It’s not that you can’t reason with the masses; it’s that you can’t reason with the visual media we use to reach them. Visual media, and moving pictures in particular, do not lend themselves to complexity of thought, or, in particular, to thought at all. This is not to say that thought-provoking films and images don’t exist, but they exist in spite of their media, not because of them. Film finds itself better used by the polemicist than the intellectual: Jean-Luc Godard’s tendency toward filling his movies with lectures is a case in point; in opposition we see Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda, which can be understood almost completely without a single word coming into play. Even the seemingly subtle masters of the form are more likely to produce emotional punches than provoke rational discourse: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is frequently noted as asking profound questions, but it asks maybe three or four of those in its almost two-hour running time, and it asks far less of the viewer than the Phillip K. Dick novel upon which it is based. Even Stanley Kubrick failed, by his own admission, to successfully address the issues brought up in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
The intellectual content of movies, at least that which isn’t expressed through the standard narrative techniques familiar from theater, exist in and are created from the juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein recognized this early on: that meaning could be created beyond the juxtaposed images themselves through the act of juxtaposition. Montage does not discount the meaning in the images themselves, but the moving picture doesn’t often allow the kind of interaction with an image that a static picture invites. A still photograph, painting, or sculpture, creates a distinct relationship between the viewer and the work. There is a boundary of surface and space that eventually forces the viewer back into herself, the moment of contemplation. Cinema, with its incessant images in motion, tends to cloy the senses and therefore demands increasing levels of sensation in order to reach its numbed audience. The viewer becomes invaded as much as she invades; contemplation, the movement back into the self, becomes increasingly difficult.
The basic problem of making moving images mean, and not merely emote, can be seen in what television has done to the electoral process. Even if Barack Obama had wanted to discuss complex solutions to difficult issues, he would not have had the chance: there just isn’t time until the next question, the next image, the next segment. Radio, which is slightly more “literary” and certainly more verbal, has become the new medium of the mind, such as it is. And even it is extremely time-sensitive, unable to maintain the close audience/author relationship of text.
All this is well known—nothing I’ve written here hasn’t been observed before. But what is even more interesting is how current trends in visual media are to substitute something even more primeval than emotion into their communications instead of any intellectual content. Orwell approached this idea with the concept of “ducktalk”: ideological blather so devoid of substance that its delivery resembles the quacking of a duck. What we go for now is pure gut-(re)action, the physical movement within of tension, the simple stimulation of some basic vestige of the lizard-brain. We wish, after all, not to feel, as that might make us aware of our actual state. We wish to avoid the subversive possibility of compassion—both our corporate minders wish to avoid this and we ourselves do. All we really ask of our mass media is that they force us to react, that they check to make sure our reflexes are still functioning, like a doctor’s little rubber hammer.
So numb we are in our little felt-walled cubicles and our commutes, our savage layoffs and our abstract wars, that we seek entertainment that elicits only the most simple of reactions. The broad comedy, the slasher flick, the graphic war movie, all circumvent the most problematic human attributes, feeling and thought, and place us back into the cognitive state of the mayfly. Thus atrophied, the two distinguishing sensibilities of higher-order creatures are easily dismissed so that we can more efficaciously ignore the inhumanity and alienation of what we do: obeying idiots, “serving” the customer, eating empty calories out of Styrofoam clamshells.
These media have not really caused the end of a civilization predicated on a literate populace, but they have marked it. For certainly it is possible to create great and thoughtful works both cinematic and televisual. Our lives as led make the lowest and worst of these compelling. Some of the best television consists almost entirely of just two people talking, like what Bill Moyers has done on PBS over the years. But what percentage of the 200 some-odd cable channels provide this? And many of the best movies ever made move slowly enough for the viewer to ask questions—the films of Abbas Kiarostami come to mind—and ask either directly or through the trials of their characters important questions about life, love, morality, jazz. But how many of the movies most people see would have any plot at all if it weren’t blown from place to place by big, orange explosions? The latest Batman movie may be a good movie, but do most people see it for its finer points, or do they just want to gut the dead guy who plays the Joker?
All this may also be why some of the better films and TV shows these days are satires or allegories: we let them exist because they work on a gut level that rarely infects the intellectual level on which they also work. They can be “read” by those who are capable and willing, and the rest can just enjoy the dick and fart jokes.
It’s no surprise, either, that the World Wide Web became popular only when it became the Web, that is, when it became visual. The strings of text that populated BBSs and listservs had a limited appeal, and anyway, it was hard to do hardcore porn in ASCII. Hypertext led the way, of course, by giving people the ability to gut their way through webpages; the destination was always clicking through, not hassling with content. Thus the user has the illusion of control, of exercising judgment, of “interacting.” But what is created in the mind of the user by this is debatable, and real change occurs in the mind when intellectual work is done. Blogging offers some hope, and the numbers who fall away from it every day offer hope as well since those who have something to say and some compulsion to say it may have a chance to be read in the aftermath of the collapse. But it, too, rarely encourages a sustained reading, being more about pith than wit, quirk than commentary.
The best of the moving-image media stick with the viewer not in terms of the trauma of their imagery, but because of their ability to expand, improbably, what the viewer is able to imagine.
In some ways, the American political system is working as intended: the elite, or at least an elite, is making the decisions, just as the proverbial Founding Fathers designed. Sadly, that elite does not comprise the actual representatives we elect—perhaps a blessing, since our electeds tend to be kind of stupid after all. There’s no irony here: candidates are selected by the two parties because they are weak: weak minded and weak-willed. They are therefore more moldable into the electable product. Witness George W. Bush, a blank canvas upon which Karl Rove could paint his masterpiece. Still, a certain level of competence is necessary, as the meltdown of Sarah Palin’s candidacy evinced. This is not to say that, had the press actually scrutinized W. the same way that the same thing couldn’t have happened to him, but they weren’t then in love with Obama, didn’t have the evil temptress of Palin to gird up their loins to resist.
But parties are cognizant of the need to kowtow to their masters, the much maligned “special interests,” by which we can read “wealthy businesses interests.” The Right may complain about the Sierra Club or the ACLU, but those entities take to the courts because they can’t afford to run candidates; only the really loaded can finance a campaign. The open-secrets of the senators from coal country or the representatives from Boeing wouldn’t seem so tired conceptually if they weren’t actually just that. In the biggest coup (all puns intended) yet, we have just passed an era in which the president and vice president were wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil and gas industries. This worn path, however, leads us to the gates of our true masters.
By doing so, we follow the money too, and even after the recent collapse, the top 5% still control almost half of all there is. And just as the feudal lords’ powers ebbed or flowed depending on their relationship with the Holy See, so too do the current elites see their wealth enhanced or degraded by political patronage. Boeing never missed a major government contract when the powerful triumvirate of Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, and Dan Glickman represented Kansas, where Boeing has a major plant. But when these were replaced by the relatively weak and ineffectual Brownback/Roberts/Tiahrt delegation, Boeing lost a major bid, and to an overseas company to boot.
It doesn’t help that this delegation is at least 2/3 intellectually dim either; the downside of being able to control a politician is simply that he or she lacks personal power. In this, George W. Bush seems to have won the day for Big Oil but lost the war, as America’s global position was weakened vis-a-vis OPEC, its relationship with Russia shot, and its access to Iraqi oil fields remains doubtful. In the short term, the almost unimaginable boon of oil prices at $120 a barrel last year have come back to haunt a wrecked economy and Venezuela and Russia renationalizing their supply.
The American people, of course, hardly even enter the picture. Even during election years, they are so docile and suggestible, so apathetic, that it’s nearly certain they’ll fail to surprise. The election of Barack Obama reinforces this idea. He may be black, but he’s also unrelentingly centrist, even conservative, in times that call for bold and progressive action. No puns intended, in Obama the electorate did not back a dark horse, as that would have been a Kucinich or a Nader. The American people have failed to riot in the streets or even calmly protest even in the face of eight years of obvious incompetence, a quarter century of declining wages, and complete economic meltdown. George Orwell, it turns out, was wrong about this: the proles need not be poorly educated. In fact, despite increasing numbers of college degrees, we’re now less likely to agitate than we were when things were going relatively well. The system that we purportedly love, that we send our kids to die in order to supposedly protect, has broken down, been hijacked by the same people who have cynically outsourced our jobs and dismantled the industry we worked so hard to create, and in order to “show them” we elected a man who packs his group of economic advisors and regulators with them.
It’s as if, along with middle-class expectations and middle-class educations, we’ve also adopted bourgeois conservatism, even if it makes our actual lives less certain, less wealthy, less satisfying overall. The middle class that, in its ascendancy, demanded more freedom is now, in its senility, demanding less.
I suppose we get what we deserve, but it is hardly meaningful politically to exist so, with half of us living up to our expectations to vote one way and half the other and neither way promising actual change. What has happened in this country over the past 30 years is the largest voluntary handover of power in history, with literally a hundred million of us not even participating in any election and tens of millions more not demanding that their parties do better. We fail to question the party lines that, inevitably, fail to improve our lives.
There is something of the mindset of war about this, and much of that egged on by the Right wing media and the Republican Revolutionaries who took over congress in 1994 but whose first major victory was the Reagan-Bush regime from 1980-1992. We still fight on their battlefields; they have long held the high ground in the minds of most Americans and even the mainstream media so often touted as leftist. The latter are all solidly in the realms of the wealthy, after all, and are still more worried about their investments than the plight of the poor. The Right determines the language–”taxpayers” instead of “citizens,”–and projects the power relationships—the supposed control of the “intellectual elite” and the threat to freedom that is the ACLU. The lack of push-back and redefinition from the Democrats is an indication that they, too buy this language to some degree. This is also why universal single-payer health care, the only system that actually makes sense, is an impossibility in this country.
They manage to do this by false dilemmas: the system we have or socialism, the vagaries of the market or the “rationing” of health care, and that feeds into the scorched-earth politics of a two-party state wherein winning is the point, governing is secondary. And the only way to win such costly campaigns is to enlist the power, and thereby pledge fealty to, the rich.
The question history will have to ask, and the answer is not exactly clear, is why such a powerful and hopeful and active people gave up on their democracy, why we decided that solutions that actually work were too ideologically scary to try, why making our public servants actually serve the public was too much to bother with after all.
The degree to which poetry is about itself is the measure of its irrelevance.
Apply this idea at will and with the necessary substitutions to fit your situation.
Ehud Olmert spoke today about the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as if the Israelis genuinely didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to cause disruption and loss of life, but that it was somehow necessary, and as if he actually believes that his state’s recent acts are going to crush Hamas and thereby solve all of Israel’s troubles.
If he really does believe this, he is utterly deluded. There is nothing in the past forty years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suggest that doing it exactly as they’ve always done it is going to somehow lead to a cessation of hostilities—just the opposite. It is certainly possible that he is indeed deluded, of course, as the past eight years of US history show that achieving high office in a democracy is no guarantee of sanity. It is possible that, being at the heart of the conflict, he and the rest of Israel are unable to see anything particularly clearly. But it’s just as likely that the leaders of Israel and Hamas are going after one another for purposes of reinforcing their power among their own constituents as that they really think they’re gaining any ground with one another. Clearly, Hamas rockets won‘t bring down the modern, nuclear-armed, US-backed state of Israel, and just as clearly, violent incursions in the face of an asymmetric opposition just leads to an entrenchment of the opposition, in this case Hamas or some party even more extreme that will form to fill its vacuum. You can’t crush a guerilla opposition short of genocide, or at least extreme and open brutality—public drawing and quartering, heads on stakes, that sort of thing—and Israel has managed not to go so far.
We must take into account, though, that when Olmert claims that Hamas is “an existential threat” to Israel, he’s not entirely wrong. After all, how would a largely secular but ethnically Jewish state define itself if it didn’t have an Other to define itself as not? The Palestinians, despite their current condition, suffer from the same potential problem. Recall what a statement it was for Arafat to don a business suit when he negotiated the Dayton Accords. There would have been no statement had his Westernized sartorial choices not been controversial at home.
Palestinians and Israelis have just as much trouble trying to define themselves as distinct from the other: they eat the same food and ostensibly worship the same god (when they worship) and have many of the same concerns, namely how to make a living in a barren landscape with few natural resources and a history of violence. If we in the West spoke truly, we’d acknowledge that nobody except the locals would be interested in the Israel-Palestine issue if it weren’t the home to the three major monotheistic religions: the area has no oil, no good farmland, few beautiful vistas. If not for the religious significance, the conflict there would be sort of like Sri Lanka’s problem with the Tamil Tigers: a minor sort of tragedy when we hear about it, the hearing of which we follow by an immediate return to the spreadsheet or caramel latte that calls for our immediate attention.
In back of this, there is also the fact that both Israel and Palestine have far right minorities that must be appeased. In Palestine, that is Hamas, and it was only after decades of oppression that the moderates of Palestine decided to give their extremists a chance to govern. Hamas was already acting as a de facto government, building schools and soup kitchens, and taking care of people when the more conciliatory but utterly corrupt Fata was just filling its own pockets with foreign-aid cash. Likewise, moderate governments in Israel are usually only able to govern by making parliamentary coalitions with the ultra-orthodox, whose settlement-building and zero-tolerance fundamentalism pulls the moderates’ puppet-strings if they wish to maintain power, and it is always the first order of business for any political party to gain and keep power.
But for religious moderates, there is always a niggling sense of having compromised one’s core principles for the sake of getting along with Modernity. I have witnessed this with Mennonites, most of whom speak and think of the Amish with reverence, even though they’d never actually wish to live the way the Amish do. Contemporary Mennonites think with one part of their minds that the Amish are somehow more “pure,” closer to the way God intended people to live, even though the Amish lifestyle was one adopted long after the founding of the faith—a faith that developed as a reaction by theologically sophisticated, university educated city-dwellers to the corruption of the existing church. It’s likely the Israelis and Palestinians view their own fundamentalists the same way and kowtow to them not only because of their political power but because, on some level, they think it somehow more “pure” and “godly” to do so.
Seeing the world in terms of a continuum of purity leads to the desire to protect those you think are more pure and destroy those you think are less pure. Since nobody’s position is at either terminus, relatively minor differences take on amplified importance: if I’m much like the Palestinian, and the Palestinian is not pure, I must prove my relative worth by destroying the Palestinian. This also leads to the “existential threat” as outlined above since it is definitional, but we see the phenomenon over and over again, from the “Holy” Land to otherwise reasonable people aggrandizing the small-town “values voter” in the US, even though few of us live in small towns, and even in small towns few, if any, of us ever live by those values we vote to uphold. This was exactly the destructive power unleashed in the witch hunts in Salem and the pogroms in Europe.
Sadly, none of the religions involved in the conflict at issue insist on the kind of purity that drives the current troubles. Judaism has its Jubilee and Christianity its forgiveness. Islam has its jihad—the internal struggle to follow the path the Prophet describes. If we were perfect, we humans wouldn’t need religion at all. The least we could ask of ourselves is that we privilege the moderation of our faith
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