In part two of my D.C. diaries this one little Englishman takes a look at the Republican Reality Denial Bubble, taking in Eric Cantona, economic crisis and the end of an era.
I talk about the distance between the actual and the virtual, and try to explain why despite the machinery of politics and propaganda being more advanced than ever it is breaking down.
This should take you 7 minutes to read.
CONTENTS
Midtermination and the Republican Bubble
See no Evil?
The Strangelove Affair of DC politics
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
Reality is a career-ending meme
MIDTERMINATION AND THE REPUBLIBUBBLE
Many elected officials seem to be uninterested in the forthcoming midterm disaster, as if the suspension of Congress has put the matter out of mind.
Republican staffers are uniformly dejected. To say they are disappointed in the administration is rather like describing Columbia Heights as a “vibrant cultural center”. There is no need to explain either, because the reality is there before you if you are willing to see and describe it honestly.
Factionalism and denial distinguish the DC Republibubble. The cause is known to be lost in November but it is tabu to say so. This fact is buttressed by the obvious angling for a spot in a post-Trump administration in Republican circles.
It is as if the car crash of November’s mid-term elections has already happened but all the witnesses are mute. A weird, unspoken consensus over a forbidden truth shapes self interest in sight of the next season of The White House, and of course the next Presidential election.
It is reasonable to expect the Republicans will win that. There is camp Vance and camp Rubio as a result. Some have a foot in both. No one dares say what their actions obviously mean, because the President is still the President for now, and therefore it is dangerous to plainly state the case.
One man who knows his onions said he thinks Trump has maybe sixty days. It seems likely the intrusion of reality will mean someone has to go down for having sunk the ship. So those who dare to see are looking beyond the man of the moment.
SEE NO EVIL?
In this sultry soup of scheming disavowal it takes a while to realise that the danger here is far greater than to a political career or a public reputation.
What does it mean if the State power of America is incapable of speaking its mind?
It is not only muted but of several minds at once. It has one eye on the men of the moment, another on those of the moment after that. Then, being limited to the personal, it runs out of eyes.
Perhaps the most convincing strategic thinking beyond the immediate is exemplified by the survival instincts developed when swimming in shark infested waters.
The sharks aren’t merely your friends and neighbours. They are also the facts. Name the wrong ones and you are finished. To know which things not to say is of course to know why. Keeping these things from the public is imperative. Selective blindness is a sign of a promising career.
The Strangelove Affair
We all know some sort of bomb is going to drop. Why is it a bad career move to notice the signs of impending catastrophe?
The concept of fetishistic disavowal was explained in Slavoj Zizek’s short film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”. It means “I know, but nonetheless I…”
It enables the individual to keep up an attachment to a belief despite knowing it is an illusion - or a problem in itself.
The slovenly Slovene fought through his tics to say that when we know something but pretend not to this creates dramatic tension. Zizek said that cinema was the ultimate “pervert’s art” -
“It does not tell you what to desire, but how to desire”.
The spectacle which schools our lives is a form of performance.
It is the animation of spectator populations with consuming desires, produced for the benefit of the sponsors of the messages. Public opinion is a matter of mediumship to communicate with spirits which are and are not there. What is in fact supplied is a darkness presented as illumination, delivering us into a mauve zone, a permanent ultraviolet hour whose enchantment is only broken by the intrusion of the real.
When we watch the spectacle of Western power we are not watching Dr Strangelove or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, but a flock of seagulls circling a fishing boat. It does not matter to the gulls whether the catch is landed or not.
If the boat sinks they will chase another. As long as they remember what they pretend not to know they will always find a sardine to feast on. We are fed fantasies by seagulls who seem to have forgotten the shore, and the hungry mouths which wait there.
The enchantment of this performance relies on the audience not wanting to acknowledge what they know about the actors, and also on knowing what the characters on (or in) camera don’t whilst being unable to warn them.
In the display of our political economy we cannot warn any of the actors, as they already know what is wrong and their career relies on them never saying so. We know that for them to state the obvious is The End.
To listen to us is to forgo the boat, the fish, and the flights of fancy which bore them aloft. And so they can hear no evil.
The pursuit of footballers like Eric Cantona in 1995 was a performance of a different order. The sardines sought from him were of cheap sensation and fleeting scandal, more for the sake of a splash than the catch.
The faction of political distraction has developed its technique. It is wise to remember that sins are equally of omission as commission.
The scandal with the political class is the silence on what is real, is the clamour over what is not. The splash that is not made now sounds the loudest.
What is routinely reported and represented is often anything but the case. Personal peccadilloes are landed like prize tuna whenever some power move demands some politician is ritually sacrificed. Ponzi scheme pretences are piffled up to repackage dire consequences as enemy action, when the actors are at home, and their activities far more damaging than any foes foreign or domestic.
The terrible decisions which have made terrible conditions for us all to endure escape the hook and the resulting clickbait. The biggest fish are never landed. Glittering minnows are tossed to feed the five thousand seconds of our weekly news cycle.
Reality is toxic. Speak no evil.
ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
There is no difference between foreign and domestic policy. It is clear now that ordering chaos abroad delivers it to your home. In many dimensions the way we have been ruled has produced a disaster, from mass migration to bankruptcy, to a collapse in belief in the agreement capability of our states and in the electoral process itself.
We have been managed into an omnicrisis.
As in Europe, the corridors of power are closed to all but their own internal dialogue - with political power a sort of sealed knot that cannot be untied, only cut, by some crisis or other.
The political technique of the 20th century relies on the production of an idea of reality through the dominance and direction of mass culture. This machinery is more refined than ever, and the result today is not total control. It is the growing recognition that the manufacture of mass belief has created a spellbinding spectacle of near universal disenchantment. Its magic is broken by the reality it was created to replace, and its output now seems absurd, an insult to the intelligence and daily experience of the viewer.
It is like a Panglossian engine which instructs you to see none of the evil created by a political class whose survival relies on remaining, at least in their own minds, disconnected from the consequences of their actions and dedicated to a doctrine of counter-reality.
REALITY IS A CAREER-ENDING MEME
These consequences are so severe that to place a taboo on accurately describing reality is a matter of survival.
The wars have bankrupted a West which America was supposed to lead to global hegemony. The international liberal system is collapsing as its supply chains break down due to the latest catastrophic adventures in Russia and Iran. The real life costs of these conflicts will continue to cascade through the lives of the ruled, which have been ruled into disorder by a ruling establishment sponsored by the very machine which is breaking everything.
DC is at once an actual and virtual reality. Americans and America are rarely seen or heard in it. Everything but the air conditioning seems breaking down or broken, the youth have no faith in their elders, the politics sclerotic, pantomimic and paranoid, reduced to personal interest invested in a cross-party partisanship which contradicts the interests of the United States as a State, as a civilisation, and as the American people.
This is not just about America. The same filth and fury pervades the cities of the West. A formless anger is finding its way in the dark to the shining cities on the hill. We have all been plundered. The thirdworldisation of the Western world is not only obvious in the peopling of our streets, but in their greasy state. Where has the money gone?
Someone has to pay for all this. Our lives are pregnant with unpaid debts, reliability replaced by liabilities, a common tragedy of broken windows, corrupt institutions, soaring costs and vanishing benefits. The sunk costs of the dying order are sinking the ship of state, itself becalmed in the clammy dead air of desperate misdirection. The only breath in its sails seems to be the whisper of scurvy and of mutiny.
I did not think that anything could make me feel better about London, but going to Washington D.C. did the trick. The degree of paralysis in the face of the terrible obvious is suffocating.
Each man sees himself in what he eyes. To some men are fish to be baited, to others, consumed. If there is nothing more to a man than snares and sensation, devouring and designs he will mistake success in these ways for wisdom. These human voices wake us or we drown.
There is little sense of salvation in this system today, tomorrow will be different. That much is certain. Supply does not match and cannot meet demand.
Who will feast and to whom the famine is the question.
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I hope to talk to you about the Restore Britain conference soon, with some commentary on the domestic political crisis in Britain and in Europe.
One of the great dichomities being revealed is the difference between the personal qualities needed to be good at getting elected and the qualities needed to be good at governing. The latter appears to have been sacrificed on the altar of the former. Add into this mess the meglomaniacs that have forgotten that politics is the "art of the possible," not "I can do anything," and you get the pathos that we all see in the body politic nowadays. They are also way in over their head with respect to understanding and responding effectively to the "wicked" problems the world currently faces - the administration's recent A.I. comments being an example of that.
Utterly brilliant, Frank. You’ve sussed out the system and explain it like no one else. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!