I got back from a little pre-holiday visit to Seattle and found three documentaries from Netflix in my mailbox. They were all very good, especially “Helvetica,” the one about the font Helvetica, which hasn’t anything to do with politics, so we’ll skip that here. Anyway, the other two were “Manufacturing Dissent” by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine and “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” by Kirby Dick.
Taken together, “Manufacturing” and “Rated” present a deeply unnerving portrait of American popular culture and American political culture. Because, in a media-saturated republic, what is politics than just another form of celebrity? Our elections are more about who Americans want to have a beer with and what church it’s perceived the candidates attend than any sort of serious, real-world concern. Many differences between Red and Blue, GOP and Democratic are really more cultural than political, after all. Which is a legitimate and deep split, but let’s not confuse that with being serious-minded citizens.
I maintain that the pro-torture crowd is deeply out-of-touch with reality and history. How else can it be explained that these self-aggrandizing defenders of America have so little idea about America? They have spent too much time with Kiefer Sutherland and too little with Montesquieu. To wit, there is no political thought behind the American right, there is only pop culture. Torture works in movies, so it must work in reality. No liberal school of thought would allow them to think what they think and still be democrats (notice the little L and little D). No, they are beyond that; they have grown up and out, like so much ether. Alas, the legitimacy to modern conservatism is fiction because, well, the ideas behind it are rooted in fiction. Specifically “Die Hard.” It is not philosophy, it’s a screenplay with a very horrible ending.
Not that us on the left are much better; indeed, much of the time we express envy at how forcefully passionate the right wing can be over nothing. Watching the clashes Michael Moore inspires in “Manufacturing” was tragic: people were thinking, but in a very reactionary, reptilian, brain-stemmy kind of way, that is, they were not thinking at all, but playing a game, a reality show with 300 million in its cast, all tears and betrayal. Our polarization is real but superficial. It’s an accessory. It’s like a big, important version of debating which New Kid on the Block you’re totally going to marry someday.
While mine is a dim view of the American people, it’s also a fairly accurate one and maybe being harsh on my fellow citizens isn’t so much I-hate-freedom as it is just a profound disappointment in what we’re able to squander at light speed. Which is, um, a lot. Uncontested superpowers have never been very good at discipline, I suppose.
Anyway, I came to be very depressed after the 196 minutes of those two documentaries. Our country’s politics and media and corporations have all been kind of combined into some sort of über-goo that permeates our culture and is so pervasive that we can’t even move. Kirby Dick, for example, brings up the idea—and then proves it beyond a reasonable doubt—that a handful of companies control 90% of all media and that the Motion Picture Association of America is an unelected force that controls Hollywood, always erring on the side that the most pandering, hucksterish, nannyish, hamfisted sort of decision on a film’s rating is the best decision to make. Because that’s inevitably the decision that makes cash. Because fuck honesty. I mean, I suppose I know all of this intellectually—we all do. But there’s something incredibly disquieting about being reminded of it, especially when there is research and figures to go along with it.
Which is part of the problem: Americans are no longer interested in protecting democracy or the republic and we don’t think it is being eroded because it “can’t” be, no matter how much evidence mounts to the contrary. I can’t really find another interpretation except that we’ve become incredibly lazy and unlike, say, Teddy Roosevelt, we’d rather have cheap plastic imports from China than worry about corporations completely undermining the rule of the people. There’s a certain exquisite sin to this behavior, I think.
As of this moment, we’re very unworthy of our history.
The genius was that we had a government that drew its legitimacy not from God (cf. Divine Right) but from the consent of the governed. But there is no such thing as a corporation running its business with the consent of its workers. No, that doesn’t really happen, not even in forced collectives.
But what made me really queasy was this:
“If there were a vibrant left in the United States, Michael Moore’s milquetoast radicalism would be laughed at rather than laughed with.” —David Marsh of Rock ‘n’ Roll Confidential
Yes. Anyway, all I really wanted to do was talk to Natascha about all this; I don’t actually have a point. But she’s visiting her mom in Germany. And seriously, how stupid is it that she carries the passports of three countries but doesn’t have a triband phone so I can call her when she’s out of town? God! So dumb! Bitch, get with the 21st century.
