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 role. No, acting out: performing a fantasy in the middle of real life.
The frenetic response of the Satanic panic in the ‘80s was a form of immersion, this blending of reality with fantasy. Strangely enough, just as McLuhan intimated, it was the farthest extent of a technology—in this case, fundamentalist Christianity—flipped into the reverse of itself. One critic of Dungeons & Dragons, exclaiming plaintively to an interviewer, explained that the game played to emotion, put the player completely in another world, the realm of the imagination, and it was by doing this that it utterly captured the mind.
Winkie Pratney, author of Devil Take the Youngest, provided this insight to a fearful audience:
Pratney: Whatever gets their imagination gets their worship. Whatever gets their worship gets their hearts.
Voiceover: The media bombards kids today with messages, many with satanic overtones.
Pratney: Satan’s not stupid. He understands that kids today are visual, so he’s making a play for excitement, for total involvement of the senses.
(cue to 2:26)
This is the actual strategy of the GOP of today, 40+ years after absorbing the form and energy, the effects, of the fundamentalist movement: it offers everyday people a chance to don God’s armor, to go out into real schools, real supermarkets; tote one’s gun down one’s own stairway and blast shot through glass doors; and it does this by total immersion, a complete capture of the senses.
This could not be accomplished without a media arm, which the GOP so ably has; and it is complemented and complete by outcrops and stations in the field, mainly embodied in pastors themselves and in the buildings, the churches, that they man. It is an interconnected network where each arm reinforces each other by sounding and re-sounding the same themes and ideas within a short/brief space/time. They’re invisible threads that, sewn up, create the fabric of an entire subculture. Now they’re trying to export this subculture all over the United States. (See Seven Mountains dominionism, which explicitly teaches as a goal the capture of seven major domains of culture so as to subdue the whole thing.)
Witness Minnesota State Senator Eric Lucero who, though grounded and relatively sane when he joined the legislature in 2015, just this month introduced a bill into consideration where he updated Satanic panic for the 21st century:
Sin is real. SIN. S-I-N is real. Sin is evil. Sin can exist in any institution. And we need to work hard as the Minnesota Senate to protect our young, vulnerable children’s minds against these terrible, wicked, evil practices. And unfortunately, because all humans are subjected to potentially being corrupted by sin, we need to examine all institutions to prohibit such funds.
There are practices out there that seek to groom and corrupt the minds of young children, to engage in sexual perversion. And those wicked people manifest themselves in many different areas of our society. One of those areas that they have manifested themselves is in the areas of the arts, and I want to make sure that taxpayer dollars do not fall into the hands of these wicked, vile people that push sexual perversion, gender confusion, that might come to our capitol and in displays of abomination parade themselves around the rotunda.
And I do not want pictures, plays, theater, sculptures, or any other type of art to be used to channel the occult, to promote the occult or any of its variations: Satanism and the wicked, evil practice of grooming young children, such as pedophilia.
Take a look at what happened in Utah last year, where David Levitt (a Republican candidate who, according to the NBC News segment below, leaned somewhat more progressive), lost his election in part because he felt he had to address QAnon conspiracies involving Satan worship and the mutilation of children:
(cue to 1:38)
The thing is that now, because of the Internet, ferreting out Satan is now sort of a participatory misinformation quest. And so, a thing like Astroworld happens, and something terrible happens; and so it’s not just enough that something terrible happened. It’s that Satan is somehow involved in it. And people are seeing symbols and, somehow, signs, piecing together parts of social media.
Not to be outdone, Florida GOP House member Webster Barnaby just two weeks ago stated that transgender people are “demons” and “mutants”:
Barnaby: It’s like we have mutants living among us on planet Earth. ...
The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come to parade before us. That’s right: I called you demons and imps.
So this describes what apocalyptic Christianity is offering to its worshippers; and what the Culture War generals are offering to their would-be soldiers, their walk-on militia men and chatroom traitors. They are extending a chance for that ultimate improvisational role, an opportunity to star in one’s own life as an action star, a kinetic lead, in a way American life had always been promised to be like but had never lived up to its own billing.
Life becomes reality TV, in reverse. There’s no casting call, but everything is live-action and able to be turned into surreality, into a set. Violence is the quickest, easiest way to achieve this, but also the riskiest—it might truly end in a blaze of glory. Vigilantism is another way. Questing as a savior at the border is another. Any flesh-and-blood proselytism is a chance to take part, to ditch the social script and truly draw all eyes upon oneself.
The impulse, “wrong place” murders that we have been seeing may indeed be an extension of this conception, this worldview. These perpetrators may see themselves as the ultimate understudies taking on a main role, finally able to act on their deepest desires in an irretrievable way—in a way that can no longer be ignored.