“Last night Howard Beale went on the
air and yelled bullshit for two minutes and I can tell you right now
that tonight's show will get a 30 share at least.” – Faye Dunaway
playing Diana Christensen, 1976
Over
the past few weeks, every one of the vaunted old giants of the
American journalistic world – you know them, the Atlantic and the
New Yorker, the Times and the WaPo, have been at something of a
crossroads since the national auto-pederasty of the 8th
of November. Their op-ed pages have been flooded with countless “how
could this happen?” articles, countless articles about the
“disconnect” with rural America (and how the fuck did it take
them that long to figure that one out?), countless earlier,
predictions from heretofore ignored Cassandras, countless articles
about the “white working class” (a term that, despite my beliefs
that the working class is larger in scope than we'd like to admit,
conveniently ignores the relative wealth of the average Trump voter,
despite the heavy dose of po' whites who gravitated towards his
message). For the past few weeks, these and the repostings of the
same have populated my impeccably azure-blue Facebook news feed.
These are paired
with the inevitable follow-up from the American literary and
political intelligentsia, the “what the fuck do we now?” message.
The common theme is the need for a new militancy among the Democratic
Party, that Bernie's clarion call should have been heeded, that the
American people are well and truly sick of a political system that
only favors Goldman Sachs et al, that if those desperates in the
American ass-nowhere are to be won over, they cannot be part of a
party that coddles the nation's fiscal elite.
And this is
probably the right approach. But what is forgotten is that there is a
part of the American populace – 20 percent at a bare minimum,
almost certainly more, whom I can safely deem to be absolute fucking
lost causes. These are the people whose gut instinct is the very
limit of their potential knowledge. These are the people who
pontificate about the looming threat of sharia law, having never met
a Muslim, who talk about the rise of socialism and Marxism on
American soil, despite their complete lack of understanding about
what socialism actually is, or having read any Marx, who live in
terror of illegal immigrants, while blithely ignoring any immigration
statistics. They have a certain skepticism towards establishment
media sources, which is fair, but really at the end are just as ovine – the sheep
who would simply rather follow the intellectually callow shepherds
representing their preferred “new media” rumormongers.
This
isn't a new phenomenon, and a number of international examples can be
illustrative. Analogies to Putin are frequent, and the Americans
living on the tattered fringe of the empire are often compared to the
Russians who seek authoritarian comfort as they live in the
crumbling, polluted industrial ruins of the Soviet era. But analogies
are everywhere. You could compare Trump to the Philippines' national
carnival barker, Rodrigo Duterte, to Turkey's Recep Erdogan, who
routinely courts Islamists while declaiming the “Islamist threat”
to hold power. And you could compare his followers to China's
fenqing, the
nationalistic and Internet-savvy “angry youth” who, like Trump's
deplorables, turned the slur against them into a badge of pride. Or
the vigilante mobs in Venezuela, defending Nicolas Maduro's crumbling
government. Or we could bring up Japan's netto-uyoku,
the annoyingly vocal Japanese troll army that refuses to acknowledge
their country's history of war crimes and fumes about supposed loss
of Japanese territorial and spiritual integrity, and compare them to
the alt-right of today – how different, really, is this Japanese
cartoon below different from the average American portrayal of the
meme-happy, misogynistic neckbeard?
What
ties all of these disparate ideologies together, despite their
supposed adherence to political ideologies ranging from the far-left
to the far-right is their blind rage towards a world they don't seem
to fully understand, to throw analysis and quiet reflection under the
bus in favor of the hoary values of nation and identity and power.
And so they find a populist vision in the media that, to use a
brilliant line from a certain old movie “articulates the popular
rage.” This impulse towards irrationality, to favor anecdote over
pattern, reaction over analysis, suspicion over assessment, is an
eternal cancer in the human condition, and, with enough fear, with
enough uncertainty, metastasizes to erstwhile healthy cells and
threatens the body as a whole.
It is
easy enough for America's so-called left to dismiss. After all,
Hillary supporters' confidence was based on its own assumptions, its
presumption that the experienced politician would win, its almost
religious faith in Nate Silver and Co's social media-friendly
electoral prediction map, its belief that America had truly become a
place where smart people made smart decisions and where the
prejudices of the past had safely been locked away in what was
assumed to be a culturally irrelevant flyover country. After all, all
their Facebook friends agreed.
The
ugliness is that we remain mired in a political landscape where
cultural markers have displaced policy, the content on your iPod
mattering more than economic strategy.
It's
in times like these that that aforementioned certain old movie,
Network, with its
absolutely virtuoso script by Paddy Chayefsky, gets brought up,
especially its most memorable line “I'm as mad as hell and I'm not
gonna take it anymore.” The plot is simple enough. Mid-mental
breakdown, an aging news anchor becomes propped up as an unhinged
“mad prophet of the airwaves,” vocalizing the internal malaise of
mid-1970s America, much to the delight of his corporate masters. It
has become touted by all manner of journalistic voices, ranging from
left-wingers who claim that Howard Beale is speaking truth in the era
of monopoly capitalism to right-wingers who claim that Howard Beale
is speaking truth in an era of godless globalists. And what they
forget, ultimately, is that his truth is ultimately marred by his
profound mental illness, his sickness that ultimately becomes an
organ of capital just as much as it is an individual voice. The
popular rage is ultimately shaped by and subordinate to media forces,
to the nihilistic drive towards capital.
People
forget Beale's last speech, where he notes that “it's the
individual that's finished.” Subsumed and eventually confronted,
Howard Beale resigns himself to his fate of living in a dehumanized
and corporatized society, before eventually being almost casually
executed by the board of directors. Chayefsky ends his script with a
voiceover. “This was the story of Howard Beale: the first known
instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”
We can
analyze all we want, and yet we are in the same place. We can take
note on appropriate strategy for the opposition in the era of Trump,
but forget how to adopt a political value system, as individuals
rather than as parties, that is strategic rather than authentic is
both a capitulation, and a weird sort of narcissism where we assume
that our individual voice is our camp's voice. I can do nothing about
the rage. I can sit here, and watch the American government suffer
under incompetent and narcissistic pseudo-leadership, and hope it
gets better, I can donate my income to causes I deem worthy. I can
offer up my opinions, to whatever end, but that's it.
And as
an American overseas, it's a bit like watching when an old school
friend, after years of dissolution and chaos, finally gets locked up
for a crime that they committed out of desperation and was busted for
thanks to their own stupidity.
