In 2019 Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, severely discombobulated the right wing media-sphere by laying out a case that the well-known (and oft-parodied) Hallmark Channel and its shows and movies are, in reality, “insidious authoritarian propaganda.” Her main point was that these saccharine, formulaic vignettes (of which most of us are familiar by now) that have so captivated a large swath of the American public were actually promoting a hetero-Christian worldview, that their story-lines reinforced right-wing media tropes vilifying the “cosmopolitan” qualities of American urban centers, and that their absence of anything but token diversity played into a fascistic view of an imaginary, idyllic American culture.
At the time I, like many of those exposed on a fairly routine basis to these things, viewed her misgivings with some wry amusement while appreciating some of the points she raised. Right-wingers, however, were less charitable, and many of their rejoinders were typically ad hominem based, suggesting it was Marcotte, and not the Hallmark channel, that was the problem. Marcotte’s thesis, in fact, gave conservatives everywhere a chance to preen and beat their chests, ostentatiously displaying their conservative bona fides, while implicitly attacking such criticisms at best as extremist, “woke,” “politically correct”, and at worse, implicitly unpatriotic and unAmerican.
That was about a month before the COVID-19 pandemic set in, rendering such high-minded debates about media and entertainment trends somewhat moot as Americans hunkered down in isolation for nearly two years, and a Democratic administration took over. The scrutiny of our national media and its influence was largely relegated to the provinces of discrete intellectual parlors with little consideration afforded to its influence. And Hallmark channel, to its credit, did expand its scope to some degree, occasionally reflecting more diverse characters, even if those characters were depicted as adhering to traditional, uncontroversial roles within Hallmark’s fairly rigid (but quite successful) formula.
But we are living, suddenly, in a different time, and that new context suddenly --and jarringly --matters. The prospect of real — not fictional, not hypothetical — fascism and institutionalized violence is now suddenly thrust fully and inexorably upon us. Fully half of the American electorate has deliberately chosen it, many doubtlessly without realizing exactly what they were doing, let alone all of the subtleties that got us to this place.
There’s nothing wrong with escapist fantasy, and Hallmark Channel is certainly not the sole culprit here. When escapist, feel-good fantasy encroaches on our collective reality, however, that becomes a problem. When we start to ignore the reality in favor of the fantasy, that is the hallmark — no pun intended — of a democratic society suffering a severe and potentially fatal sickness. Our reality becomes deadened, nullified by degrees, replaced by fake paeans to a world that for all intents and purposes does not exist for millions of Americans, and never actually existed at all.
In her 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen writes:
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
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... One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in history—it’s just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
We are now living in a country whose rulers have made it completely clear they intend to impose a Christianized, militaristic, white supremacist dogma upon the American population, simply because they can, no matter what the rest of us may think or believe. They will use our sources of entertainment to promote their zealotry, whether it be through idealized depictions of our military and law enforcement or the glorification of sports and consumerism. Through constant repetition they will attempt to numb us into complacency, because a complacent public is a docile public, and they depend on that docility to achieve their goals.
As Marcotte wrote in 2019:
When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl's films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality."
As the next thirty-odd days quickly elapse, we forget the socially mandated bonhomie of the holidays, and the reality of what this country is going to experience comes more and more into focus, many are going to seek respite in the familiar and the comforting, continually fed to us by a media solely pre-occupied with filling its own coffers. Americans will turn to their binge-streaming cable channels, their Monday — and Thursday, and Sunday — night football and sports coverage, as the house down the street or in the next neighborhood is ransacked by ICE agents operating under color of secretive court orders; as protests are deterred by impressive displays of military force; as women, racial minorities and trans people are continually harassed and as religious zealots use their newfound power to intimidate our educational institutions and workplaces into submission. Half — or more -- of the population will be fine with that, or too ignorant or disinformed to perceive what has happened.
All of this will be occurring without any legitimate reason, rationale or sense behind it, to serve the purposes of a tiny minority of Americans who see the looting opportunity of a lifetime before them, and who simply want the rest of the population distracted from their looting. So, they’ll be spinning away, pushing any buttons they can to lull the population into complacency while they do their dirty work. They have all three branches of government and a (largely) supine media at their disposal to do this.
Do not be taken in.
