(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The GOP project is now all interactive storytelling, a Satanic panic 2.0 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-29 Recently I brought up the cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, famous for “The Medium Is the Message,” among other trenchant critiques. Here he speaks regarding “Living in an Acoustic World”: The old journalism used to try to give an objective picture of a situation by giving the pro and the con. Objective journalism meant giving both sides at once. Strangely, everyone assumed there were two sides to every case. It never occurred to anyone that there might be forty sides or a thousand sides. No, just two sides, pro and con. Suddenly this form of journalism disappeared, and the new journalism arrived represented by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and many others. The new journalism doesn’t give us any side: It just immerses us in the feeling of the whole situation. It plunges us into the feeling of being at the convention or being at the fire, being somewhere, and it began with that famous phrase, “Something funny happened on the way to the forum.” A happening is not a point of view. A happening is all sides at once with everybody involved in it. Mardi Gras is a happening. We cannot have objective journalism about a Mardi Gras: we just have to immerse. Mailer was one of the authors of the new journalism of immersion without any point of view—no objectivity, just subjectivity—and he subheaded his Armies of the Night fiction as history, history as fiction. The new journalism quite frankly regards itself as a form of fiction, with no objectivity at all. → This is the Republican project right now. It is a form of immersion. There’s no objective truth at the center of their project, which has now become diffuse; the layperson, the erstwhile voter, the person at home, can immerse in this new diffusion an can even become a part if he or she so chooses. The descriptions offered by the GOP have no central core—it is not an object. The party is no longer a vehicle. The GOP is a story, and what the party offers are roles. It extends to the average person a chance to get personally involved. Witness the Bud Light rampager destroying his own corner of his local supermarket. That was his mission. He was able to fully immerse himself in the role of cultural defender and cultural destroyer all at once. McLuhan continues: The new politics is in the same position. The old politics had parties, policies, planks, opposition. The new politics is concerned only with images. The problem in the new politics is to find the right image. So search committees are formed to find the candidates who have the right image. Man-hunting has become a big business in the military world, the commercial world and the political world. Image-hunting is the new thing, and policies no longer matter because whether your electric light is provided by Republicans or Democrats is unimportant compared to the service of light and power and all the other kinds of services that go with our cities. Service environments have taken the place of political policies, or so it seems. → Now, the GOP doesn’t pretend even to do that. All they offer are chances on stage, or chances to directly spy the stage, a semi-active bystander. Consider this TV reality, the inversion of reality TV. I noted several weeks ago in my private notes that “the cultists are living in TV reality”: They are the inheritors of Survivor, American Idol, Fox calling Florida for George W. Bush in the middle of the night (before widespread DVRs), and kayfabe from professional wrestling. As Theodor Adorno stated that TV tends to perform reverse psychoanalysis, so Fox and their TV personalities, as an entity, swaddle their viewers in such a constructed fabric of irreality that the audience no longer perceives a true line between what’s been massaged for them and what actually surrounds them as an environment. They take the fabricated construction to be their environment. Then they act accordingly, as Walter Lippmann described regarding propaganda/stereotypes long before the age of television. The members of that audience mistake their apperception as a true reflection, and they respond to their fantasy conceptions with concrete motion in shared reality. McLuhan elsewhere spoke of Bonanzaland, a place that people in fast-moving electric society could relax into as they looked back upon an idealized fictional past. (cue to 12:48) Today, with TV reality, we have pseudo-contestants, ordinary people feeling their oats with itchy trigger fingers, figuring they may as well punctuate their fifteen minutes with a bang. The GOP provides roles, bit parts that can be walked into, no understanding required. Wing it and rise—they have an entire media universe structured to take ready-made talent and thrust unpolished raw material in front of the camera or microphone to let the environment finish the bake, like a kiln. It’s all pre-set. All it takes is some gumption, some inner spring inside the ambitious upstart, the latest Jesse Watters or whomever else is willing to be as plastic as the situation requires, as long as a paycheck and admiration from the crowd is forthcoming. All it takes is that sense of jumping the line, jumping on stage, and breaking the fourth wall in society by acting out. Not acting up—though we have that sometimes as a blended a role. No, acting out: performing a fantasy in the middle of real life. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/29/2166583/-The-GOP-project-is-now-all-interactive-storytelling-a-Satanic-panic-2-0 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/