By Edward Curtin
September 01, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Neurosis to a
greater or lesser degree is the norm in western
industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact
is the key to effective propaganda. It is well
known that neurotics always return to the place
they are running away from. It’s a circle game
of frustration in which being frustrated is
actually the “solution,” because the real
problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump
phenomenon is an example of this on a social
level.
Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated
in equal measure. And everyone knows he
dominates the minds of those who love or hate
him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him
in a way that only very obtuse people would fail
to analyze. The media made Trump and he is
their gold mine and the key to the effective
propaganda they run for their masters in high
finance and the intelligence agencies. Although
his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is
like an Impressionist painting that, as the art
critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude
Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you
are compelled to recognize that it is no longer
there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist
painting; instead it extracts your memories. In
a sense it is more active than you – the passive
viewer is being born; what you receive is taken
from what happens between you and it. No more
within it.”
Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here
and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is
fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence
of appearances are its essence. As with Trump,
nothing is really clear, although many claim it
is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th
and early 20th centuries) when, due
to technological and economic changes, an old
world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a
century or more and we have Trump and the
electronic media where vagueness and flux rule
perceptions.
Celebrity Culture
For Trump is a product of celebrity culture
that has come to dominate our world that reminds
you that the world of the past has become a
reality television show and all the talk about
the good old days is an illusion and that we are
now living in a society where experience has
been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral
gestures. The politicians of all stripes play
ghosts.
America will never be great again, for it is
corrupted to the core and the mass media present
it in images that have no bearing on reality.
This is something neurotics cannot face, so they
still follow the circle game played by the media
and fight political battles that are exercises
in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a
sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a
game or had a losing season, there is always
tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.
Before Donald Trump emerged on the national
scene with his 2015 announcement that he was
running for the presidency, he was known as a
wealthy real estate operator who had often
declared bankruptcy and a comical
reality-television host with a strange hairdo.
In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge
mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous,
including former President Bill Clinton and
Hillary Clinton, among many others.
How such a billionaire celebrity could ever
have become president and have such a large
following among the white working class – the
“deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo
– has its roots in the transformation of
American culture from the late 1950s to today
when illusion and performance have replaced any
semblance of reality.
Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler
Daniel Boorstin described this transformation
in its early days in his brilliant book, The
Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
(1962). He dissected the radical change taking
place whereby images and manufactured
pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or
distorted – have become more vivid, more
attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive
than reality itself.” What I describe as
neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies.
In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people
imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of
themselves imitating the famous people of all
stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the
repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin
writes:
Our very efforts
to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by
critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar
‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy
of our admiration, are like efforts to get
‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other
pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They
increase our interest in the fabrication …. The
hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all
equally news.
Thirty years after The Image, Neil
Postman added to this critique by showing how
the new computer technology was tyrannizing over
all human values and ways of knowing. In
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology, he showed how the ecology of
technology, wherein “One significant change
generates total change,” creates a totally new
world where cultural and personal coherence
become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where
technology and technique rule over all life, any
sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles.
“That it why it is possible to say almost
anything without contradiction provided you
begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has
shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘”
Scientism and gibberish blend with technological
tricks to create an electronic digital society
where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the
news” – or the creation of the illusions –
becomes the most interesting news of all, even
as its debunking is a tautology like the
definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known
for being known.
Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the
finishing touches on these developments with his
book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment
Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and
Postman, he argued that in the United States
life itself had become an ongoing movie in which
the manipulation of reality and real life
melodramas, the movies and the new information
technologies, had melded into a cultural
transformation so profound that it marked the
end of traditional values and/or the start of a
brave new world. When fiction replaced facts
and everything became entertainment in a
technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was
gradually becoming a medium all its own, like
television, radio, print, and film, and that all
of us were becoming at once performance artists
in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The
traditional media turned from some semblance of
reporting actual news to become conveyors of
“lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood
of entertainments taken from soap-operatic
events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical
techniques were applied to politics, religion,
war, etc., and everything became show business,
including the presidency and the national sitcom
of political reporting.
Political Theater and Propaganda
This is the context for Trump’s rise to
prominence. It makes clear that he is not an
aberration but part of a long development that
gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and
all the presidential performers who have
followed. One could say, if Trump never
existed, he would have to be invented, which of
course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush
II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the
Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic
television and movie actor? Performers such as
these follow their Director’s orders.
Furthermore, all these developments omit the
crucial part played by government propaganda
apparatuses in conjunction with the media and
technology conglomerates. The growth of such
massive propaganda is entwined with all these
cultural changes, although it is not the primary
focus of the three books mentioned. When all
these threads are woven together, we arrive at
our current situation – a vast tapestry of
lies.
There are various schools of thought on the
Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the
thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to
Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election,
his presidency, and all that continues to
transpire around him in 2022 and into the
future. (And although Trump will be an old man
in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you
can be assured he will be garnering the
headlines then.)
Monet Paints Trump
These diverse impressions of what it all
means fall into at least four categories, which
I will sketch as I see them.
Trump supporters seemingly
came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false.
If anything, they have been smoldering for many
decades and their complaints have been mounting
for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the
New York journalist, wrote an article for New
York Magazine called
“The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.”
He said:
They call my
people the White Lower Middle Class these days.
It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I
suppose, of the missionary zeal of those
sociologists who still think you can place human
beings on charts. It most certainly does not
sound like a description of people on the edge
of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt.
And yet, that is the case. All over New York
tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn,
Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are
standing around saloons talking of their
grievances, and even more darkly about possible
remedies. Their grievances are real and deep;
their remedies could blow this city apart.
The White Lower
Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a
cocktail party on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the
American demonology. Here comes the murderous
rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an
army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving
Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and
Hungarians (they are never referred to as
Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are
referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the
blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic,
sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class.
Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.
He went on to quote various white
working-class New Yorkers, their quiet
bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a
media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre,
its seeming inability to ever explain what is
happening behind the photographed image,” which
results in a superficial understanding of what
is really behind their frustrated complaints
that they too are victims of the system and are
not respected. In an article ostensibly about
New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger
came from, not to justify misdirected racism or
ignorance of how things actually work in this
country. Update his account, and you have a
good portion of Trump’s followers today. His
description is just as apt today: “The
working-class white man is actually in revolt
against taxes, joyless work, the double
standards and short memories of professional
politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the
debasement of the American dream.”
The perplexing thing, only explained by the
rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the
dumbing-down of the general public, is how
Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could
garner their devoted allegiance. A man so
different from them, many of whom come from
states with large rural populations and Trump a
quintessential New Yorker who probably never got
his hands in the earth. Of course he said many
of the things they were desperate to hear about
making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign
entanglements, etc., many appealing things after
they spent so many years hearing the politicians
talk the same jive talk about invading this
country and that and fighting Russia to the
death. His message appealed to many. They bought
his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that
all politicians use, but he was touching the
suppressed underbelly of the American delusion.
An upper class politician talking about, among
others things, class matters.
Then there is the liberal
counterpoint to Trump, which is
essentially the Democratic Party’s
interpretation that Trump represents a shocking
neo-fascist resurrection of the historically
racist, isolationist strain in American history.
This position is ironically consonant with the
extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer
friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who
claimed there were communists under every bed
and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize
our liberties. The accusations against Trump,
being led by The New York Times, the
Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is
a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and
that he is intent on undermining American
democracy and establishing an American
totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election
with the help of Russia; and that he always has
been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The
liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what
some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,”
are as devoted to their assessments as are
Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump
as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in
equal measure.
Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or
Satan, there are various other opinions
of him that cross ideological divides. Most are
equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him
for his less belligerent stance toward Russia
and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate
accusations against him and the impeachment
proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity,
although they do not endorse some of his other
positions. Others view him as the
personification of the rise of neo-fascist,
far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also
seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious
fools leading the country to disaster. Some
conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do
a small number of libertarians, but they remain
very wary. There are many variations on these
opinions with most falling somewhere between a
rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both
contestants in the electoral game, but most are
based on the presupposition that the show must
go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud
when their side loses. This is the frame within
which impressions of Trump and his opponents are
formed.
Rarely is it considered – and this is
the take of a tiny minority – that with
the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events,
image-making, and the vast, sophisticated,
electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus,
that Donald Trump is not the impressions he
gives off but a creation of hidden forces
manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent.
That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or
Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a
partner in a great game of deception in which
the good guys and bad guys play their parts for
the Great Director. It is worth remembering
what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the
West Wing of the White House in February 1981,
overheard that day:
We’ll know our
disinformation is complete when everything the
American public believes is false. – William J.
Casey, CIA Director
It is also worth considering a different
version of the point the psychologist James
Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised
with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of
Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.
People might ask themselves if over the
past fifty or five years their lives have gotten
better or worse under all the American
presidents, including Biden and Trump. The
answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time
to imagine the most extreme possibility: That
Casey’s statement has come to fruition.
It is not just painters and comedians who do
impressions.
Edward Curtin is educated in the classics,
philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology,
He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of
Liberal Arts.
http://edwardcurtin.com/
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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