When the phrase 'resistance fatigue' sprang into life everyone who heard it for the first time knew instantly what it meant. It's only been a fortnight and having to adjust to dystopia, we are learning, appears to require a rather longer period of adjustment than that.
But in other places people are having to go through exactly the same process AND dodge bombs.
I'm aware that people on blogs and in columns are pointing out the advisedness of getting an overall perspective of how both Brexit and Drumph fit into a global context. But it isn't, really, a conversation that's going on in Macdonalds, is it? Whereas Drumph is.
And this is where individual media face the same basic choice: - their business is to sell product. Either of the Big Two are what gets the most clicks and thus their product will sell well. It's part of any rational business policy to make the largest profit. And pay the best wages. A funny caption on a Trump pic. will get more spread than what's happening in Russia or the Ukraine. People who aren't even interested in politics will buy/click a Drumph cartoon. The answer is economically obvious. Pump Trump.
Although that's a lesson learnt in secondary school economics, it has to be dragged up into the conscious memory in this current reality. For how is it possible that traditional media could be in business to make a loss? Where would that leave them in our economy? Profit-drive is an accepted reality in which the public has always been complicit by patronising the The Sun over The Times or Fox over BBC1. If a business is based on a particular demographic, it of course caters to the bias of that demographic. That's what a business does. That's the service it's in business to provide.
Even social media can be said to have a profit-driven agenda as bloggers and academics vie for Followers to their cause.
Most people understand this. Yes, media is biased. But yes, truth is still the standard through which media is judged. Only jejune fantasy even plays with the idea of trying to shut down the Fourth Estate or limit its power. Even the eponymous Man on the Clapham Bus knows what happens and where we are headed when someone actually proposes it.
But a strange Orwellian reversal has now taken place: to follow the news - go directly to the President's address. Why even trouble with the Fourth Estate? Now bias no longer applies. Now we don't have to wait for media to get hold of news and then dole it out to us. We don't have to embark on Google searches to check the track-record of the person or organisation passing on the news.
We just click a button to find the leader of the free world passing on diplomatic information, tantrums, urban myths, celebrity buzz, and a comprehensive picture of the level of his stability, comprehension, knowledge, ego,and deep, deep psychosis. Why go to war with democracy in order to shut down one's critics? For the first time in nigh on 400 years we have now come across a situation where, indeed, media - either biased or not - could step back and shut up without comment!
There's absolutely no reason to go through any intermediary - partisan or otherwise in the current clusterfeck. The horse's mouth appears at the press of a button and any question one could ever have about the direction in which we're headed is answered. No matter who asks it and which direction they themselves wish to go.
Now, I've been involved in journalism a long, long time. Hell, I'm probably the only journalist left who once worked at a newspaper with typesetters and printing presses. (Vanity impels me make clear that I'm not that ancient - just that it was a weekly paper on a tropical island in the South Pacific. Times move slowly there) I've been a journalist and columnist in South Africa for 17 years. In the 7 years I spent in China I taught journalism, gave classes on propoganda, and sex education to adults from 18 years into their 40s... at the State University where I lectured. I also had work translated and printed in Chinese.
So I've been working in media under close surveillance for a total of 24 years. And now is the first time I have ever felt under threat. Or even aware of being overlooked. I'm an adult in a first-world country, and I'm more deeply troubled about committing what I feel to the internet than I felt in war-torn South Africa or Communist China.
I have been deeply troubled by the fact that, for the first time in the Free World, I feel there is a possibility that what I write, in public, could result in consequences.
Then, last night, I watched Spicer's press releases back-to-back . Real life rofling is not a particularly large feature of my personality; but at first I honestly slid from the sofa onto the floor laughing. Given the current prevalence of tv/movie-styled tropes from the White House; each script was fondly reminiscent of B movies at a kid's matinee. When the Villain takes over the world he immediately tries to shut down or limit, the fourth estate. Then, in the tradition of those spoof movies from the '90's, they cut to the unopposed, impassioned rhetoric from The Villain presenting Orwellian double-speak from the podium in his bid to destroy planet earth. It obviously has never occurred to Spicer and his red-necks that we all watched the same movies so we all know the script.
It did, however, help to put things in perspective. After I'd clambered back onto the sofa and wiped my eyes, the surreal quality of the past two weeks fitted into a narrative much more readily understood: - Never having encountered academic standards, logic, critical thinking or objectivity; the blue-print of the current White House junta is styled on 'reality' television. With no-one to explain that 'reality' shows are all about distorting reality; and that they don't reflect any kind of reality currently existing anywhere in the world, Drumph and Co have been caught up in a block-buster follow-up to The Apprentice...which explains the constant preoccupation with ratings.
Ratings are the only public measure of societal acceptance or rejection with which anyone recently sat down on the latest set (I'm the Leader-of-the-world Get Me Outta Here) can identify. Whether set in the White House, the Jungle, a Desert Island, these kinds of shows always have turns and twist and prove much tougher than the contestants realise. The one currently on show on every outlet on the planet is turning out to be the toughest one yet for the contestants.
No sooner had this analogy occurred to me than I felt better. TV shows get cancelled if the ratings are bad. Some people's 15 minutes of fame in reality shows turns into a life-long humiliation. The Network can step in and remove the show...there are all kinds of ways to get the ones that have terrible ratings off the air.
And then, to-day, I woke up to the news that, finally, the grown-ups had stepped in. With a 'tsk, tsk' that was heard around the world, they brought reality with them, stepped into the play-pen and removed a few more toys from the contestants who had proved they simply couldn't be left to their own devices to play their little 'reality' game in some quiet corner.
I drew a quiet sigh of relief and went off to make a cup of coffee.
Truth, Justice, Honour, Humanitarianism: - these are the stalwart pillars upon which civilisation is based. At times immersion in the world of tv reality gives off a different message and people get confused. But, we have spent thousands of years advancing to the point at which we find ourselves. The reality that has got us to this point is unchanged. Tawdry values, hyperbolic rhetoric, sleight-of-hand, nifty edits and free offers are enticing to many on a device which can be switched off at any stage. But an attempt to replace reality with this electronic fantasy world?
No-one in the First World to-day is unaware of the way ratings work: least of all The Dumphster himself. Reason, experience, protocol - none of these have made much difference. But we have his own words to prove that he completely understands how ratings effect him and his gameshow:
"Terrible ratings, folks. Bad. Bigly bad. Period."
And that, said John, is that.
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