How America severed its own brake cables and plunged into The Grand Canyon
The legitimisation of stupidity
This would embrace the two Great American Myths; the laughable notion that anyone can rise above their circumstances to be president of the most powerful nation on earth and that the way to achieve happiness and prosperity is to allow individuals to enrich themselves beyond Croesus’ wildest dreams.
No-one is laughing now.
No matter how stupendously inept Donald Trump appeared to be, he still somehow managed to impress his core supporters. With this in mind, I watched an episode of Family Guy, a show which mysteriously manages to remain one of the most popular TV comedies in the USA, whilst constantly and unremittingly reminding its huddled, under-educated masses, (all of them raised on TV commercials, cheap processed food, reality television and the firm idea that everyone should carry a gun), that they are being sold a pup.
As I watched, what occurred to me was this; Is the Donald J Trump disaster-movie a big budget, wide-screen version of what we in 1970s Britain once called the Alf Garnett Syndrome?
Alf was a sitcom character who, for those of us too young to remember, was a cockney, racist, right wing, Tory-supporting bigot, who saw himself as a loyalist spokesman for the UK’s aspirational blue collar working classes. Portrayed brilliantly by Warren Mitchell, Garnett was a truly revolting (and very funny) character, aggressively spouting his awful opinions whilst his more liberal family disagreed profoundly with him. The sitcom, ‘Til Death us do Part written by the great Johnny Speight, was wildly popular – the only trouble was, it turned out that some of its more devoted followers, perhaps lacking the ironic discernment of the drama critic, enjoyed the show because they identified with and were as rabidly xenophobic as Alf himself.
Alarmingly, that same syndrome now appears to be gripping the post-truth, barely educated, armed to the teeth hordes of inner America. The chilling question is this: did those poor huddled masses re-elect, as 47th President of the United States of Vespucciland, Alf Garnett?
But the rot started a long time before Trump. Let’s take a look at the USA’s contribution to modern philosophy.
Selling culture like soap
England, declared Napoleon, is ‘a nation of shopkeepers” but as anyone who has spent longer than a holiday in our former colony will tell you, America is a nation of travelling salesmen. Reared to believe that the population is nothing more than a herd of chumps, marks and mugs, one of which is born every minute, the salesman’s mantra is the mantra of eternal growth and his myth the myth of everlasting progress. Buy cheap, sell dear. Promote your product as part of the entitled freedom laid out in the Great American Constitution; freedom from healthcare, freedom from social inclusion, freedom from personal responsibility or empathy, freedom to consume, waste and pollute, freedom to fritter hard-earned cash on frippery and shiny gewgaws, like their folk heroes Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley (a visitor to Graceland once famously remarked: “I never knew it was possible to spend so much money in Woolworths”).
Got to pick a pocket or two.
The constant repetition by politicians of what are essentially low-grade TV advertising slogans is something we Brits are getting pretty used to by now. But the technique, endemic across the Atlantic from the early 20th century up to the present, succeeded simply because the USA was a nation that embraced broadcasting from the outset – not for its ability to educate and inform, but for its retail possibilities.
The Nazis reached the same conclusion about the power of radio as they rose to power in the thirties, but rather than promoting refrigerators, washing powder and tobacco, the intimate new talking box persuaded the reparation-battered German populace that pollution of their racial superiority by alien interlopers was the genesis of all their woes, all from the comfort of their living rooms.
In a similar way, Trump’s naked ambition, combined with his reality-TV celebrity status and Las Vegas notion of style, made a connection with the nation’s poor and under educated, many of whom, in their TV-induced rapture still clung to the fable of the American dream, a dream as ephemeral as Hitler’s mythical vision of a Europe dominated by a Caucasian master race.
TV Time
The new medium of radio, from its birth in the 1920s was treated as an advertising medium, nothing more. The entertainment, or ‘talent’ (excellent though much of it was), was just an add-on, the sugar on the pill. When television came along, the ad-men of Madison Avenue quickly recognised that the new ‘radio with pictures’ was potentially the holy grail of retail and got to work. The burgeoning TV networks bought into that philosophy which soon trickled down to the fast-proliferating local TV stations. From Cadillacs Coke and Malboro to constipation cures, used cars and the naked promotion of evangelical fraud, they quickly realised that everyone was a potential sucker who under no circumstances should be given an even break.
Governing by algorithm
Of course racial and economic divisions had existed in American society since the Conquistadores. However, the invention of an interactive tool available to all – a kind of Super-TV which would give the user the illusion of free expression but could be exploited by its inventors (with terrifying personal accuracy) to the opposite effect- arrived to exaggerate those divisions.
Just like Radio and TV in the 20th century, the internet was a gift, manna from heaven for the cold, calculating smoke and mirrors men. A combination of sophisticated data-harvesting and number-crunching expertise created the most efficient propaganda tool ever, with the flattering illusion of public participation in the great important debates providing the perfect sucker-bait.
Perhaps, influenced by an old familiar medium which successfully reared so many generations to be obedient consumers, American citizens, ill-equipped for critical thought, were ripe for the new algorithm-based politics.
The whole world it seemed, was just waiting for someone like Donald Trump to come along and sell them some of his patent medicine.
News vs Opinion
In 1987, after Ronald Reagan’s abolition of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine* the cynically commercial television stations, (notably Fox News, owned by media megalomaniac Rupert Murdoch), reverted to broadcasting polarised opinion pieces rather than fact-based news. This decision hugely increased advertising revenue as viewers flocked to a slick echo chamber of mutual validation served up by glamorous Fox anchors. Predictably, the virtually unregulated local TV and radio channels followed suit, ushering in the era of the shockjock – a charmless, unexpurgated broadcaster of inflammatory bile and offensive stereotyping.
The right to die free
In the United States, this stream of misinformation has led to the adoption of a peculiar notion (certainly to Europeans): that universal access to affordable healthcare leads to the establishment of a socialist state – a Marxist-Leninist society where slavery replaces freedom, (or at least the exclusively American notion of freedom):
“I would rather die screaming in agony than lose my constitutional rights.” pleads the flag-waving dirt-poor caravan dweller. Those same rights include allowing people to openly carry a deadly weapon or to spew hatred without fear of censure under a constitution formulated under an entirely different set of social circumstances. Repeat after me children:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the repression for which it stands: one nation divisible, with poverty and injustice for all.
*The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced this in 1949. It required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced), The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.
The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been considered by some to be a contributing factor for the rising level of party polarization in the United States.
Collin Gibson