Trump, The Post-Modern Mediated Authoritarian

Having cited the phrase from Trump's Nevada victory rant, that he "loves poorly educated people," Matt Taibbi offered this eulogy for the American political process:

"Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn't know how to turn the cameras off, even when it's filming its own demise."

 And we truly have to accept ourselves as enablers.  We are like the Munchkins of Oz, cowering before the booming bombast of the imagined Wizard, fearing the smoke, fire and mirrors that promises foreboding strength and benevolent control.

But we don't have a Dorothy to give courage, wisdom and heart to the potential fighters we might have had.  And I don't see a Toto among the hordes of journalists and pundits who will pull the curtain back and reveal the actuality behind the false images Trump projects.

We, indeed, are the Munchkin-like gawkers gazing into the filming of the demise.  Trump has been the maestro of the media circus and the "information" media are his workers.  For or against the idea of a Trump presidency, we abet his manipulation simply by tuning in and giving him the ratings, which drive the kind and amount of "information" we get.  Trump and his media abettors have extended the meaning of "infotainment" into the absurd.  And the absurd is the reality of the Trump arena.

We might weather this storm.  But perhaps it's not a storm.  Perhaps it's the gaussian blur of the world we've always wanted and strive toward.  This imaginary vision just might be the actuality we've sought all along.  We might even say it has become our secular religion...and Vegas is our Mecca.

Diversity and Technology: The Blessing and The Curse

In Antonio Damasiio’s book, Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2010), he painstakingly explains human neuro-development from in-utero to the concept of self or what some call individuation, which is the organism’s awareness of separateness from other organisms.  Damasio celebrates this process noting that it is what makes us uniquely human among the evolved organisms.

But what if this separateness, what most contemporaries now celebrate as diversity, rather than being our blessing as a species has evolved into our curse?  That is, perhaps, as we become more aware of our differences, and ponder or dwell on it, we simultaneously become aware of our desperate-ness.  Perhaps, we are evolving into increasingly insular prongs or nodes the linkages of which are spinning into finer and finer untenable threads that dissolve or snap without warning.  What if this explains the currency of the phrase “dissociative behavior” that is used increasingly in the 21^st century to identify lethally social pathology that increasingly seeps into the headlines?

In Roger Cohen's op-ed today (2/23/16), he writes eloquently of just how much technology has abetted this evolution.

"The smartphone is a Faustian device, at once liberation and enslavement. It frees us to be anywhere and everywhere — and most of all nowhere. It widens horizons. It makes those horizons invisible. Upright homo sapiens, millions of years in the making, has yielded in a decade to the stooped homo sapiens of downward device-dazzled gaze... A world is gone. Another...is being born — one where words mean everything and the contrary of everything, where sentences have lost their weight, where volume drowns truth...How cold and callous is the little screen of our insidious temptation, working our fingers so hard to produce so little!...Technology has upended not only newspapers. It has upended language itself, which is none other than a community’s system of communication. What is a community today? Can there be community at all with downward gazes?"

I say Cohen is eloquent, because he phrases the questions so precisely.  He, too, feels that something is going on, and that something just might be more profound than any of us could possibly imagine...especially those of us locked into our downward gaze.  And he inserts a cautionary note at the end, a note, which to me, resonates so thoroughly within the popping and crackling of the bonds which previously secured what we think of as community.  But, perhaps, that's precisely the point.  Perhaps what we think of as community has been changing while we were struggling to understand what has been going on.  Is this what's at the core of all the anger that's impelling this election cycle circus?  Are we angry not because we feel the center is not holding, but rather because we feel we have no center? Are we already where we fear we have been heading?

You Say You Want A Revolution

This John Lennon challenge in his "Revolution" (released in 1968) captured the essence of the most turbulent year in my lifetime.  What he knew, and what the people of the United States sadly discovered was that rebellion in the streets, while attracting large numbers of people who had little to lose, would serve as the paradigm for a media branding that television and the press had just recently discovered had the power to attract through spectacle and foment without resolution.  The word revolution had great currency in those days; both the Yippies and the establishment in their opposing rhetoric used it to keep the cynicism alive.

I witnessed, close up and personal, the techniques that were used to corral well meaning but naive  adults and young people, into massive marches and displays chanting slogans of the need for endings and desires for vague beginnings.  Some even spilled their blood.  But in the end, after people had been dragged into paddy wagons and banners and signs had been swept up into junk, the idea of revolution had been snatched and turned into something closely resembling a coup d'etat.  Those of us walking the streets of D.C. and New York and New Haven eventually got it, we saw the military arrayed on rooftops and smelled the tear gas, and we eventually understood Lennon's caution, the voice of the narrative saying that the effort won't create a revolution and that everything "will be all right, all right, all right"...in other words, middling acceptable.

History tells me that revolutions arise from the citizens' court of last resort.  The trials have run their course, but they bring no satisfaction.  All that precedes a revolution have been episodes along a series of bandaid increments.  And for each increment of solution there are double retreats into the original problems.  1968 was a major trial for the citizens of the U.S.  Its verdict demonstrated two things to the people who cared: 1) a citizen rebellion is not a revolution, an actual, systemic change that takes great effort, causing much hardship; 2) incrementalism, the consequence of rebellion, plays the house's game—it allows you enough small scores so that you think the game is winnable, but when you step back and accept that the house still has the most points, the most money, the most power, you realize that it's time to sit back and wait for the next increment, the next tease the house tosses your way.

Bernie Sanders' rhetoric voices both the need for and the promise of a revolution (full disclosure: I have donated money in support of his campaign), but he does not clarify what demands that revolution will assume on the part of his supporters, indeed, on the part of the U.S. citizenry should he be elected.    David Brooks (a writer I respect and often enjoy chiding) presented a low key sarcastic summary of what kinds of sacrifices would be required of the citizenry as a result of implementing Sanders' policy standards.  I recommend that you follow the link, because what Brooks demonstrates is a fairly accurate picture of what the U.S. would look like and feel like in the wake of a Sanders election to the presidency.

Yes, this is what the Sanders revolution would look like.  Forget about the European references, which are merely Brooks' tweak of Americans' knee jerk responses to what they believe are the intellectual elitism and nanny state-ism of all things European.  What Brooks does fairly mention is that elements like stability in the provision of basic personal needs (health care, child care, food, housing) are met in such societies.  What he implies is that Americans, so far, have been unwilling to swap the possibility of greater self-aggrandizement—physically, financially and socially—in their individual lives, and very much willing to let the devil take the hindmost.  In other words, Americans like to gamble with their lives (according to Forbes, 90% of startups, i.e., gambles, fail in the first 3 years).  And Bernie Sanders suggests that such a lifestyle currently has nightmarish consequences for what used to be comparatively small numbers of people but now are having significant consequences for all the risk takers out there...except the ones holding the house money. This is what Sanders means when he lists childhood poverty, the boom in the incarceration industry, the boom in the charter school industry, the prices of the food we eat, of the medications we need to get through our days, the housing we live in, and the health care we do or do not receive.

Sanders' opponents, no matter which of the two parties they represent, pay lip service about what kinds of things they know must be done.  When they want to be kind to him, they say Sanders' vision is not realizable and practical; it's a too radical system for Americans.  But, unlike Sanders, they don't identify how they represent the incremental process of the radical capitalism that supports them.  No  matter what they say, they cannot and do not want to change that process; they do  not want to change the system to make it more responsive to the fundamental needs of human beings.  Our history has passed through periods like this, for example, 1880-1900 and 1920-1930.  The culture of the U.S. during those periods was full of extremes, and life for 90% of the citizenry was very unreliable.

Sanders wants the citizenry to look closely at what and how we are living.  Secretary Clinton refers to him as a single issue candidate.  But she carefully doesn't mention what the issue is.  The issue requires change as revolution, rather than yet another series of incremental changes, that must be made in order to remedy what might become a society of extraordinary dislocation.  Some minority pundits raise the question about Americans' fears of socialism.  They wonder why those people do not see the dangers of financial and corporate welfare.  The Tea Party people seem to think that their ideas will restore basic freedoms, yet they don't protest the usurpation of freedoms that go on in their lives every day they spend more money on food, transportation, utilities, mortgages, interest rates and so on.  They accept the exploitation that goes on around them, even while they claim that they want to avoid the exploitation of so-called socialism.  They accept the radicalism of the Big Banks and Big Pharma but fear the radicalism of revolution.  One wonders what side they would have been on after 1775.  Oh yes, the colonies were full of people like them, not the least were the farmers and small merchants.  They were called Tories.

I'll end this on the despondent note that for all the reasons cited I'm fairly certain that the Sanders revolution will not be realized.  Americans are mostly unrepentant gamblers.  And they fervently believe that is the birthright that underpins the fundamentalism of their secular religion.  The person whose face is on the $10 bill knew this better than any of the others haggling in 18th century Philadelphia.  A close associate, Ben Franklin, drew a persona out of it.  That's who Americans are and want to remain...apparently.

This Way To The Egress

I keep wondering what Donald Trump's big attraction is.  An obvious part is his vocabulary.  He repeats favorite words and phrases.  "Fantastic.  Great.  Incredible.  Awesome.  Smash.  Amazing.  Tremendous.  Beat.  Unbelievable.  Terrific.  I wanna tell you.  Gonna [fill in blank].  Something very special.  Like you wouldn't believe."  This is puff language, the language of the huckster, booster and carnival barker...how Trump closes the deal.  It's cotton candy language: very sweet but mostly air.

You don't need to be terribly intelligent to be a huckster and booster.  But you do need to know how to work a con, to know your audience and to keep your audience's focus on the beneficence of the deal.  You need to place dramatic and familiar images in your messages, words about walls, invasions, weaklings, whores and rapists.  You need to speak of the easiness and quickness of assurance and satisfaction, emphasizing the audience's plight or need.  And repetition is the mode.

Trump is working a very well established American tradition that's been with us since Capt. John Smith lured impoverished and victimized Europeans to settle North America, since Horace Greeley boosted the settlement of the West by prompting recent young immigrants and down-and-out tenement dwellers to move to the promise of Manifest Destiny, providing the railroads with homesteaders.  And, finally, perhaps the greatest huckster/booster of them all, P.T. Barnum, the original ring master, who proved you can count on needy suckers being born every minute.

Barnum provided major attractions for his new Americans—opportunities to experience the excitement of the newness and the thrilling entertainment of The Circus, a state of mind as well as the thing itself.  He opened his American Museum in 1842 in lower Manhattan and stuffed it with unimaginables, like "dioramas, panoramas, 'cosmoramas,' scientific instruments, modern appliances, a flea circus, a loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus’ disciples sat...Ned the learned seal, the Feejee Mermaid (a mummified monkey’s torso with a fish’s tail)...Chang and Eng the Siamese twins" and other such wonders. (Wikipedia, Barnum's American Museum)

They were all the wonder of the unknown.  They perfectly represent the tradition Trump is working these days.  His vocabulary screams of grandeur, the wide can-do, inclusive spectrum of making America great again—exactly, again, the way it was in the heady days of the mid- and late-1800s.  No vision could be farther from what American life confronts every minute of every day in this 21st century.  The whole thing is the thrill, excitement and warm feeling of nostalgia—it is the promise of The Circus, its side shows, daredevils and exotic wonders.  And like The Circus it leaves the emptiness after the show is over, the void that is the essence of cotton candy.  Pundits keep wondering why so many people keep showing up at Trump rallies and town halls.  The "supporters" keep coming because they want to experience the spectacle again, to be filled with the wonder of grandeur, the uplift of empty language and stagey gestures.  They want Trump's "reality" TV spectacle to replace the actuality of their  lives.

At the American Museum's peak of popularity, it attracted "as many as 15,000 visitors a day.  Some 38 million customers paid the 25 cents admission to attend the museum between 1841 and 1865. The total population of the United States in 1860 was under 32 million."(cf. Wikipedia)  Barnum eventually had to find a way to keep people moving to the next exhibit.  He decided to post a sign toward the end, promising "This way to the egress!"  He knew most of his customers would think it would lead them to the next wonder.  In fact, it led to a doorway, which opened on the clutter, noise and manure of lower Broadway.

Trump continues to bark about the numbers he attracts.  And he likewise has devised a plan to keep them moving, promising the next wonder, while knowing that he has no idea what will be on the other side of the doorway that opens to the actuality the numbers will need to face.   Caring only about the  gross numbers, Trump will continue triggering the thrills until the numbers dwindle at which time he will move on to another show, another deal.  

Welcome

I'm Roger Conway.  If you ever landed on a place called "Roger Conway's New Monastic Individuals," I'm the same person.  Including that blog, this will be my fourth blog—the first was "Fuel For Thought," then came NMI, then came "Cyberspace Glass House," and now this.

I'm an old guy who has learned, since I wrote so feverishly on those other sites, to restrain myself until I had something more orderly to write.  Or perhaps to write more orderly.  I closed down NMI after posting some 700+ observations and diatribes, because I felt I really didn't think I could comment anymore on what was happening and, more to the point, not happening in American society and culture.  I suppose the effort had also begun feeling more compulsory and less necessary.  I still feel that way...mostly.  But at times, I see things and hear things that I just need to comment on—they're either flagrantly banal, flagrantly inane, flagrantly dangerous and/or just flagrant.  Mostly, I guess, I just can't understand the kinds of things that capture the attention of millions of Americans.  Why are they curious about the Kardashians?  Why do they prefer screaming singers instead of mellifluous singers?  Why do they prefer power walking listening to headphones and shutting out nature rather than strolling to the sounds of nature?  Stuff like that.

For example, currently the 24/7 media circus seems befuddled by the swings taking place in the polling data in the "race" for the presidency.  I have a simple answer:  None of the candidates exemplifies presidentiality—sorry, that's another thing I do; when I can't come up with a precise word to communicate my thought, I create a word for it, usually some sort of clumsy neologism.  In any case, this is the kind of thing that gets me started.  My hope is that my broadcasting it might tweak some surfer out there into thinking about it, agreeing or disagreeing and floating that response through one of the various "social" media—the quotation marks indicating my feeling about the phrase "social media," namely that it does not socialize us but rather sorts us into comforting nodes of mutual assent—which just might get other people thinking.

That's really my purpose.  Just to get us thinking again.  Having spent my professional life trying to get people to want to learn to communicate, I've always held that writing and speaking should have the purpose of communication, not the purpose of self-expression.  Self-expression is what one does by going into the woods and shouting into the wind.  So-called creative writing, by the way, is also not self-expression if done sincerely.

So let's have a go at this thinking and see what happens.  At the very least, it will keep me aware of language, which has always amazed me.