show business (again)

the media is the metaphor

Oliver Cromwell’s portrait sitting went like this; he said, “Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint your picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughness, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me.” Paint me warts and all.

Sir Peter Lely’s portrait of Oliver Cromwell, circa 1654

This essay examines what has happened to the medium of language in the age of digital formation. Okay, highlights a couple of things. It’s a big topic. I don’t write about politics much, because the Team Red/Team Blue paradigm makes political discourse about as thoughtful as shouting, “Go Big Red.” Besides I don’t want to anger unnecessarily half of my readers. It wounds me when you unsubscribe. I use American politics here to make a bigger point about our ‘conversation.’ The ‘verse’ part has gone missing. We at least need complete sentences for dialog.

Trump has been accused of having an ‘ad hoc’ foreign policy crafted to serve his own political interests. He certainly has opinions about the show business of war in Gaza. “You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt. “And the other thing is I hate, they put out tapes all the time. Every night, they’re releasing tapes of a building falling down. They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that … that’s why they’re losing the PR war.” However true Trump's observations are, his comments don't sound very presidential. They sound familiar though, they sound like Trump, and he thinks and speaks like a showman.

Not that Biden thinks differently. Back in August 1987, when Biden first ran for president, a video clip of Biden giving a speech at the Iowa State Fair was spliced together with video of British Labor Leader, Neil Kinnock speaking previously in May at the Welsh Party Conference. Seen together, it was obvious Biden had simply copied a large part of Kinnock's speech, even down to Kinnock's gestures and mannerisms.

At the time, “The basic rap against Biden,” explained Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a candidate of style, not substance.”

Immediately reporters discovered Biden had failed a freshman course in law school by including five pages from a published law-review article in his paper without any attribution. He had to retake the course. Lastly a video of Biden surfaced with him claiming to have graduated in the top half of his class from law school. In fact he ranked 76th out of 85. Biden was forced to suspend his presidential campaign Sept. 24, 1987. Who would have guessed then that Biden was a man simply ahead of his time? Biden now is the triumph of style over substance. Forget painting his warts, that’s what face-lifts are for.

I have three very large volumes composing the entirety of Oliver Cromwell’s recorded correspondence. His literacy was breath-taking. For a man who was famous for his sword, not his pen, he lived his life immersed in reading and writing. Neither Biden nor Trump read or write much. They never did. Their communication skills lie elsewhere, and their shows must go on.

What prompts this essay is Israel’s war against Hamas. Israel would like to wage a conventional war against its enemy, but Hamas has chosen the cities of Gaza as the battlefield. Hospitals connected to tunnels are their fortresses. Hamas hides behind both the hostages and those who live in Gaza who are not allowed to flee. The refugee road must run through Egypt and the road is closed. War always produces refugees - but not this war - Hamas takes all the non-combatants hostage. There is no truthful way to dispute anything in my paragraph. This is a war and battlefield chosen by Hamas, and truthfully, by many others who live in Gaza and hate the Jews.

Is Trump right that Israel is losing the PR war? Apparently so. The majority of people everywhere around the world seem incapable of dividing their sympathies for those suffering in Gaza from those directly responsible for their suffering, that is to say, Hamas. People believe Israel is causing the suffering. They see proof in the images. They believe the Jews’ power, money and manipulative cunning always destroy the innocent. People are incapable of thinking straight about it, because their minds no longer are moved to remember and to imagine with words. Images, as the word implies, does our imagining for us. We can’t help it. We want to believe our eyes. Our eyes see everything clearly, right?

Not exactly. In the end, there has to be a narrative. You have to believe something to make sense out of your thoughts. There are narratives to choose from. In 1844 Marx published his, On the Jewish Question. In brief: Marx says he is not writing of the chimerical Sabbath Jew, but of the Real Jew, the Worldly Jew. Real Jews are the creative inspiration of the Bourgeoisie. “Money is the jealous god of Israel…” “The Bill of Exchange is the real god of the Jews.” A narrative of the oppressor-class and the oppressed is the genius of Karl Marx. At the core of Marx’s thought, you will find the Real Jew is the genesis of the oppressor class. The Jews will disappear when the Bourgeoisie are overthrown. The oppressors and the Jews - you can never separate them.

You start swapping out the nineteenth century Marxist jargon and ‘proletariat’ become ‘Palestinians’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’ are ‘Israel.’ It’s a righteous story - and the oppressed are the good guys. Forget about October 7th. Ignore the fortified hospitals. Pretend the hostages are all in Israeli jails. The vision is myopic: Israel is the oppressor-class. Jews, hiding behind what can be seen, are the unseen oppressors/exploiters of every nation. Marx is utopian to his core. “Working men of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

Juxtapose this: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The Marxist revolution is a war against the oppressor. No one can be free while the oppressor lives and rules. The jargon changes - but Marx's vision endures. Marx’s utopian vision is material. Nothing spiritual about it. The Real Jews don’t have a Torah, they have a Bill of Exchange. The Torah scholar is a strawman, a decoy, a ruse. When Marx says his history is scientific. He means it's prophetic - he scientifically understands history and thereby sees the future of history. Or maybe not… at least the utopian part never works out.

The slave Fredrick Douglass learned to read at an early age. His master’s wife, Sophia Auld, taught him alongside their son. His owner, Hugh Auld was displeased. Douglass wrote that Auld had told them that being literate “would forever unfit Douglass for the duties of a slave; and as to himself, learning would do him no good, but probably a great deal of harm — making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you learn him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”

“…Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Fredrick Douglass

I don’t know how to turn our politics around. I don’t know if there is the path back to literacy. But we need to do some serious thinking. Pictures are okay, but they have to have con-text. We need something more substantial to believe in than images. The triumph of style over substance will be the ruin of us all. We desperately need to dialog collectively with each other in historical consciousness, warts and all. The zeitgeist of this age is killing us - it's killing dialog. The images we are making might be worth a thousand words, but I will take the words anyway. Keep the change. I don't want it.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.