who explain and vanquish the ridiculous enemy (like George Kennan, or the mouse professor who beats the pursuing cat)—Marcos turns this pattern on its head. During the Cold War, one turned to priestly teachers who could explain the big things and calm anxieties, but now, the hieratic teacher to whom one turns is an insufferable and hardly credible little bug. The enemy is quite real and quite dangerous, not a cartoonish cat or an abstract and distant adversary no one will never see, yet the statement by the encircled soldier Marcos, the pupil of this ridiculous new kind of teacher, is eerily familiar: “[I answer] myself: ‘Win.’”

Another way to view the recourse to the simplicity of children’s narratives is as a deliberate regression, a sort of “strategic infantilization” in the same spirit as literary theorist Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism”: a reduction to the “essentials” is necessary for identity politics, made so by the desperate circumstances.5 This simplifies complex moral problems. Children’s allegories, meant to be easily comprehensible, also are comforting when the intended audience is an adult one. And at least in the Disney versions so common in the 1950s, they provided the certainty of the happy ending. Consider the plots of most Disney, MGM, and Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s: the master narrative is a chase by a larger but ultimately unsuccessful predator. The little mouse will invariably prevail despite the long odds.

These streamlined, escapist narratives comfort children and adults for different reasons. But they act as responses to real anxieties, such as threatening ideologies, fear of the Other, or the actual threat of annihilation. These preoccupations cast their indelible shadows even in the anodyne Disney versions. The very “simplicity” of youth literature, especially cartoons, reveals a complicated relationship to their deadly serious and quite grown-up sources of anxiety, a relationship that cannot be repressed. But the faith in the positive outcome remains strong. It is this memory—of childhood where one could afford to have faith in happy endings—that Marcos knowingly represents, and ironizes, by showing himself as the subject of instruction, not of infantile topics, but by an infantile teacher.

The Intrepid Masked Komrades

We turn briefly to the physical manifestation of Marcos’s double voice: his mask. The Zapatista mask is a heavy symbol, much commented on and quite complex. It not only invokes the Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s arguments about the hermetic nature of Mexican character in his essay “Mexican Masks” in 1950’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (29–46), but also Hollywood fantasies like El Zorro and ninja fighters, and lucha libre superheroes and ironizing folk-redeployers such as Mexican urban activist Superbarrio.6

An archetypal antihero during the US Cold War, the rebel without a cause, was not “necessarily bad,” because, as cultural historians Edward Griffin and Warren Susman argue, he “revolted against a society deserving revolt. Popular writers and professionals had thus arrived at the point where the disturbed personality should be regarded not as a villain but as a hero. Indeed one of the extraordinary features of the period was the celebration of the psychopathic as heroic” (27). An important variant of this antihero, first arising during the 1930s, was the disguised superhero from graphic novels, who fought enemies that tended to be florid, highly stylized evildoers, clear allegories standing in for contemporary threats to the nation: the Depression, gangsterism, fascist totalitarianism, and, finally, communism. These heroes embodied the simple qualities and strengths needed to defeat these allegorical threats; they included, in rough order of appearance, Superman (1938), Batman (1939), Captain America (1941), and Spider-Man (1962).

There is a progression to note in this list. First of all, the transformation of each of these characters into superheroes is increasingly the result of science, technology, and very human knowledge—quite different from the first of them, Superman, with his birthright as a Moses-like prince from outer space. In addition, the nature of the anonymity afforded by the costume changes over time. The “civilian” persona of the superhero started with a bland, civilian incognito (Superman) and went to something more complex. Notice the increasing disconnect between the character’s street persona and his crime-fighting, costumed alter ego: when good reporter and good citizen Clark Kent becomes Superman, he casts off his everyman street clothes to become an exaggerated version of his upright-citizen self. He turns into a patriotic showman, garishly heroic in his primary-colored, circus-strongman suit, with bulked-up sense of the same steely civic duty that was already there under his clothes. As Superman, good becomes even more good. His anonymity is not really of much use, because Clark Kent isn’t that much different from Superman: a straight talker, honest, helpful, well brought up, out to do good. The difference lies in a pair of eyeglasses and a costume change, and it is a mystery why Lois Lane can’t see right through the props. The hero at the end of this list, Spider-Man, is quite different from the virtuous and mostly unconflicted Superman. Peter Parker is an anxious teenager whose superhero persona—the result of a science experiment gone wrong—is an outright fugitive from the law who often uses his powers for dubious ends and is not above vigilantism and revenge. He is conflicted and has many regrets.

This progression from unquestioned hero into edgy quasi-criminal was in part due to the changing nature of the enemy and what was required to defeat it. When the Depression and World War II gave way to the Cold War, the threat to the nation became more ominous, diffuse, and inscrutable. This was no longer a danger that could be tackled by determined patriotic government intervention (in the case of the Depression) or concerted, superior military and industrial might (in the case of the Second World War). The move during the Cold War was toward containment: of the enemy, and of the immediate environment of the ordinary citizenry. And, as we saw in the previous chapter, one response to the enforced domesticity and its stifling closeness was for its rebels to head into the periphery of the wide expanses, into the contrasting enormity of the backcountry, to the open road. But there was another type of reaction for those seeking to confront the enemy head on: to become, albeit increasingly conflicted, masked do-gooders.

Marcos is a late redeployment of this Cold War cultural pattern, now fueled by a keen irony and a sense of self-awareness. In the original Cold War dynamic of the 1950s in the United States, the enemy was perpetually imminent, as well as immanent: always about to strike, always nowhere and everywhere at once. This duality undergirds the superheroes’ anonymity/public persona of the period, projecting an external paradox into an internal conflict between the two sides of the same character: the private “civilian” and public crime-fighting “superhero,” a dichotomy that only increased over time.7

The public crime fighters Batman and Spider-Man were progressively shadier, to the point of quasi-criminality, in contrast with their upstanding-citizen cover personas, which remained stable. Batman began as a violent, gray-area extension of hard-boiled fiction and gradually became even darker and subject to questionable motivations for his violence. From the beginning Spider-Man operated as an outright vigilante outside the rule of law. The sideshow masks joined to the alter-ego “normal” existences become more and more a necessary prerequisite for doing “good,” precisely because this dualism allowed superheroes to operate outside the rule of law. These heroes’ bland, anonymized cover personas contrasted more and more with their dark work as bringers of irregular justice.8 The chronological list of masked superheroes, each more marginal and more conflicted, reaches a turning point—an ironic, self-aware turnabout—in its postmodern postscript: Marcos.

In a dispatch from January 20, 1994, Marcos offers this taunt: “Why so much ruckus about the ski-masks? Isn’t Mexican political culture of ‘culture of hidden faces’? But in order to put a stop to the anguish of those who are afraid (or who wish) that some ‘Komrade’ or cartoon villain might be the one who would appear behind the ski mask, . . . of the ‘Sup’. . . . I propose the following: I am willing to take off my mask if Mexican Society takes off its foreign mask that it anxiously put on years ago” (Marcos et al. 86). Besides the somewhat predictable challenge to society—that he will drop the pretense of the mask if society does the same thing—he warns that what is underneath the mask might be quite frightening: a cartoon character, a communist “Komrade.”

Marcos’s masked strategy interlaces with another familiar Cold War figure: the knowing professor. All the oracles from Kennan onward had worked to unmask the enemy as large and unthinking. But, alternatively, Marcos’s masked professor is almost too knowing; he knows more about the enemy than the enemy knows about itself. Marcos’s disguises and anonymity recall Churchill’s speech in academic drag, a professorial garb not really his own, as well as Kennan’s “Long Telegram.” But his outsider condition, although fully expected for a superhero, is no longer a representation of an inability to fit into the world at large. Instead, the criminality reflects the outside world: Mexican officialdom is the real criminal here. Marcos’s “anonymity” is a fake, an effigy to call attention to bigger fakes.

This returns us to the initial contradiction of Marcos’s discourse, one that was also central to the Cold War condition: the simultaneous coexistence of two scales, one small and one large. On the one hand is the pragmatic struggle for indigenous rights, and on the other the much larger war against enormous (and slippery) world-scale threats such as “neoliberalism” and “globalization.” Nuancing this dichotomy, Kristine Vanden Berghe argues that there is an intermediate third scale in Marcos’s discourse—a national one. She contends that Marcos’s Zapatismo was essentially an attempt to reclaim the national register, “discredit the government,” and “dissociate it from Mexico, its geography, its history, and the aspirations of its people” (Vanden Berghe 134, my translation; Vanden Berghe and Maddens 125). This reading would locate 1990s Zapatista discourse within a long continuum of patriotic nationalism, more specifically the effort to claim the “authentic” legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This is quite visible in the EZLN’s and Marcos’s transformation from the FLN “Frente de Liberación Nacional” (National Liberation Front) into the “Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional” (Zapatista Army of National Liberation)—or, as Nick Henck details, from a “People’s Guerilla” to a “Guerilla people” (64–190).

Some analysts have taken this further to argue that the EZLN was a neonationalist organization. In any case, it points to an important aspect of Zapatismo necessary to understand its central paradox: its place, its “geography.” One key geography of the Cold War was an internal, infinitely repeated small space: the domestic. It was seen in the glow of TV sets, in countless living rooms where it played out. This seemingly calm domesticity spoke to the enormous mental fortitude that was required; it provided constancy and predictability. These stories of professors on the run—the Durito stories and the “Mouse” cartoon—share an important departure from this idealized domestic location of safety. The reassuring acts of teaching occur wherever one is momentarily safe from a circling enemy. They happen on the road. Again, “cátedra” refers to both the content of a lecture (the message) and its location (the chair). The places of these lectures on the run are always improvised, anything but routine.

Not all improvisations are equal. Durito from his cátedra explains how the enemy’s failing is its way of improvising: the neoliberal government hunting them down will ultimately fail because it operates by “i-m-p-r-o-v-i-s-a-t-i-o-n. The government has no consistency” and “no plans . . . no perspectives,” he states—from his own oddly improvised yet almost complete classroom. The government has a different kind of improvisation than his, an unthinking and (literally) reactionary one. Durito’s brand of improvisation is different: it is one of resourcefulness, of resilience, and smallness—a perspective lacking in the pursuing federal forces. By pulling out the accoutrements of the classroom in the middle of the jungle, flip chart and desk included, he establishes the connection between the rebellion’s local struggle and a much larger one that affects everyone. He is following Che Guevara’s famous dictum about improvising the revolution: “It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.” A little one-desk classroom in the jungle, while one is on the run, can have a significant impact—especially when it broadcasts over the Web (7).

Size matters. Especially if you’re a small cartoonish creature, most threats will always appear oversized; in later communiqués, Durito mounts an “anti-boot” campaign. But one’s smallness also confers a visionary privilege, because the scale and perspective of the enterprise is inverted. The specific threats in the local conflicts sublimate into a larger ideological message on a grander scale. But a small creature cannot forget smallness. The colonialism scholars Jean and John Comaroff, echoing Hardt and Negri, have observed that, in the class struggle at the millennium, the strategy of the ruling class—globalizing neoliberalism—has involved outsourcing labor into the realm of the virtual by dissipating its specific locations. Globalization is “likely to fragment modernist forms of class consciousness, class alliance and class antinomies. . . .It is also likely to dissolve the ground on which proletarian culture once took shape” (302). In a fundamental way, smallness of scale stands in opposition to such deterritorialization. Smallness by necessity is closer to its very physical immediacy.

The Zapatista slogan of the first Zapata, during the Revolution of 1910–20, was one of place, of land reform: “The land belongs to those who work it” (la tierra es de quien la trabaja). This cri becomes more complicated when the land that is in contention is virtual, existing in cyberspace. It holds to reason that the local struggle would be undermined by the virtualization of one of the tools of resistance, the cátedra, into the more diffuse but farther-reaching scale of the Web. But, in important ways, this can be read as a way to reclaim the means of production, the virtual locality: fighting fire with fire, taking the battle to the ether, turning virtual space into the local because that is where injustice is now effected.

The unprecedented battle of the EZLN and (Neo)Zapatismo for digital land reform channels the original Zapatismo’s specific goals. This brings us once more to Marcos’s double discourse, and to his knowing deployment of the conventions and strategies of the Cold War. In a communiqué from September 4, 1995, Durito himself takes up the keyboard and invents for himself a persona as a Quixotic “Don Durito de la Lacandona,” with the Sup Marcos as his squire. He issues the following slapstick parable. (I include the Spanish original to highlight an untranslatable linguistic particularity, the comic abuse of diminutive endings for the nouns [“-ito, -ita”].)

Once upon a time there was a little mouse who was very hungry. He wanted to eat a little bit of cheese that was in the little kitchen of a little house. So the little mouse very sure of himself headed for the little kitchen to take the little bit of cheese. But it so happens that a little kitty came across his way. . . . So then the little mouse said,

“Enough already!” and he grabbed a machine gun and riddled the little kitty and then went into the kitchen and saw that the little bit of fish, the bit of milk and the bit of cheese had gone bad and were inedible. So he went back to where the cat was, and he dismembered him and then made a great roast and then he invited all his little friends and they had a party and they ate the roasted kitty and they sang and danced and lived happily ever after.

(Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Mexico, 438–39, my translation)

(Había una vez un ratoncito que tenía mucha hambre y quería comer un quesito que estaba en la cocinita de la casita. Y entonces el ratoncito se fue muy decidido a la cocinita para agarrar el quesito, pero resulta que se le atravesó un gatito. . . . Y entonces el ratoncito dijo:

—“¡Ya basta!”—y agarró una ametralladora y acribilló al gatito y fue a la cocinita y vio que el pescadito, la lechita y el quesito ya se habían echado a perder y ya no se podían comer y entonces regresó a donde estaba el gatito y lo destazó y luego hizo un gran asado y luego invitó a todos sus amiguitos y amiguitas y entonces hicieron una fiesta y se comieron al gatito asado y cantaron y bailaron y vivieron muy felices.)

Diminutives turn things small. Here the overuse is a parody of the treacly tone of stories for young children, where the diminutives create a sense of innocence and intimacy. In this case it contrasts sharply with the ultraviolent ending, making it even more jarring. (Durito, the little hard one, is no soft touch.) Irony is related to scale.

The small-scale, local goal of the original (Neo)Zapatismo was attainment of indigenous rights in the state of Chiapas. This required unironic and straightforward language and a clearly defined outcome, echoing the language of similar revolutions. It is to the point. During this first phase of the campaign, Marcos was willing and capable of marshaling such language. The early declaraciones still have faith in instruments such as the Mexican Constitution, which unequivocally states that the people have the absolute right to change the government if it no longer reflects the will of the people. It is a sincere and heartfelt belief in the social contract. A hopeful communiqué from August 30, 1995, during peace talks with the government (only a few days before Durito’s ironic parable), proclaims that “effort by Mexicans, citizens, and the National Peace Conference reminds us that the motherland [patria] lives and is ours” (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 437, my translation). This may sound naïve, but it is issued in the good faith that the government could still abide by its own values in making decisions about this local struggle. It is meant for internal consumption. In contrast, just a few days later when Marcos launches into the larger-scale dimension of Zapatismo, into the struggle against globalization and neoliberalism, his message is voiced ironically (and certainly more entertainingly) by a “tiny” voice: the diminutive and pompous Durito. It is meant to project to an outside audience; his smallness helps.

Understandably, most interpreters are more drawn to the “postmodern” Marcos—ironic, complicated, and self-referential, a masked figure who speaks to the world in savvy terms—than to the idealistic Marcos, who voices worry about the daily caloric intake of the indigenous Tzotzil population. This playful, ironic Marcos is as much a performer as a revolutionary; he fits into a long tradition of countercultural activity mixing art and activism (“culture jamming,” or, more recently, “artivism”), with deep roots in Dada, Surrealism, French Situationism, and other avant-gardes. This tradition is part aesthetic gesture, part grand political statement, and part juvenile pranksterism, but mostly performance.9 Marcos as ethereal commentator and social and intellectual gadfly is more persistent than the guns-and-bullets guerilla leader actively fighting for local change: he is more valuable as a revolutionary critic than as an actual revolutionary.10 The progression of the Marcos persona might warrant the claim that he himself orchestrated that transformation. After the stalemate of 1994–96, when the real-world, geographic impact of the EZLN vanished, and violent conflict segued into seemingly endless negotiation, the only viable Marcos was really the virtual Marcos of indefinite time and space, long-term goals, and rhetorical mastery. The actual physical battle was over.

Finally, recall an important fact about the ironic Marcos of this countercultural tradition, master of a sophisticated and antiglobalizing wit, who aims to decolonize the patterns of the Cold War discourse. That ironic and slippery Marcos, at least for a time, coexisted in equal measure with the “real” Marcos, who was hiding in the sierra with an underequipped force, issuing sincere demands and engaging in real violence. The grounded Marcos still had in mind a solution (if small-scale), echoing previous, dead-serious voices like Fidel Castro’s in the “Declaraciones de la Habana.” And these two coexisting modes, one adamant and the other wistful, were on a fundamental level still hoping for a home, something that the more gestural revolutionaries like the cosmopolitan Situationists could take for granted. Home, a plot of land to call their own, was something that neither Marcos nor Zapatismo could ever take for granted. Although Marcos’s ironic redeployment of Cold War discourse shares much with the Situationists, it is fundamentally different, because it does not happen in the metropolis—in Paris or New York or even Mexico City—at the heart of empire, in any hegemonic center of geography. It is, and always will be, located in the backwoods periphery, which is now in cyberspace. And because of this its reach has been enormous.