Watching the most recent GOP debate taking place tonight
– 9/16/2015 – one has the feeling that there is nothing left to say. As we hear the same talking points and
monomaniacal grandstanding that we heard four years ago, and four years before that,
it becomes clear that any frustrated exclamation, any attempt to transcend the
theatrical madness through bipartisan entreaties or decrying the futility of
the system, simply dies abruptly in its impotence, snagging pathetically like a
broken snare drum. We are caught, by no
fault of our own, in an ideological tangle that allows for no satisfying
reprieve, no utterance that could possibly convey something meaningful beyond
the nauseating semantic web of political discourse. I realize, of course, that I’m falling victim
to a kind of fallacious infinite regress, a paradox of purpose: my statement
here inevitably falls victim to the impotence that it struggles to avoid. What I write fails in its attempt to take
shelter from the political winds. Or, if
by some slim chance my plea is successful, it’s probably only because it comes
off as whiny.
The contemporary climate of conservative demagoguery is
at a level that threatens, in my opinion, to destabilize any remaining
semblance of cooperation and communication between the left and the right. This is a climate change every bit as
dangerous as ecological climate change (and every bit as measurable). Over the past several decades (since the
Reagan era), conservative ideologues have hermetically sealed themselves off
into strategic echo chambers. Conservative
talk radio remains an AM megaphone, hearing very little (call-ins aren’t for
the purpose of educating the jockey, after all) yet shouting a great deal (and
somehow actually saying very
little). In a recent piece on The Atlantic, Oliver Morrison asked why
there isn’t any conservative equivalent to Jon Stewart; in this excellent
piece, Morrison also addressed the plethora of liberal satirical talk shows
such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, yet the dearth of
liberal radio shows. Morrison cites
Dannagal Young, a scholar from the University of Delaware, who suggests that
liberals and conservatives enjoy different kinds of humor: in short,
conservatives prefer “indignation and hyperbole,” while liberals enjoy “irony”
(Morrison). Rodney Lee Connover,
producer of a conservative satire titled The
Flipside (N.B. – this is a conservative satire, not a satire of
conservatism), takes issue with Young’s analysis, claiming it insinuates that
liberals are smarter than conservatives; but Young maintains this is not the
case: “Young insists the hypothesis is not about intelligence; it’s about a
preferred structure of jokes. She maintains that there’s nothing inherently
better about liking ironic jokes over exaggerated ones” (Morrison).
Acknowledging the depth and accuracy of Morrison’s
article (accuracy in targeting an issue, that is, not necessarily diagnosing
it), I want to turn to an article published ten years earlier: David Foster
Wallace’s “Host,” from 2005. In this
brilliant essay, entertaining and informative in a way that only DFW can
deliver, the author, in a brief aside, offers his own explanation for the
dearth of left-wing talk radio shows:
Notwithstanding
all sorts of interesting other explanations, the single biggest reason why
left-wing talk radio experiments like Air America or the Ed Schultz program are
not likely to succeed, at least not on a national level, is that their
potential audience is just not dissatisfied enough with today’s mainstream news
sources to feel that they have to patronize a special type of media to get the
unbiased truth. (316)
Wallace refers here to the
MMLB: mainstream media liberal bias, a notion largely created and promulgated
by Rush Limbaugh. According to Wallace,
because of “his own talent and the popularity of his show, Rush has been able
to move partisan distrust for the ‘mainstream liberal media’ into the
mainstream itself” (315). In other
words, Wallace suggests that the success of conservative talk radio stems from
its listeners’ distrust of more mainstream outlets such as CNN or MCNBC. It is tempting, at this point, to accuse
conservative talk radio of promoting rightist agendas and ideology, just as
conservatives accuse the mainstream media of being liberally biased; but such
accusations miss the mark. No media
outlet or institution can be described as either liberal or conservative
despite the convictions of its talking heads.
The news, Wallace reminds us, is a business, and no matter which way a
jockey, anchor, program, or station leans, the business is in it to make
money. Even if an institution considers
conservatism or liberalism to be a public good, in the sense that everyone
would be better off believing in it, it wouldn’t be in the business’s best financial interest to promulgate that particular view:
“Because the time and money my one company would spend trying to spread the
Truth would yield (at best) only a tiny increase in the conservatism of the
whole country – and yet the advantages of that increased conservatism would be
shared by everyone, including my radio competitors” (290). In other words, the notion of media qua media
being liberally or conservatively biased is a fallacy. Media doesn’t care one way or another; people
care, and we can gauge a hell of a lot about a large percentage of the
population’s beliefs by tracking their listening and viewing habits.
All this is just to say that none of us are escaping any
kind of brainwashing by avoiding certain media venues. We know what we already believe, and we go to
these venues in order to hear these beliefs echoed back to us.[i] This raises an important and possibly
unsettling question: where do we go to escape the ideological backwash, the
unceasing tides of political rhetoric?
In our time (over the past century, I would claim), politics has
infiltrated all aspects of life; and this is neither good nor bad – it simply
is. All matter of topics has become
political, and while it may result in frustration, it also forces us to discuss
issues that may otherwise slip past us unnoticed. Alas, I also admit to experiencing
frustration, primarily because the chatter is inescapable, especially with the
advent of social media. George Orwell
critiqued the quality of political speech in 1946, its ambiguity and contagious
effects; but Orwell could not have foreseen (or if he did, he didn’t give any
clue) the absolute political saturation of the public and private spheres via
technological media.[ii] William Gibson comments on this saturation in
an article from 2003, aptly titled “The Road to Oceania,” in which he suggests
that “we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational
transparency, one in which ‘Orwellian’ scrutiny is no longer a strictly
hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy,
so too do corporations and states” (168).
The rhetoric of the politician works its way ever more parasitically
into everyday life, infiltrating the speech of private individuals and the
headlines of all medial forms – but this infiltration works both ways, and the
more the politicians venture into our living rooms, the more we poke our noses
into theirs.
At this point political language reaches its critical
mass. At the first of the recent series
of GOP debates, Donald Trump explicitly acknowledged the financial games at
play behind political arrangements, citing his own experience as a private
businessperson and his deals with various political figures in the past. More recently, Lindsey Graham responded to
Bobby Jindal’s accusation that Graham failed to mobilize congress against Obama’s
Affordable Care Act by explaining the political reality of the situation: “Even
if you eliminated the filibuster, Graham says, there is still this thing called
a ‘veto’” (Newell).[iii] In other words, we are witnessing, more and
more frequently, the introduction of translation
into the folds of political speech.
Politicians now take to explaining away the equivocations and elisions
of their opponents’ rhetoric; but they do so through the venue of the political
platform, thus transforming political translation back into political rhetoric.
This is what I am calling the “critical mass” of political language: the
point at which Orwellian political speech incorporates its own translation as
part of its ideological strategy.
Of course, this is not to say that such maneuvers escape
the logic of conservatism or politics in general. These ploys still serve specific ideological
ends, and they still partake of rhetorical strategy. “Translation,” Lyotard reminds us, “is itself
a language game” (21). Set forth in the
drapery of righteous explanation, this tactic of political translation can only
be a short-term play. I wouldn’t even
say it’s only a matter of time, because I think it is already obvious to most
people that these tactics, while possibly refreshing, do not manage to void the
hermetic echo chamber of contemporary political discourse. And this is what causes the sense of
inescapability I mentioned earlier; for when our politicians begin coopting the
appeals to translation and explanation left to us as critical and informed
viewers/voters, what are we left with? Any
utterance is absorbed into the rhetorical sphere or deemed irresponsible (such
as “I’m sick of this, to hell with it”).
The problem, of course, is that many of us are sick of it all, but we also want to be a part of it all. “It’s impossible to leave, but we can’t
stay,” as one contemporary songwriter croons.
The only option, it seems, is participation.
Can participation be emancipatory? Does criticism amount to anything more than
partisan polemics? Can speech be
anything other than political? In an essay
published in 1999, titled “Authority and American Usage” (and conveniently subtitled
“or, ‘Politics and the English Language’ is redundant”), Wallace claims that
maintaining a truly democratic spirit in contemporary political debate is so
difficult that “it’s almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some
established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp’s line on the issue and to
let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe
that the other camps are either evil or insane” (72).[iv] In other words, Wallace does seem to
acknowledge some exterior space, some vantage point capable of assuming a
democratic and populist perspective on the issues at hand; but it’s highly
unlikely that most people can adopt and maintain such a perspective. In fact, this claim begs the question of
whether or not there is more than one distanced, democratic perspective at all;
and if there isn’t, and we all were able to achieve it, then (theoretically) we
would all suddenly be in agreement…
Or maybe not.
Maybe the perspective that Wallace espouses isn’t actually free of
ideology, but merely able to recognize the contours of its own ideological
commitments. Such a view would hardly be
apolitical, but would be able to acknowledge any accusations that it falls
victim to certain ideological assumptions.
Indeed, the possibility of such agreement seems ideal; but it also seems
pointlessly utopian. Would such
democratic agreement provide room for change, space for development? Or would it simply result in idle patronizing
and stubborn refusal: “You’re right, my statement is susceptible to the charge
you levied; but I still think it’s correct.” In other words, would this ideal democratic
space simply expand the echo chamber of current political discourse, making it
even more vast, complex, and differentiated?
Would this actually do us any good?
This post has been an attempt to do what I said at the
beginning was impossible: it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I want to end on a note of potential
rather than foreclosure. If there’s one
element of modern society that has led to this notion of democratic, populist
discourse, of the ubiquity of political language and rhetoric, and of our
near-total (if not total) saturation in it, it is – plain and simple – media.
Wallace knew this and wrote about it intensely in both his fiction and
nonfiction. Media is a technological
development. It has ties to human
ingenuity and creativity, but it has expanded and developed largely beyond the
scope of human intentions and expectations.
This is one of the most important lessons of history: that we have only
a minute degree of control over our material conditions. It has been the contention of Marxist
historiographers that by taking control of the means of production and material
conditions the people can regain a sense of immediacy within their environment
and take charge of history. But there
are some within the Marxist community – I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin – who
see technological development as harboring implicit emancipatory potential that
does not reduce to human control.
Technology may develop on its own and pursue its own course; but this
does not preclude its capacity to provide means of improved existence within
the human community.
Long story short, if media is responsible for our
currently gregarious political quagmire, then perhaps some future development
of technology will present us with a means of filtering the noise in pursuit of
the signal.
Works
Cited
Gibson, William. “The Road to
Oceania.” Distrust That Particular Flavor.
New York: Penguin, 2012. 163-172.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Wittgenstein
‘After.’” Political Writings. Trans.
Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 19-24.
Morrison, Oliver. “Waiting For
the Conservative Jon Stewart.” The
Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group,
14 February 2015.
Wallace, David Foster. “Authority
and American Usage: or, ‘Politics and the English Language’ is redundant.” Consider
the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Back Bay Books, 2005. 66-127.
–. “Host.” Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.
New York: Back Bay Books, 2005. 275-343.
[i] This is not to imply that
people’s views can’t change. I
personally admit to experiencing a certain sea change in ideological
commitments while earning my MA at University of Chicago. However, there is a huge difference between
going to school and watching the news: solid and effective educations are
intended to force us to question our convictions, while media serves the sole
purpose of reinforcing those convictions.
[ii] Of course, Orwell did note the
potential political instrumentality of the television, demonstrated by the
towering and domineering screens that loom over the hapless denizens of
Oceania.
[iii] There have been appropriately
excited responses to these statements in the media. Jim Newell’s piece in Slate, for example, is titled “Lindsey Graham Just Called BS on the
GOP Primary.”
[iv] A footnote acknowledges that such
camps never form in a vacuum, but always seem to form in opposition to other
camps.
