Guns as Entertainment; NRA as Postmodernist Death Cult

Because we are a nation based in fantasy. Much that is in the fantasy is a great, good thing in the world: equality under the law, for example (albeit almost fatally betrayed by slavery, and institutionalized racism for 100 years thereafter); the “Sermon on the Mount” Christian vision of Winthrop (routinely, almost idiomatically betrayed by far too may Republican officeholders today). These were ideals, most of them germinated in a skeptical-minded Enlightenment (not that skepticism hasn’t become the entire worldview of too many hardcore liberals now). But still. In the omnipresent mediascape, it’s the fantasy of your choice now. Build a bunker in Alabama, where Postmanisms are located, then kidnap a child from a schoolbus and take him down there? So we can viscerally feel your depthless paranoia while respecting your right to own lethal weapons, a law-abiding gun owner right up until the moment you shot the bus driver dead? Amy Bishop, too, was a law-abiding gun-owner, until, at the end of a department meeting, she whipped it out and killed several of her colleagues, in Alabama, at a research university. The line is so thin, LaPierre. And the end of that bunker story (which we’ve already forgotten, right?) is the natural end of all bunker mentalities.

There are no doubt many sane gun owners like a friend of mine who needs them to defend against an occasional drunken, hostile neighbor, or to stop feral dogs from killing his baby lambs (and his wife makes a fine lamb stew). But the vast majority of gun owners own guns to entertain themselves, we contend. Some of these entertainment-gunners just like to shoot at stuff, at a range or on their own property (knock yourselves out, guys’n’dolls). Some like to run around in paramilitary gear and pretend they’re fighting off a fantasy government that has the will+resources to come try to take 300 million guns away from them (guys, really—we can’t even keep the Post Office solvent). Some build bunkers and hijack school buses, or shoot up movie theaters or grade schools. Could it possibly be as simple as this: Either the world you live in is real, and requires real compromises, while discouraging mental scenarios that have exactly 0% chance of occurring; or the world is whatever is in your head, and every wretched excess is justified by the mere mentality that you’ve staked your existence on?

If the preceding is even partly true, then the NRA, as currently configured, is a nascent death cult, as surely as the Islamic extremists they so fear really are. (“Mon frère! Mon sembable!”) Maybe the NRA hasn’t actually advocated for consumers to be able to buy “cyanide-tipped armor-piercing bullets” (that’s a Simpsons joke), but when they advocate for all teachers to be locked and loaded and ready for a firefight in a building full of students AT ALL TIMES (recall, for the nonce, that Postmanisms are teachers), they seem to be advancing the view that 24/7/365, paranoid, hair-trigger “vigilance” is the only way a good society should function. And don’t start with your movies and video games yadda yadda–the fantasy media that produces an apocalyptic bunker mentality is on the InterWeb and talk radio, in fundamentalist churches, and to a lesser extent, underlies the merely self-serving commercial enterprise of Fox News.

Yeah, we saw that film from the PSA about what to do if some previously law-abiding citizen came onto our campus and started unloading on us and our students, and you know what it made us think? That if we had that kind of crap at the front of our cerebelli every second of the day, we might build a bunker too.

“Wish in One Hand, Poop in the Other…”: What the Late Election Season Says About the Age of Total Noise

Here are five headlines, four from pundits of The Washington Post, one a “news analysis” item from NBC: 

“Will: Obama’s empty noise”

“Rubin: Obama escapes scrutiny on Libya”

“Gerson: Obama’s historic negativity”

“Parker: The un-callable election”

“Democrats face very steep climb to 25 House seats they need”

Of course, we at Postmanisms are being blatantly biased with our pundits-of-choice, each one being a bona-fide rightie (and we’ve left out Krauthammer!): Good-humored Parker, “old man” Will, former W. spokesmodel Gerson, and the execrable Jennifer Rubin (less pleasant for the length of a single column than listening to Laura Ingraham for an hour). The reason for our bias, however, is not simply a reflection of our political sympathies: the same analysis could have been done on Democratic-leaning pundits near the end of 2010, or for that matter, at the end of 1988, when the general noise-level on TV made a few of us think Dukakis still had a hope in hell.

What these headlines have in common is an almost deistic faith by the ardent supporters of one party that their wishes can come true if only they’re expressed fervently in public: “Go, team, go! We know you’re behind 35-7 in the fourth, but you’ve got SPIRIT! S-P-I-R-I-T!!” Will calling Obama’s closing arguments “empty noise,” after his own party’s candidate spent the last month shredding every position he’d staked out over the previous year, then topping it off with blatant lies in ads with his name on them, is mere bluff. Rubin channels Fox News’ fervent desire that a tragic (and probably problematic—who knows?) event in a Middle Eastern nation that 99% of Americans could not find on a map be magnified into an emblem of 9/11-size failure-to-prepare is just more rank nonsense. Gerson, though capable of being thoughtful, bears the terrible news that exactly everyone knew a year ago, that in a rough political environment where margins were thin, this race was primarily going to be about winning ugly; one only had to watch a couple of his own party’s primary debates to gauge how negative. Parker has not been reading (or taking to heart) Nate Silver, who himself acknowledges that Friday’s 80.9% is only a probability, albeit one worth a small wager. Collectively, these are wishes that seek to reify themselves simply by being written/published. In an age infinitely noisier than 1988, you’d think a little more circumspection would be in order. (Then again, we are not paid to make a certain sub-demographic of readers feel good every time we poke our heads above ground. We ourselves are not “totally confident” about the outcome on Tuesday, nor after an agonizing week of possible recounts in Ohio—though thankfully, nothing depends on Florida this time. We’re merely hopeful.)

The NBC header is a different kind of beast, in a class with recent ones in places like Slate that idly ponder “what ifs” about a hypothetical Romney administration’s policies. (Admittedly, the candidate has made it exceptionally hard to discern, not what he’d like to do in Fantasy Whitehouse, where he barks CEOish orders at Congress and they do what he says, but what the rational businessman might probabilistically think he could actually achieve.) It isn’t a “steep climb” because no one—go find your anonymous blogger to try and prove us wrong—to our knowledge has suggested the Democrats had a real shot at regaining the House this year. The superfluous “they need” (= “to take back the House”) is a completely spurious premise, unless one is doing a reverse-Fox and trying to wish into existence some Democratic wave/landslide which, people, just ain’t gonna happen, and that prediction has a gold-plated lock on it.

Silver makes the point, in his magnificent, good-humored “The Signal and The Noise,” that more information often leads to WORSE predictions, topping that with hard data which shows that the more a pundit appears on TV, the LESS accurate their predictions tend to be (think: ideological intransigence, getting paid to voice your fans’ opinions on TV, mere hubris). If anyone out there really believes that the Information Age is not busy producing more mythology than all of ancient religion and literature combined, Postmanisms wants to play a game of idea-poker with you.

Who’s your Oracle?

 

Culture of Contempt (Old People Edition), or “Who’s the Douche?”

Admittedly, this one’s well at the margins of anything one might call the mainstream, but something about its cancerous vibe struck a chord for us. (cf. our earlier entries on Family Guy) Turns out that a novelist who was last popular some twenty-odd years ago was reading the new biography of David Foster Wallace, another writer who came of age in that generation. Apparently, novelist Brett Easton Ellis felt the bio to be a locus of all he despised about the now-deceased Wallace, his work, and his readers. Being a modern guy, he also felt he couldn’t contain his loathing to a mere think-piece for Newsweek, but had to broadcast it over one of our hip, happening social networks, Twitter. (How about an all-rant site called Farter, where posts are called Poots?)

A taste: “OMG is the solemnity of the David Foster Wallace myth on a purely literary level borderline sickening…”; “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation…”; “Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon…”; “I find the halo of sentimentality surrounding him embarrassing.” Quite enough, thanks.

First, we’d like to point out that words like “overrated” (a word you often hear chanted at sporting events) and “pretentious” have dogged Wallace’s work since the time Ellis was outselling him ten to one, and that what they come down to is crotchets of taste. One likes the Ramones, the other likes King Crimson, and amazingly some people can actually make room for both in their pantheon, depending on how the mood strikes. But one can never win an argument about taste. A friend of ours will drink no fizzy soda but Diet Coke, is not fooled by substitutes, and will not be dissuaded by her friends on a long cross-country car trip. (Coke Zero really is awful, though.)

We, of course, are avid readers of Wallace, and if you need an excuse to quit reading us, click away (for years now we’ve been reading what horrible humans we are, what limited intellects we have, for appreciating the work of DFW). Yet we are not blind adherents who can’t recognize the variance in quality between, or even within, his works, and we’ve never thought to tell anyone who didn’t “get” Wallace that they were blind or stupid. We do sometimes feel like Professor Frink, when he’s demonstrating atomic properties to third-graders with one of those toy ball-rolling machines; he won’t let Ralph play with it because, “I’m enjoying it on so many more levels than you.” We’re also pretty sure that if an Ellis work has ever had more than two levels, we missed them.

The sad thing, though, is Ellis’ need to attack “the myth,” which no artist from Shakespeare to Led Zeppelin should ever be held responsible for. Especially in our media age, these memes or “infotainment orbs” generate themselves whether the artist participates or not; as Neal Gabler notes in Life: The Movie, even trying to be off the myth-making grid (Pynchon) only makes you ‘the author who is never seen, except with a bag over his head on The Simpsons. But Ellis then has to go that extra mile (why else would he have gotten noticed by a Salon writer and been able to send his contempt all the way down to mere Postmanisms?), and assert, in that Zeus-like tone that characterizes so much communication on the InterWeb, that anyone who thinks Wallace was great is a) a douche (frat-boy as literati), and b) a fool (meaning he or she is dumber—has worse taste/doesn’t live in New York/has to actually buy books—than Brett Easton Ellis).

It simply isn’t enough to have enemies and hate them; one must despise everyone who may have been reached, in what those readers consider to be a profound way, via a work of art. It’s our belief that the new intensity of this felt compulsion to verbally destroy, and to do so instantly, thoughtlessly, and with no desire except to provoke a response (Here we are!), is merely an aftereffect of our disembodied digital landscape. One has to talk as loudly and vilely as possible now in order to be heard over the howling wind of a billion cells, souls, dogs barking.

We wish to thank Prachi Gupta of Salon for following Ellis’ bile with a sort of ghost answer, from which we have stolen this: “Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development … Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” (DFW, from an interview with Larry McCaffrey)

Hard to think of less douchey words spoken in the last twenty-odd years.

Quotes sourced from Prachi Gupta of Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/06/bret_easton_ellis_hates_david_foster_wallace/

How Learning Does Not Work: Self-Ed vs. Human Nature on CBS This Morning

Yes, it’s summer again, time to bask in the glow of largely inane morning television, but our subject is not the weird tension on CBS This Morning between Charlie Rose’s earnest attempts to add depth to this moribund format and Gayle King’s equal and opposite desire to pull things back toward happy, chatty trivia as if she’s auditioning to replace Kathie Lee over at Today. No, what we’re addressing is an illuminating, completely serendipitous juxtaposition between two views of the world with regard to education that happened on 6/13/12.

First up: “Six years ago, Sal Khan created Khan Academy, an online school that now has more than 2,300 educational videos in 12 languages—all completely free.” His “academy” is just a collection of videos on the Internet, “all free,” as if we haven’t heard of YouTube. Charlie asks the dapper Mr. Khan why it is “people” want to go online and learn new things “with you.” “They feel like I’m sitting there at the kitchen table, very conversational, off the cuff,” sayeth Mr. Khan. “When you learn something, it’s a very stressful experience and I think people have under-emphasized how important tone is, and not being condescending and being conversational.” Ok, learning is stressful, and that’s bad, right Mr. K.? Yet how can it be other than stressful to learn a new skill, Algebra, say, or a foreign language? It is precisely the avoidance of this kind of stress that the average young person seeks to avoid by writing answers on their palm (or, now, their smartphone, which can solve translation problems stress-free!) And all the pleasant, casual “tone” in the world will not make it go away. Learning is work, precisely the thing our entertainment-oriented culture does not train young people to want to do. Charlie follows: “But it says something about the curiosity of people to know more, to improve themselves.” Khan: “For all people, the biggest high they can have is to learn something.” So education should be a stress-free “high”? Khan: “When you see kids who are disengaged in math class or science class, it’s just because they’re frustrated . . . and feel like something’s going over them.” So if we just make kids “comfortable,” and somehow get them “excited” about learning, they’d jump right in and apply themselves?

Gayle follows with celebrity-type questions for Mr. K.: How many people come up to him to say they saw him on 60 Minutes? How does he “feel” about people “signing up” for his website. (Famous, we guess. “Viral,” even?) Content of interview ended.

But who exactly are these young, goal-having little adults he, and even Charlie, are talking about? Like Bill Gates, Mr. K. assumes that “people” (there’s a generalization for you) are “naturally” interested in “learning.” As teachers of college classes for some 20 years, Postmanisms can assure you that they are far from the majority at any school.

A related but unmentioned subtext: Gayle’s intro. began by quoting Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” and followed with, “How ‘bout no more teachers, period?” Exactly what our ever-more Walmart / efficiency / profit-centered educational system may want. Why have teachers at all? Why do kids need the experience of discipline and socialization that attending classes away from one’s kitchen table requires? Why not just podcast your teaching staff’s lectures, send the kids home, and give the teachers a penny-per-view for their experience and expertise?

Immediately following this blather was former MTV Loveline jokester Adam Carolla, promoting his new comic-memoir. Surely without intending to, he precisely rebuts Mr. Khan by saying of H.S., “I didn’t have an idea; I didn’t have a goal . . . High school is set up for people who want to go to college. For those who aren’t going to college . . . the other 80% of us . . . there was a shovel or a carpet-cleaning wand.” He’s referring to his earliest jobs, but he’s right on target about the lack of forward thinking in the vast majority of young people, as true in our time time as it must be now. One of us, at that age, was “interested” in absolutely nothing but Star Wars and recording pop music off the radio, yet somehow these things never turned up on exams in his English or Physics classes. And today, we can guarantee young people that most of the bosses they are likely to work under are going to be interested only in what skills they have, not how quickly they can find someone else’s answer to a question on their smartphones.

Interestingly, Carolla also mentions the mindset of being poor, of seeing all the luxe-life presented on TV and thinking to oneself, “Well, that’s not for me.” Here, he hits on a second inherent problem in our increasingly stratified economy. How can a young person possibly be made to believe that Algebra, or literature, or a foreign language will help them in some faraway future, weighed against short-term pleasure-seeking? Long-term values like learning and self-improvement are neither “natural” nor “easy,” Mr. K.

Solipsism as Protest: OWS Impressive as Guinness-Record Flash-Mob

As avid readers of Matt Taibbi’s caustic, detailed rundowns of Wall Street criminality (ethical whoremongering? Darwinian robberbaroning?) in Rolling Stone, we can hardly be credibly accused of either financial neo-con sympathies or arrant cynicism when we suggest that “the Occupy movement” is one of the most curious phenomena in our ongoing political malaise. FOXies can’t help themselves as they play the old “here come the dirty hippies again” meme, but 60s protesters at least had a short, sharp answer when someone took the mic and said “What do you want?” (“Freedom!”, or “Stop the war!”)

From the beginning, we expected little from a movement whose randomly chosen (by gawking TV news reporters) spokespeople would turn up on the news saying they were, in fact, rather pleased that they had no leaders and no set agenda. Seemed a bit like an “I Hate Jar-Jar Binks” website: a valid sentiment unlikely to stanch the flow of cash into the Lucas Empire (though it did achieve the reduction of the character to one very funny reaction shot in volume V, or whatever). Oddly, as the movement grew, not a single slogan has risen to join the meme-pile, not even the simplest “Congress Invalidate the Supreme Court’s Designation of Corporations as People, Now!” (Try getting a crowd to yell that one.)

But when we use the word “solipsism,” we’re not referring to the garden-variety hobby-horse of your average conspiracy theorist, a semi-factual/semi-delusional belief or narrative which fails to bend to any contradicting evidence. Our financial system, a faith-based confidence game in which Goldman and Citi are God, has, in its infinite hubris and self-interest, indeed wrought world-historical calamity. It sucks, and we don’t like it too! Feel better? No, what we mean to suggest is the category error that is semi-mass protest in service of no achievable goal. Fatuous comparisons to the Arab Spring revolts hold no water, as there is no target that will be brought down like Gaddafi, unless the protesters mobilize people to vote for candidates like Elizabeth Warren in upcoming elections who actually intend to try to curb the outsize power of the investment-“banking” sector. (Bankers used to be people who earned modest, steady returns for their customers by not betting 30-to-1 shots in markets they’d legally rigged to go bust.) And since most of that sector is wired into a transglobal system which will not, now or ever, come under the purview of some World Court of Superfraud, but will continue to play nation-against-nation for maximum returns for itself, the aim of a protest against it essentially translates into a mass feelgood (feelbetterforawhile?) moment for participants and beleaguered viewers of them on television. Its evanescence is the essence of the televisual world: the appearance of meaning (really, the venting of sentiment) as the world of hard facts and phony-MONY capital grinds relentlessly forward.

We’d propose a Jubilee movement (rather than a Fight Club-style violent disruption, which we still think is a possible mutation of OWS; we prefer listening to Radiohead), if we believed for a second that forgiveness of sins (here, self-destructive short-term-gain debt, though the same analysis would work for energy, water, sexual fulfillment—you name it; we’ve bought it) were even a concept in this age. As for consciousness-raising, see you at the ballot box (if the world hasn’t ended) in 2012.

Steve Jobs: Harbinger of the iPocalypse

It’s hard to quantify the media outpourings over the death of the Apple founder, precisely because so few people are interested in the difference between an inventor (say, whoever was first to digitize video images and sound) and a designer (um, Tommy Hilfiger?). This is not to dismiss his hegemonic status in shaping the delivery channels of the Interweb, or “Cloud” for those who are metaphysically inclined; the latter meme is nebulous enough that it might as well be the Netopian version of magic, or God, though presumably either of those belief systems had more in mind than porting “your” music and Tweets and status updates of various irrelevance to you 24/7/365. God, in most traditions, actually asks you to shut the hell up every now and then.

But the blatant hypocrisy that underlies the latest=greatest equation (is there any other message in technohype anymore? Surely no one is still pimping that “global village”…) is the most recent ad for the iPad, in which the somber tones of the announcer (over soft-piano “learning” music) accompany scenes of people learning stuff on their endlessly wonderful gizmos: drawing Chinese calligraphy, playing the piano, studying a 3-D human skeleton, looking up a word. The rote Postmanist analysis you already know: only people who already have the self-discipline and sense of purpose to learn use technology to learn. Bill Gates, in his techno-hype book (!) The Road Ahead (paleo-web 1997), adumbrated a similar fantasy when he wrote a whole chapter about the coming techno-teen, checking on their assignment first thing in the morning (“Mom! We’re out of Pop Tarts!”), doing last-minute editing of that essay while riding the schoolbus, checking the menu at the cafeteria (“Soy burgers again?”), scheduling a conference with a teacher. Surely Gates knew that only people like him ever came near that standard of small-adult purpose-driven-ness. Most teenagers in America were doing nothing on the web but playing DOOM and dashing off emails in 1997, and the 2% who were being productive came from families who, through tradition or brute terror, instilled in those kids the idea that “learning” was connected to good grades, which were connected to not shaming your family or even yourself by being a Butt-Head. He conveniently left out encrypted drug-deal IMs, porn, neo-Nazi websites, nascent file share-stealing, and porn.

But we have bigger fish to fry than “17 Ways of Wasting Time on Your iPad.” What concerns us is the way our technology comes increasingly to immerse us in our own personal iWorlds, where nothing is of interest that isn’t either a reflection of ME or of immediate interest to ME. This is the opposite of learning; learning does not flatter the learner when he doesn’t know who Dick Cheney is/was or what was the deal with that Knox chick, or how exactly did our global economy come to suck so bad that I might as well take out another $100,000 in loans and go to grad school? What concerns us is the mindscape that obliterates the actual, where there is increasingly no space in existence where one willingly puts iWorld on hold and pays attention to something other than themselves and their (apparently) endlessly fascinating, unique, special-snowflake lives.

While this development may have been inevitable, built into the very nature of the medium, what, pray tell, does it portend in terms of an end, a telos, a metaphysic, other than Narcissus’ bottomless viewing-well? Flash-mobs on Wall Street which will have zero impact on a Too Big to Fail Corporatocracy? The 2%ers deciding the fate of nations (and certain hominid species) while the rest of us steal to Tweet and launch pseudo-trends on YouTube? (Er, “planking”; “glamping”; “ant-snorting”—wait, that last one was just Ozzy.) Marx, with his old adage that religion was the opiate of the masses, could never have conceived of a blackout of this magnitude, nor one so willfully, enthusiastically engaged in. So that when Announcer says, “There’s never been a better time to learn,” the void at the heart of the question is all we see.

9/11: What Does America Remember?

“Here come the planes. They’re American planes.” –Laurie Anderson, “O Superman”

We do not have a single negative word for those who lived through that day and want to relate their experience to the public at this time. One of the Postmanisms staff was out of the country that day and he’s been told, repeatedly, that he couldn’t possibly understand what it was like that day and he wants to say, but doesn’t, that TV filled him in on the details. But when a television host asks the viewing public “What did we learn?” and follows with a sentimental tsunami of, say, ten-year-olds born to fathers who died on that day (“Look, we’ve got video of those babies. Call the mothers.”), we’d like to know what TV thinks it is “teaching” us. That life goes on? That children are still cute at ten? That the last thing America wants to think about is the hard, ugly lessons of that day, like the extent to which our political leaders at the time would exploit the event to consolidate their hold on power? Certainly, no one on the major networks seems to want to recall, say, the ads run in Georgia by Saxby Chambliss against Vietnam veteran and multiple amputee Senator Max Cleland in 2002, “linking” him by video image to Osama B.L. because Cleland voted against the bill forming George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Administration, though Cleland did so because it gutted union rights for federal workers? That Chambliss and many more of his ilk won? Then voted for tax cuts on the eve of a trillion-dollar war on Saddam Hussein, whom the Bush administration eventually had to admit had nothing to do with 9/11 (even as Fox News viewers, by a large margin, remained convinced that he did)?

Another way to misremember, or simply not to think: the “endless ads [for the “40-plus TV specials”] featuring terror porn of the planes striking the towers,” as Harry Siegel (in an article about how no politician in NY wants to deal with Ground Zero except on this one day) has it in the Village Voice. The kinder, gentler version of these shows (none of which Postmanisms chose to view—spare yourself: “Just don’t look!”) is the Budweiser ad I just saw run during an NFL game on Fox on this day. It would seem to be a version of the one shown “once only” during the 2002 Super Bowl (so the company would not be accused of exploiting a tragedy). It’s been repurposed (Will I only see it once? Once during each game?), with less of the Clydesdales leaving their fabled snowy Midwest and more of the Clydesdales clomping respectfully in slow motion over the Brooklyn Bridge (?) and through Central Park (all scenes as empty of humans as in I Am Legend) to bow respectfully to what? And this means what? Budweiser remembers (their ad)? Budweiser, the now-multinational-owned corporation, still cares? Beer can enhance your ability to cry at the televisual memory of a national tragedy? And don’t get us started on State Farm’s ad featuring children singing Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” (now, it seems, our new national anthem) to firefighters. Or Verizon’s, etc. Corporations care, they really really care. Curious to see just how much? Read Negri and Hardt’s Empire.

The media continued its unstated mission to dematerialize the world, to re-present it as an all-encompassing dreamscape (matrix?) in which everything is up for grabs, especially truth, especially memory, especially concerned with expunging any hard news about ourselves. The media’s sanitized, imminently consumable de- or il-lusion draws us like moth to flame. The flame itself, however, is evanescent, endlessly fascinating, and ultimately meaningless, unless it provokes self-reflection and –judgment.*

*This last is not really a shot at the George Wills of the world who still want to upbraid Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky for their views that America in some way “reaped what we’d sown” on that day, simply because the Moores and Chomskies had zero effect (like the internet’s “truthers”–remember, everything’s up for grabs) on our nation’s actual response to the event.