2017: The Nazi Punch Did Not Take Place

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The Nazi Punch Did Not Take Place

The Obama Presidency was ushered in by seven seasons of NBC’s The West Wing, after which its image, action figures and messaging were designed. That unabashedly melodramatic, aspirational prime time soap, repeating on cable and Netflix, hovered always as the hinted behind-the-scenes of the Obama White House, a vision of decency, smarts and probity, of sexy, bright, erudite women and streetwise, striver intellectual men, doing what they do – work as upper-middle-management creatives -- with dash, joy and success. They bantered erotically like Wilder/Diamond lovers, overlaying the present with the hint of period piece from a morally simpler and grander age, to reassure the audience-electorate of the persistence of the American Century and democratic business as usual as the racially historic President – the culmination of all this Hollywood storytelling, finally playing out --  proceeded, to the surprise of even the most cynical lesser-evilist, to accelerate the de-democratizing, imperial program he had inherited from the deep state cabal’s most personal watch.

Throughout the Bush regime’s two terms, The West Wing provided an integrated memory-implant to replace audience-electorate recollection, a gauze-lensed liberal procedural dream into which the succeeding fascist, bellicose, lawless reality had transformed, by contrast, the barely bygone Clinton boom era, plunging that bitterest-to-date of treacherous Democratic neoliberal administrations into the sepia tub of instant, digital-age nostalgia.

So this superimposition and intercutting of entertainment and disinfotainment placed the actual Bush regime as seen on tv to be received as the 2nd Act of the 3 act drama, the period of peril that must eventually be escaped and righted.

Instead of knowing history, Americans were encouraged to open their senses to genre and formula and judge by its cues. Instead of organizing civic practice according to political divisions confronting real conflicts (progressive vs. conservative, labor vs. capital), the People were prompted to identify with Red or Blue tribes, according to tastes in entertainment commodities, and to consume and root. Instead of policies, scrutinized for real consequences, style and motifs were to be examined for appeal and interest (even flavors of dissent were offered as social media diversions, like the ultra-left critique of marriage equality and its accompanying rainbow-washing of empire, espousing which made no fucking difference to anyone or anything, but served as a pleasurable interpretation of the spectacle no different from reading tv reviews in The New Inquiry or n+1). Instead of judging the actions of the ruling class and its henchmen and courtiers, and challenging them, the American electorate was invited to be an audience recognizing and enjoying a favorite show, and demanding only to receive recognition and respect in the form of representational mirroring on its mesmerizing surface. Something Baudrilliard famously formulated (mistakenly) as a “hyperreality” was carefully being constructed, a decoy for political discontent to fire fruitlessly on, and a hall of mirrors through which it would sail, to demoralize, disorient and pacify the populations of the core.

And accomplishing all this while mining telecom-age attention labor for ballooning profits. The spectacle is much like a treadmill we are mesmerized by and run on and run on at first for delight and distraction from life in this dreary cage we are born in, and then, once addicted, to ward off withdrawal, not fully aware this running powers the locks keeping us in our cage.

This is not a trivial shift, although the post-moderns educated in “theory” instinctively dismiss it as merely the exposure of some always-already je ne sais quoi. Certain not ancient assumptions --  that when a President in reality commits a crime, Congress must (ideally) impeach him, the state possibly try him and make attempts to compensate the victims and rectify the damage – were worked upon with the irrationality of advertising art to become hokey, embarrassing markers of unenviable personalities stuck in the age of the typewriter and the broadsheet.  “Burn the Constitution,” Jacobin quipped (taking it back of course in the article nobody read). The Law is an ass, the dogberries dutifully repeated, offered the naughty contraband opinionettes of the Nazi Carl Schmitt, regurgitator of popular anti-Semitic pamphlets absurdly puffed as a rediscovered forbidden genius, for confirmation. 

With this maximally disempowered disaffection, aggravated by the learned helplessness of the emotional circuits of the spectacle’s loop of calamity, the citizenry is primed for a kind of propagandizing that need no longer even convince; it need only entertain. When Frank Underwood commits a crime, the hipster audience enjoys it, feels its hunches validated and is grateful, reaches for more popcorn, and surrenders to the pleasures of observing and understanding the inevitable progress of the arc. In the morning a blogpost may dissect the evening’s diversion, discovering its grace notes and basking in its truthyness. The only role for the citizenry is choosing the channel. This observation I know must seem painfully obvious, but that too protects the status quo; the evidence that a genuine psychosis of the spectator has been inculcated in a key segment of the American electorate is too plentiful now to ignore.

Television audiences can still (largely) distinguish between fiction and history, but they can no longer feel any difference,[1] so the distinction is of no importance. In 2008 after the incessant red alerts of Shock and Awe – 911, the attack on Afghanistan, the Israeli reinvasion of area A and the Jenin massacre, the invasion of Iraq, the failed coup in Venezuela, Madrid bombings, the ethnic cleansing of post-Katrina New Orleans, 7/7 London, the credit crisis -- the Obama Presidency was welcomed as if it were the return to Pennsylvania Avenue of the party of Jeb and Trophy Wife Bartlet and its squadron of tirelessly verbal, zealously liberal trivial-pursuits champions, residing in an alternate history of prosperity and social democracy. The real world merged into the vacuum packed mass-produced dream-world that had sustained American liberals through the Dark Age Of Cheney, an occult timeline where the Democratic Party led by Schindler reigned uninterrupted and Star Trek villains had turned into rival dotcom CEOs.

The Bush regime, and its 8 years of radical daring social transformation, was then declared NON-CANONICAL. And it was naturally followed by a fresh re-boot. All the disappointment, all the loathing and fury for that prior power couple, the Clintons, a sleazy pair of slave-state hucksters who loved the death penalty, abolished welfare, sadistically overthrew Haitian democracy, bombed Europe’s breadbasket with depleted uranium for 78 days, and led the gullible public’s mass movement for single payer off a cliff with chilling cunning and without remorse, melted away in the pure warmth of attachment that only patriotic soap opera can inspire. To support the Obama candidacy and its subsequent regime was simply, as far as the liberal voters were concerned (and any number of articles and polls make this abundantly clear) to champion a restoration of the fictional world of The West Wing and its imperturbable optimism; the reality of the Democratic Party’s politics and agenda, its complete collusion with its apparent rival, its ruthlessness toward the poor, its racism, its imperial criminality, was simply either completely denied (as the large-audience media preferred) or demoted to the status of imperfections envisioned as a kind of splattering of mud on the gleaming vehicle of the Warner Brothers’ fiction, which served as the – fascist, when you think about it --  capital-concocted dreamlife, essence, and eternal Truth of the Blue tribe’s nation. Will I Am’s Yes We Can video is a perfect piece of evidence: its effect of uplift (harmonizing perfectly with the tone of The West Wing) requires the listener literally refuse to hear what Obama is saying on the soundtrack; one must literally fail to understand the imperial fable boasting of genocide and merely surrender to the feeling of recognizing the genre of Blue State tribal ceremonies familiar from The West Wing’s weekly tearjerker climaxes. The West Wing took all the criticisms of the real world Democratic Presidencies, represented these opponents in straw and caricature form (whether as spoilt screaming altermondialist children, Puerto Rican nationalists, or long dead Soviet spies), and told stories to dispense with anything like a rationale for opposition (the absurd pronouncement “Free Trade Stops Wars!” is staged as an unanswerable zinger; the nefarious Soviet agent is a murderous heretic against the secular heaven). It was, and remains, a complete manual of imperial apology for progressive liberals and urban conservatives. Hanky in hand, liberals could ingest a full complement of thoughts and beliefs, postures and factoids, swallowed whole by each audience member who then need supply nothing in terms of knowledge or reason to produce his politics as membership in the beautiful Blue tribe, his make-belief as ersatz belief. 

In such (admittedly, irresistible) Presidential cameos as “It Gets Better,” the two shows seemed to merge so seamlessly it really was as if the Obama Presidency were nothing other than the stream of new seasons of that formally cancelled series.

Television can accomplish so easily almost instantly what all the primitive media technologies at the disposal of Hitler and Mussolini, the parades and the myths and the posters and the salutes and the endlessly repetitive public rhetoric, took years to induce, and accomplished only much less flexibly and therefore more precariously. Individuality of thought is eradicated by the replacement of thought with viewed moving image, infinitely digitally reproducible, and the displacement of synthesized knowledge with the memory of stories told in this highly stimulating, manipulative form. Nothing Hitler could do could give his Volk anything like the shared experiences and affects of television audiences, whose waking lives have been spent in front of the television (whenever not at work or driving) hearing and feeling exactly the same things, and situated as themselves absent from the real and meaningful reality. The Volk’s telepathic communing became real with radio but deeper and at the same time more unself-aware (for the illusion is that one is experiencing these intensities individually) with television. At the same time, in parade and radio it remained active, a common (self)-creation, and with television it became voyeuristic, vicarious and eventually even less participatory than that. The shared entertainment is a shared consciousness as commodity implant, as the imagination atrophies along with the intellect’s rationality.

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[1] (though repressing the terror and horror of the real violence of beheading videos so that they are experienced emotionally just like Tarantino films may be a factor contributing to widespread depression and anxiety among wired audiences)

— Red Kahina, 2017