05-14-2016, 08:34 PM
Extracted from an old discussion (from 2010):
Propaganda is the norm of 4T communication. Details of reality recede before a desired and sponsored image, whether it is the mind-numbing pageantry of Triumph of the Will or the sophisticated (but tightly-scripted) banter in Casablanca.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04VNB...layer_embedded
Any political entity in Crisis mode must get people to do things contrary to the usual assumptions of ease and hedonism in other times. Nobody now pretends that the war work was easy or perfectly safe. Women who a few years earlier would have been troubled by a broken fingernail and were averse to the aesthetic offense that was the factory had to replace men who had gone off to war. The American soldier, now the Real Man, had to do combat but needed all the supplies available of ammunition, weapons, transport equipment, fuel, and of course food. Rosie the Riveter was almost a Socialist-Realist stereotype that one might expect in the Soviet Union, then the epitome of regimentation and shared sacrifice, at least in its own propaganda -- that one could do heavy, dangerous work and still be very much a woman.
The real Rosie the Riveter almost never looked so good as did the poster image. She was often a middle-aged, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed woman who had worked to supplement a meager living. The poster image was never a black or Hispanic woman. The woman with a career as a factory worker looked it. Maybe it was to appeal to the margin of people who might otherwise do trivial work or stay at home and be 100% domestic. The model for the Norman Rockwell image on the Saturday Evening Post cover proves as marginal as a defense-plant worker could be.
We are now at least five years away from the conclusion of a Crisis era, and probably ten. It is unlikely that the most successful appeals of the American elite will be the glorification of elite greed, the brutality of rapacious plutocrats through their enforcers, or the promotion of the fake populism of anti-intellectualism. We are at most in the Dust Bowl phase of this Crisis era, and if anything the 2010 election shows that the American electorate still pines for the promises of cakes and circuses as a substitute for economic justice.
Americans in the Second World War didn't fight on behalf of the "economic royalists", whether big landowners in the South or heirs of Gilded-Age fortunes. Such would have been failure. That said, we are now being asked to give our all -- and get as little as possible, especially economic security and economic justice, on behalf of elites that now look like the sorts of aristocratic plunderers that many American fled from in Russia, English-ruled Ireland, feudal Mexico, southern Italy, and the most backward parts of the German and Austrian empires. Let us not forget the great internal migration of blacks from the old South, where ownership was everything and toil came with serfdom in all but name.
Work has dignity only when it is well-paid reward for genuine toil. This Crisis will not be won by the investment bankers, by executives who affect aristocratic lifestyles while aping Simon Legree, or by gangsters.
Update: We seem to have made no progress toward the resolution of the existing Crisis Era in the last six years. The 2014 midterm election was an unambiguous victory for the economic royalists of our time. America can become the sort of society in which almost all human efforts go to paying off economic elites who who better resemble feudal lords than capitalists. We will be taxed to indulge an elite that offers neither representation (the US House of Representatives now better serves political donors than the people in districts) nor service. We are now at least five, and perhaps ten, years away from the resolution of this Crisis.
Propaganda is the norm of 4T communication. Details of reality recede before a desired and sponsored image, whether it is the mind-numbing pageantry of Triumph of the Will or the sophisticated (but tightly-scripted) banter in Casablanca.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04VNB...layer_embedded
Any political entity in Crisis mode must get people to do things contrary to the usual assumptions of ease and hedonism in other times. Nobody now pretends that the war work was easy or perfectly safe. Women who a few years earlier would have been troubled by a broken fingernail and were averse to the aesthetic offense that was the factory had to replace men who had gone off to war. The American soldier, now the Real Man, had to do combat but needed all the supplies available of ammunition, weapons, transport equipment, fuel, and of course food. Rosie the Riveter was almost a Socialist-Realist stereotype that one might expect in the Soviet Union, then the epitome of regimentation and shared sacrifice, at least in its own propaganda -- that one could do heavy, dangerous work and still be very much a woman.
The real Rosie the Riveter almost never looked so good as did the poster image. She was often a middle-aged, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed woman who had worked to supplement a meager living. The poster image was never a black or Hispanic woman. The woman with a career as a factory worker looked it. Maybe it was to appeal to the margin of people who might otherwise do trivial work or stay at home and be 100% domestic. The model for the Norman Rockwell image on the Saturday Evening Post cover proves as marginal as a defense-plant worker could be.
We are now at least five years away from the conclusion of a Crisis era, and probably ten. It is unlikely that the most successful appeals of the American elite will be the glorification of elite greed, the brutality of rapacious plutocrats through their enforcers, or the promotion of the fake populism of anti-intellectualism. We are at most in the Dust Bowl phase of this Crisis era, and if anything the 2010 election shows that the American electorate still pines for the promises of cakes and circuses as a substitute for economic justice.
Americans in the Second World War didn't fight on behalf of the "economic royalists", whether big landowners in the South or heirs of Gilded-Age fortunes. Such would have been failure. That said, we are now being asked to give our all -- and get as little as possible, especially economic security and economic justice, on behalf of elites that now look like the sorts of aristocratic plunderers that many American fled from in Russia, English-ruled Ireland, feudal Mexico, southern Italy, and the most backward parts of the German and Austrian empires. Let us not forget the great internal migration of blacks from the old South, where ownership was everything and toil came with serfdom in all but name.
Work has dignity only when it is well-paid reward for genuine toil. This Crisis will not be won by the investment bankers, by executives who affect aristocratic lifestyles while aping Simon Legree, or by gangsters.
Update: We seem to have made no progress toward the resolution of the existing Crisis Era in the last six years. The 2014 midterm election was an unambiguous victory for the economic royalists of our time. America can become the sort of society in which almost all human efforts go to paying off economic elites who who better resemble feudal lords than capitalists. We will be taxed to indulge an elite that offers neither representation (the US House of Representatives now better serves political donors than the people in districts) nor service. We are now at least five, and perhaps ten, years away from the resolution of this Crisis.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.