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.
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
Why no one is calling the Paulson/Bernanke plan to bail out Wall Street a massive power grab by these two men is beyond me, but historians may see it for what it is. They gain power by dealing directly with those holding our nation’s economy hostage, the Wall Street elite we have allowed to take control, instead of giving this power to our elected representatives. This is appeasement of the investor class on a scale not seen since the days of the danegeld. That Congress is fighting back is a good thing in theory, but may be ruinous in practice: we are all subject to the fragile psychology of the investment class and its representatives on the trading floor.
Our nation is prepared to spend nearly a trillion dollars in order, not to shore up the actual balance of credits and debits of our financial system, but to cure the “jitters” of those whose hands are on the money. Almost everyone in Congress agrees this is “necessary.” What this shows us is that bank executives, traders, investors, are “super citizens,” capable of wielding immense power simply by acting on their disordered states of mind. Maybe more accurately, they’re the real citizens of this country, the genuine aristocracy that must be appeased so the king’s men, Paulson and Bernanke, can keep their heads on their shoulders.
I say that it’s not about actual balances between debits and credits, but what would be even more accurate is to say that the balances of debits and credits that are being weeped over are not actual in the common sense of the word; they are a fiction every bit as real, and every bit as revealing, as a character in some broad national drama, mythological numbers whose significance looms as real as Gilgamesh in the mind of a Babylonian. What we have is a crisis of values in both senses: the values of things and how we value things. The value of an object is what those negotiating over it, or potentially negotiating over it, agree that it is. This is true whether or not it’s a stock in a company or a home on the range. Thus when home values are “artificially” inflated and then that value collapses, the event is more a story we tell about ourselves to ourselves than it is anything inherent about the home. The home does not change; our attitude about it does. When that attitude is held by the investment class, we all lose money, since the investors are the ones whose actions infuse money with their magic, fictive power.
None of these observations are particularly new, but stating them broadly would no doubt cause our system to collapse, again, for the very reasons stated above. All cultures need these stories about themselves to define themselves, and without them we turn to the Ghost Shirt Dance and the Boxer rebellion. Cultures survive such identity crises, but rarely without war, chaos, and starvation that are very, very real—a process we still see playing out in post-colonial Africa.
Another illusion muddying the picture and causing the media and even those involved in solving the problem from seeing it clearly is revealed by the fact that nobody called the president on his statement that we practice a system of “democratic capitalism” in his recent speech about our financial crisis. I generally don’t nitpick about such things, but we practice democracy in only very limited ways: we’re a republic, for the most part, in which people choose their representatives. The idea was that this setup avoided the messiness of mob rule that true democracy was prone to, gave legislators time to travel to the capital and stay there during sessions, and allowed the lay citizen to elect someone perhaps more able to do the job of ruling than himself. The representative was meant to be aligned with the interests of the citizen who elected him, and the competing interests of the various representatives in congress were meant to lead to deliberations, negotiations, compromise—in other words, reasonable solutions. That our Congress is rarely able to actually reach those things says more about our failure as an electorate to do the job of an informed citizen than it says about the relative incompetence of the men and women there. But because elections cost a lot to run, those able to afford to hold office are frequently of or aligned with the investor class, and so they see why bills like the Bernanke/Paulson bill must pass, but they also know that the bill is highly unpopular with the wage-slaves back home. An actual compromise must be reached or the peasants—like you and me—may revolt.
Part of the problem we have seeing this clearly is that we also practice capitalism, a system that is in many ways fundamentally opposed to democracy: where democracy thrives on equality and an informed and interested public, capitalism thrives on the inequality of investors and those they invest with and an ignorant and docile consumer. We get confused because capitalism and democracy share a features: both require a certain amount of liberty to succeed. The investor must be free to invest as she sees fit, and the citizen must be free in body and mind in order to make civic decisions without interference. Capitalism must keep information from competitors in order not to reveal its trade secrets and from consumers in order not to reveal that it serves the bottom line and not them. This is part of the reason that free-market theorists’ “rational agent” notions are total crap—or rather a cynical ploy: basic business practices preclude the transparency the consumer needs to act in a rational way when making buying decisions. The pushers of subprime loans in this latest meltdown provide millions of cases-in-point since they basically ran a confidence game on the poor, creditless fools they duped into buying their variable-rate loans. Added to this is the fact that consumers rarely act rationally when making purchasing decisions anyhow; because most products are equally bad due to the excesses of corporate corner-cutting; consumers buy instead based on what they feel about a product or what they think the product says about them. More basically, industrialization thrives on overproduction, and so capitalism has created consumers, a class of people who define themselves by what they buy and the need to collect more of it, needed or not. Thus the president–with a straight face and perhaps genuinely believing it—told us to go out and buy things as our patriotic duty after 9-11-2001. The investment class was already firmly in control.
As legislators and presidents ceded more and more power to the investment class over the past 25 years capitalism was kept healthy but at the detriment of the real-world values (in both senses) of the citizen; the market became more opaque as it became more free, and its concerns became, de faco, the most important concerns the nation has. It has gotten to the point now that, when asked to define “freedom,” or “democracy,” nine out of ten of my students will equate it with consumer choice, the ability to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night and choose between fifty different Chinese-built clock radios.
Democracies, certainly, can tolerate a certain amount of capitalism, but capitalism must be seen for what it is: a way of doing certain economic functions, not a way to run a country.
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