At the moment I'm having an extended offline conversation with someone about the nature of (surprise!) politics and the media. The conversation is private, but one of my replies runs a little long (surprise again!) and I think is worth posting. And since it's my blog...
I believe that trying to analyze the Right using a leader/movement template is misleading, which is why I began this longish explainer about the Right with this quote from William Burroughs:
"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."Instead of ideologues, the Right created an army of junkies with a socially acceptable addiction. It's not a movement, it's a market: an incredibly lucrative and politically useful one.
Like any other drug market, there will always be people more than willing to supply what the market demands. And like any other junkie who lives scrambling from fix to fix, Republican voters don't much care about who they follow or the degraded state of the merchandise they are buying or the long-term price in blood and treasure and national reputation this is costing them and everyone around them. To them, the Worst Thing In The World isn't selling the country to thugs to feed their habit. The Worst Thing In The World is to be publicly exposed as junkies. Exposed as fools who have been terribly wrong about almost everything for decades.
Because to admit that they're wrong -- even a little bit -- is to admit the possibility that everyone they have trusted for decades really has been a liar and a fraud. That they really have been played for chumps all along. That the Dirty Libtards may have been (gasp!) right about them all along.
And that revelation would destroy them, which is why it must-must-must be kept at bay at any cost. Which is why they hired Donald Trump. He's not their "leader" -- he's just the most brazen pusher of the lies they need to believe. This is also why their ludicrous and ever-changing "talking points" don't need to make any sense or follow any ideological consistency: they just need to be shouted long enough to keep Reality from crashing in on them for one more day.
This is also where the deeply complicit Both Sides media gets their cut of the lucrative junkie market.
The Both Sides media already profits from feeding a different kind of addict: the cynical, aloof, “everyone is corrupt” voter and the pathologically fence-straddling “independent” voter who are both desperate not to believe that the Right has lost it's mind and has become so dangerous that they must actually Pick a Fucking Side and fight for it.
But in addition to these types, every now and then* lies of the Right collapse (think 2007/8) and for a moment there seems to be no place for the Republican junkie to go but into the grave or into rehab. And then along comes a phalanx of Respected Beltway Media Persons who reassure then that none of this was their fault because the pushers they were following were never "real" Conservatives/ Republicans to begin with anyway.
They weren't bad people – they had just been bamboozled by Corrupt Washington Insiders!
And anyway, they need not feel any special shame for the catastrophe they created because ... (wait for it) somehow (wait for it) Both Sides are Equally To Blame!
No, I Won't Be Going To Politicon!
*fixed! thanks!
10 comments:
Spot on Mr Drifglass.
Isn't that what the Civil War was all about?
Wow, no wonder I like coming to your site. I just recently finished reading Burroughs's Junky. Great minds.
From a little later in the same deposition quoted above:
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
I won't delve into if they are aware of their both sider wart or if the have make up put it on.
It is all about viewers and what will they do to "entertain". Oh, and big paycheck.
Very good. I don't mean to be the grammar or spelling police. But in addition to these types, every now and the lies of the Right collapse. But shouldn't your sentence be every now and then. Respected Beltway Media Persons who reassure then. I assume you mean them.
I'm currently engaged with a moron on Fake book that's so wedded to "both sides are corrupt and I'm above it all" that she's gone from dismissing LYNCHING to trying to bullshit BothSides a Canadian. And ends every fucking comment with a derisive dismissal, like her "above it all" attitude makes her the adult in the room. She thinks everyone's mad and full of hate.
Personally, Trump makes me mad. This makes me weep for our species, that somebody can invest more time into proving her "above the fray" credentials than trying to prevent literal fascists from taking over her country...
I'm watching the evening news talking all about and around Trump, but as you've been saying for years Driftglass-when the fucking hell does the news and the talking heads start talking about the Republican party at large supporting an authoritarian figure in the form of Trumpinski trying to turn our country into Russia Junior with Putin in charge. Is it when all the billionaires grab the last dollar and expect the new boss Putin allowing them to keep their money and perceived power as the insanity of Putin burns the planet into a ball of ashes. And who doesn't think that one of those tactical nuclear weapons now being held hostage in Turkey at our current undefended airbase won't end up being detonated in our country.
Please someone try to convince me that these two things will not come to past in the very near future unless Trump and the Republican Party aren't dismantled and swept into the waste bin of history.
Brilliant. As ususal. And why the lifeboats MUST. BE. BURNED.
RP
In the same vein (pun intended) as Mr. Burroughs' insight into the co-dependency of junkies as pushers, there's this perspective from "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer:
“As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences.
“Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler's and Goebbels' baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery and license.
“The personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews, they gave expression and direction to fierce primal passions.”
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