Six
Flags Over Neo-Nuremberg:
Bush, Oprah, The San Diego Chicken,
And A Proto-Fascist
Panopticon Of The Mind
By Phil Rockstroh
06 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Many
believe fascism will come to the United States of America resembling
contrived spectacles such as The Super Bowl, The Academy Awards, and
American Idol, with the proceedings intercut with teary, yet ultimately
triumphant, Oprahesque tales of how redemption can be gained through
the renunciation of one’s rights, liberties, as well as, the dutiful
turning in of one’s subversive neighbors.
Don’t reach for that
remote, folks: It’s already here.
Our journey to fascism began
at the end of The Second World War when the tenets of the hyper-commercialized
entertainment/military/corporate state became sacrosanct by means of
our internalization of it from constant mass media reinforcement. What
purported to be only a message from our sponsors metastasized into the
twenty-four/seven, corporatized UberCulture of the present day. The
Revolution will not be televised – because The Corporatist Coup
is being continually broadcast.
Commercial advertising is
a form of political speech: A very potent one and its effects are far
from benign. By means of its cultural dominance, commercial advertising
is promulgated, to the point of total market saturation, without any
form of effective opposition; hence, by its very nature, it amounts
to corporatist propaganda and serves as a vehicle of mass indoctrination.
By way of a ceaseless bombardment
of advertising imagery, we exist in a nonstop, holographic, corporate
Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We need not participate in old
school, torch-lit processions of Brown Shirts through the streets: This
brand of all-media penetration proto-fascism has been internalized.
We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing malodorous about
our place of birth.
Carl Rove, Roger Ailes, et
al are not evil geniuses. Well, at least, they’re not geniuses.
They’re simply cocktail party-variety, confidence artists of the
electronic age. They're media professionals who understand the proto-fascistic
fantasies of the populace of the consumer state.
Hitler and Goebels grasped
what any advertising copywriter is taught early on: People can be manipulated,
if an appeal can be addressed to modern man’s yearning to break
free from the constraints of his existence as an economic animal ...
Whether it’s the promised dawning of The Thousand Year Reich or
the empty facsimile of freedom promised by the purchase of a new automobile,
both provide the feckless sucker with the illusion of shaking up the
old order; hence, the quotidian prison will collapse, allowing one’s
imprisoned longings to escape to freedom over the rubble. But first,
paradoxically, one must surrender their rational mind to the individuality-destroying
agendas of the state and/or corporation.
When people habitually surrender
their free will to the irrational dictates of a dominant order, an inner
anxiety results. Outwardly, one feigns strength, yet inwardly one is
ridden with doubts. To compensate, an individual will grow, over time,
more rigid, even totalitarian.
Enter George W. Bush, a man
affecting a massive measure of feigned toughness -- yet, at the same
time, riddled with such a high degree of concomitant inner doubts that
when he attempts to speak, his words trip and stagger over his lips
like drunken dwarves attempting to clear a high curb.
In temperament, Bush is as
vain and brutish as any tin-plated dictator. Worse, Bush, more closely
resembles an abusive pimp – tragically -- Lady Liberty’s.
Habitually slapping her around, accusing her of holding out on him,
and paranoid of betrayal, Bush, a preening caricature of Macho Narcissism,
like any run-of-the-dark-alley pimp claims to be her protector, as,
all the while, he abuses, exploits, and degrades her. Apropos, Bush’s
vast collection of outfits for every occasion should include a plum
purple pimp suit; accordingly, the presidential limo should be tricked
out to sport 1970’s style Cadillac El Dorado opera windows, a
two tone paint job, and be accessorized with plush, white fur-lined
upholstery.
It was the black magicians
of advertising who sold us George W. Bush. Bush was initially marketed
as a box of detergent (though he's dumb as a box of rocks) -- a cleansing,
Christian soap, to be used as directed to wash and scour the stain of
Satanic jism left on the fabric of American life by the sinful Bill
Clinton. Bush, a former drunk, now "cleaned-up," was ready
to lead America to a whiter-than-white future – plus provide round-the-clock
protection from the offensive odors emitted by the body politic.
But, after the eleventh of
September 2001, Bush was marketed as a Humvee. The biggest, most powerful
vehicle traveling the perilous roadways of a hostile world ... It's
O.K. kids; daddy's at the wheel ... just sit in the backseat and watch
your DVDs ... You're safe and protected: anybody or anything stupid
enough to get in our way will be crushed beneath us. Challenge us you
evildoers and you'll join the rest of the smoking wreckage and pulverized
road-kill in our wake.
Although -- after wildly
fluctuating gas prices and a series of deadly rollovers on the roadways
of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Post-Katrina Gulf coast -- the Hummer
presidency of George W. Bush is sputtering: the DVD player is running
an endless tape loop of Bush strutting, clad in a flight suit, while
Iraq burns and bleeds; in addition, the vehicle’s passengers are
carsick and road weary.
The fool’s gold standard
for this form of governance-by-marketing-subterfuge was set by former
soap and nuclear missile salesmen Ronald Reagan who was successfully
sold as a kind of grandfatherly Marlboro Man. Reagan, whose fantasy-prone
hagiographers still believe, by some cryptic act of telegenic alchemy,
brought down the Soviet Union – somehow -- by simply reading a
teleprompter. Later, Bill Clinton was a rock-a-billy cool Elvis who
fattened up the economy like it was binging on a round-the-clock, fried
peanut butter and banana sandwiches and chocolate cake diet.
At this point, hapless George
W. Bush, as was the case with his geeky, hyperthyroid father before
him, must be beginning to cause his corporate creators to drastically
up the dosages of their respective SSRI prescriptions, because, while
they intended to market Bush II as the heir apparent of the iconic,
cowboy Ron Reagan, it's clear he couldn't handle the responsibilities
of the San Diego Chicken.
Bush should serve out the
rest of his term wearing a chicken costume. Such an act would be emblematic
of the man, as well as our era: Bush as an emblem of the populace of
the United States -- a people who have lost their dignity, by way of
surrendering it to the corporatist order.
In a more literate age, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, limned characters
emblematic of his era. Yet the words he wrote in the 1920s still resonate
today as a powerful indictment of those who created and enable men like
Bush -- the corrupt corporatist classes of the present time:
"They were careless
people, Tom and Daisy -- They smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever
it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess
they had made ..." (Pg. 180-181)
Carelessness is the manner
by which extroverts manifest despair. Being a nation that considers
introspection a loser’s gambit, carelessness has been our national
mode d'être since the countries inception. Bush is only its latest
manifestation.
And the mess is piling up
by the hour. As was the case with Gatsby, beneath the carefully constructed
image and manic consumption of the UberCulture, the American empire
is doomed. Although, we, unlike Gatsby, for all our cunning artifices
and desperate subterfuge, are not flaming out and falling amid the glittering
debris of frenetic, jazz-imbrued bacchanals -- we have only managed
shopping spree debt, over-priced coffee jags, mcmansion-enclosed anomie
and porn habituation.
Gatsby remains an emblem
of the hollowness howling beneath the convivial veneer of capitalist
man. An updated version of the model is Oprah Winfrey.
Yes, I realize Gatsby is
a fictional character, imagined and realized by F. Scott Fitzgerald
within the context of a novel; Gatsby is a construct of the mind sent
out into the world to synergize with the imagination of the reader.
Yet the Oprah we hold in our mind’s eye is also an imagined character
-- a character wholly created by Oprah, fully imagined and realized
inside the media hologram.
Oprah is a corporate capitalist,
performance propagandist. Her rousing tales of personal redemption are
very useful to the plutocratic order of the present day; an elitist
order in which she's comfortably ensconced.
In a time when the besieged
laboring and middle classes would benefit from an honest exposé
detailing the ruling class machinations that belie their sense of powerlessness,
Oprah, instead, proffers twelve step-usurped platitudes, "Self
Help" bromides (suggested book club title: An Idiots Guide To Idiocy)
and shop-worn Horatio Alger doggerel, all refitted to the media age.
The Gospel of Oprah reeks
of faux redemption. Even when Oprah addresses a topic such as the wage
enslavement of minimum wage jobs, she avoids the obvious question of
who benefits from having this exploitive system in place. Such disingenuous
story telling is analogous to Charles Dickens penning "A Christmas
Story" sans Ebenezer Scrooge.
Oprah is a plutocratic enabler
disguised as the populist underdog who made good. She is a shill for
the status quo. She will never point a pampered finger towards the corrupt
ruling elitist of the corporate class -- because that finger would end
up pointing back at her.
The Uberculture’s frenetic
come-ons and false promises flatten people out emotionally, rendering
them depressed, passive, and conformist. Moreover, in a culture where
success is deemed the end all/be all of all things -- even a measure
of God’s love and grace -- when contemporary Americans risk straying
from the mainstream and fail, the repercussions are terrible, more than
most people can endure, economically, as well as psychologically. And
within the parameters of a corporately controlled economic structure
-- rigged for the benefit of a privileged few -- failure is altogether
likely. Then combine those noxious realities with the puritanical idea
that failure is due to some character flaw (a toxic notion Oprah has
given a makeover for the media age) and we’re left with a populace
who are conformist, terrified to risk, yet cling to the defining delusion
that they live in a society where industry, innovation, and pluck are
rewarded with success.
For this reason the corporatist
order needs a consummate propagandist like Oprah; a charismatic mountebank
who, by means of her stem-twisting tales of personal redemption, dangles
before her credulous audience the elusive and illusionary carrot of
success. Success and personal fulfillment are possible for one and all,
she lies, if only one will surrender their rational instincts and avail
oneself to her gospel of self-help salvation. In doing this, Oprah simply
sells a variation of the old totalitarian snake oil.
Oprah Winfrey is a sleight-of-hand
artist. One of an order of corrupt illusionists who have conjured an
all-pervasive, corporatist narrative, a ceaseless mass-media phantasmagoria,
wherein empty imagery deluges authentic apprehension and our minds are
whirled within a virtual-reality vortex that drowns out resonate experience.
The Virtual States of America.
In reality, a large measure
of our lives are comprised of long work hours, rounded by tedious, time-decimating
commutes, while in unison, mass media manipulation creates a psychological
and societal dynamic whereby we must work, nearly continuously, so that
we can afford to purchase the empty distractions needed to stave off
the demoralization attendant to this soul-numbing arrangement; yet,
for all our efforts, we only accumulate more enslaving debt. Ultimately,
condemning ourselves to exist indentured to our corporate bosses, by
means of our own consumerist compulsions.
These circumstances and our
own complicity contrive to fetter us to the global company store of
late capitalism as, all the while, our perceptions remain imprisoned
within the proto-fascist panopticon of the Uberculture. Part prison,
part holographic theme park of the mind, it spins a ceaseless spectacle
of commercial propaganda. Call it: Six Flags over Neo-Nuremberg, U.S.A.
Phil Rockstroh,
a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist
and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at:
[email protected].
Comment
On This Article