It took me years to figure out that “progressive” isn’t a synonym for genius, and “conservative” isn’t a synonym for criminal, and vice versa. I happen to like Michael Moore, for example, for what he does, not always for what he says. I like Chomsky, what I’ve heard, Suzuki, for what he tries to do, most Greens for the ideas, if not the methods.
That said, there seems to be an industry of ideologies which has all the healthy spontaneity of a game show. The most truly tragic case is/was feminism. It’s not the only one, and the damage was that it put the issues out of sight, where somebody apparently thinks they should be. There are a lot of feminist support groups that do work nobody else seems prepared to touch, despite the media-pariahdom. As an ideology, however, feminism has managed to do horrible damage to itself with the assistance of media. Not because the ideas are any less valid or important now than they were 40 years ago, not because the real women’s issues are usually shunted well off the front pages, but because the entire movement seems to have become saturated with pedants, feeding at the endless trough of mass culture.
Feminism was the original PC flag-waver, after racism. An important series of issues, with a strong backing. The basis for all the dogged attempts to turn women into human beings, and with some success. A lot of valid points were made, and it seemed that the roar would go on forever. What was overlooked in the euphoria was the environment in which it had to function.
To expose any sort of rational process to the Global Five Second Attention Span is to kill it. Add “dumb” as the basis of your communications strategy, and why would anyone bother getting out of bed? Anything, however vital, can now become a sort of shampoo commercial, like safe sex and AIDS awareness. “Be less infected, more alive, with whatever, now back to our show about what happens when nymphomania and satyriasis meet”. Real attention getter, isn’t it? That mass media is more often than not a curse to communication shouldn’t be a revelation to anyone.
There’s another problem, and feminism got the worst possible version of it. Most of the marketing of anything on Earth is essentially a product of suburban mindsets. The great spiritual horizon is the bank statement and the ephemera of “daily life” as expressed over the last few decades by cliché ridden idiots. To get these people handling the interests of half of humanity was not a good idea. This is the same group of geniuses that translates anything into a sitcom. The brilliant minds that will write a letter to somebody using five paragraphs to tell them something they already know, and think it’s a masterpiece of communications science.
It is also the group which maintains the continuity in terms of human perspectives. The people who are determined to live in 1950, whatever it costs. Feminism, awash with enthusiasm and sincerity, didn’t, and couldn’t, quite know what it was getting into. The priorities were too different. Like many other social issues, feminism was an issue that got air time mainly when it became unavoidable. Not because the various outlets had suddenly become humanists overnight. How many headlines are lost topics within a week? A lot.
To make things that much more difficult, to use communications media effectively, you have to use their methodologies. That is how they work. In fairness, to some degree it’s how they have to work, but for the feminist movement it was a very long way from their forte. Before long, the letter was writing the person. It followed logically that the sort of people used to express views were the ones who could do so in accordance with the norms of the various media. Enter euphemism as a way of life.
This process devolved into the creation of a tool which just couldn’t do its job. A brief look at the way issues were handled is enough to illustrate this process. In the early days of feminism, the big issues were all that mattered. Discrimination, abuse, single mothers…..reality, actually, in a female perspective. Phase 2 was the beginning of the unproductive cycle. From mass rapes and misery, the topics of interest changed to billboards, the use of the word “person” and interpreting advertising. The highly articulate arguments of the founding era were replaced by a lot of strident and ultimately useless digressions into what seemed to be everything but important issues.
It didn’t help that anything on two legs able to call itself a feminist was getting airtime, and that their methods of expression were guaranteed to turn off a lot of people, particularly, it would appear, the people whose interests they were so verbosely failing to represent. That feminism has survived in any form is more thanks to the tenacity of those working to the original ideas, than to the sort of talkback/game show methods this period created.
So, when a woman gets a clitorectomy from a machete, or turned into confetti by her delightful male partner, several things happen. One, a group of people get outraged over a tacky billboard showing a bit of anatomy. Two, the physical realities of the events, if they ever get a mention, are translated into medium-language, the broad generic, the utterly useless expressions of anger about generalities which are keeping our hospitals and morgues so busy lately. Not a lot more than usual gets done about the women reduced to kit form. Self righteousness is a wonderfully insular process. Then someone else comes on the screen and starts talking about some new form of snake oil which will improve your sex life; topic closed.
But why? I’ve used feminism as the example, because it has suffered most from the translation of very serious issues into pabulum. It’s not the only victim. The fact is that humanity is suffering from a bad case of its own idiom of existence. Modern “life”, to be very casual in the use of the word, is now the life of something trapped in an infrastructure of compulsory processes. The mass mentality which is bred in a slum, conceptual or actual, among the mundane and the mindless isn’t a very highly developed thing. More alarmingly, the usual reaction to an environment is to adapt to it, not realize it’s a death trap and burn it down. The lives people are born with are what they will accept. The more comfortable they think they are, the more likely they are to accept anything.
Humanity manipulated its environment, and has created an environment which now manipulates it. Humans have to react to it, rather than control it. The vast, flabby, inertial mass burdens everyone with the requirements of life on its terms. People live and die, work and breed, and that’s all there is to it? From the caves to the graves, please form a line. Seems rather a waste. Yet, how many try to get out of it, or even think they should? For one thing, it’s a known factor, something people are used to.
People have tried. Alternative societies usually come apart because they aren’t far enough out of the social event horizon to escape. Short of entering a monastery or convent, it’s not easy to avoid. Most, however, adapt and remain within the social structure. They have to speak the language, eat the food, and “live” if they can.
This conceptual coma has become an article of faith in the urban/suburban context. Every facet of human life is now a massively amplified reflection of some half arse effort to relate to it. Of course everyone’s a street kid. There are no people over 35. Nobody earns less than a million a year. Poverty is cool. Wear a suit, and you become a human being. Agree with everyone about everything, and you have a high social IQ. Your intellect is drastically improved by some diseased effervescent geek asking rhetorical questions like “Will Amber and Herpes get it on at last?” and whispering into a mike.
But people make a living doing these things, from producing crap to marketing crap to buying crap because everyone else has it. Therefore it’s normal. It must be done this way. Nobody questions where their money comes from; they only care about where it goes, and why it goes there. The ultimate weapon of the Great Mundane is income. It is who you are, according to someone. Doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, we can sell it to somebody. So the world’s turning into a garbage-covered sauna…..well, that’s interesting, people seem concerned, perhaps we can get someone to pay us to talk about it. Maybe even do some merchandising….
That’s exactly what happens. The disaster becomes someone’s job. Gravy trains are born as a result of someone turning on the tap of human need. There are actual armies of mental health and social welfare organizations. Since their inception, both schizophrenia and depression have become extremely common, globally, particularly among the poor. The equation, so far, is like Parkinson’s Law; the more money and resources you throw at a problem, the worse it gets. If there’s a global disaster somewhere, you get more information about how plutocrats and celebrities feel about it than you do actual information, and the area will be filled to bursting point with film crews and suddenly publicized nobodies making “statements” while the population continues to die, usually in the tens of thousands.
More impressively, human need creates all the basics of an industry; demand, supply, communications, economics, experts, executives, a whole infrastructure derived from something that never needed to happen at all. The star on the top of this Christmas tree is that no objective is ever set. Feminism was based on the reality of the second class status of women. Legally, for nearly half a century, there has been no basis whatsoever for that status. Equal pay, for example, is a right for equal work, and always has been. The fact was that women just weren’t paid accordingly. There was nothing really set in marble that said women shouldn’t be paid equally, they just never were. The feminist arguments about rights were always perfectly valid in any context you care to name.
Yet, within 20 years, we’d degenerated to side issues as a topic of contention, while all the old abuses went on worse than ever, and the female sex slave industry, affecting millions of people, roared to life around the world, without a mention from anyone. Particularly the self-proclaimed guardians of the PC ethos, none of whom have so far deigned to comment on such merely contemporary matters. At least they’re consistent; the outworkers and maquiladora serfs also took about a decade to rate a brief burst of well-groomed outrage, and absolutely no material result.
(It’s interesting that the conservative side has only recently had to address these situations at all, and its strange, awkward ventures into these areas are so innocent. If you’re a conservative you can safely disapprove of anything, but every time a conservative talks about poverty as something other than a sport, I keep expecting to see Walt Disney pop up somewhere.)
Issues about human rights and needs are now managed like governments. You can pay someone to run things for you, and they can make a career out of it. The problem is therefore running the process, not the problem. Having become a means of earning income, the inevitable laziness and corruption seep into issue management. It is quite possible to hold an important job which affects literally millions of people, and do nothing of any note. Exactly like government. Some people also make a point of doing as little as possible to earn their income. With them come the pedants, the creators and preservers of procedural bliss who roam the management hierarchies being indispensable. These are the inevitable bureaucrats we can’t live without, who are hired by the do-nothings to do their work for them. They look good, they talk interminably, usually in the most PC manner possible relative to whoever they’re dealing with. They shine like beacons to other mediocrities, who promptly also put themselves on the payroll.
Everything about them is acceptable to anyone. The ultimate facilitators. They understand how things happen and what’s expected of them and any other bloody cliché you can find. They will not act without precedent, and certainly not without approval. If anything is to be broadcast, said, or done, it has to go through them, to be put on air by people like them. Management can sleep forever in the certainty that nothing human will disturb it. That’s why they hire the pedants. When the pedants move in, fossilization has occurred.
The pedants aren’t just morons. They thrive on lack of substance. They’re very good at what they don’t do. Much work will occur, deadlines, meetings, frenzied admissions of self importance, but no actual objective result. The pedants are perfectly evolved to the present world order. Their adaption to life is to ensure that it’s no threat to them. The suggestion of the world being in a bit of bother could worry them only so far as it affects their nest eggs. To them, anything is just a way of making a living. They thrive in media, because everything is a timeslot, a passing part of the endless production process. Everything is just another show. Feminism in its original incarnation never stood a chance against this sort of mindset. Neither does any other sort of issue.
The general ethos and idiom of any medium, TV, radio, or the net, is essentially sales. Add to this the submersion of the entire human communications capacity in eternal budgeting, and making sure every middleman on the planet is properly paid for breathing and inflating its production costs….. Then include everyone who thinks they can make money supplying a demand for feminism, or diapers, or support groups, and you’ve got a real little cottage industry. Interestingly, that’s how hippiedom first got noticed. The hustlers of the day realized they could sell it to someone. Relevance is a sales figure.
A series of gravy trains is created the minute some poor sincere bastard tries to achieve anything. Sales uber alles has no idea how to be anything else, and wouldn’t understand a social responsibility if it gave birth to it. This is the vehicle with which people are trying to move ideas. It’s a pretty dodgy machine. The drivers are usually insular, insane, or ignorant, and that’s just the ones that are awake. At a normal fuel economy of something like twenty words (10 seconds) broadcast per X thousand dollars, it’s not a very efficient form of transport.
It should also be understood that this conceptual jalopy only goes from A to B, because the mental load gets a bit heavy for the vehicle. So, for example, if A = life, and B = enjoying it, C is off the map, they’ve never heard of it, like personal hygiene, and D, which might be actual good health, is just pure fiction, and too far to go. To get to C is very unlikely, and D is out of the question. The fares, however, are high, particularly for excess baggage, like facts or ideas. Gravy trains are the only form of public transport that never runs at a loss.
The society of salespeople has similarly managed to create an all purpose identity for itself. That identity is largely unchallenged. The ideal person is rich, therefore successful, therefore has a degree, status, and all the material possessions which can be quantified as success. Nobody is deliberately educated outside the concept, because nobody is paid to do that. Education, for those wondering or who have forgotten, is to prepare for successful life in society. If the criteria is to be a materially blessed gerbil, that’s what you are trained to be. If, somehow, the skills and mentality of a gerbil aren’t the same as those of a person able to comprehend basic physical facts about the realities of life on Earth, it’s not surprising. Unfortunately for the gerbils, the various gravy trains are the only information transport which they know how to use. They are not experienced, or adventurous, travelers, and they assume, like many other commuters, that the trains have a schedule. Having arrived at B, further progress is debatable. They’re just as likely to go back to A, if they go anywhere else, because they knew where they were, at A. C is a not necessarily compulsory extension of the journey, as far as they know, and D would be pure tourism.
I’ve lost count of the number of highly trained, intelligent people/gerbils I’ve met who are literally lost in the middle of sentences, let alone ideas. Some are able to contradict themselves, not only literally, but conceptually, within half a sentence in the course of trying to express themselves on any subject. If you accidentally string two sentences together in anything other than baby talk, with no clear causative association, they ask something like, “What are we talking about now?” They’re not actually stupid. Some are even quite nice people, when they’re able to be people. It’s just that somehow they don’t make the association between two consecutive sentences. These are the people to whom the chicken crossing the road is a mystery which they are greatly relieved to have explained. Otherwise they’d worry, and never finish their theses on mental health policy. Chicken Little may have got started that way.
It’s training, or in this case imprinting. They’ve just been spoon fed to the point that they think everything’s a lecture, or supposed to be one. Even a book must stick to itself, literally. I saw a book called 1000 Storyline Problems, or something equally inspiring, in 6 point font, well over 500 pages. Real gerbil-fodder, at its worst. This is another gravy train, the accepted self-justification express, showing logical continuity because otherwise the gerbil can’t sell the book to a publisher. The mere implication of a storyline problem can destroy some books before they get to a reader, because “that’s how we do things”. Similarly, no literary issues are involved: the entire issue is pure process, another version of the social machinery that handles ideas, and is the basis for people’s careers. Somebody will actually be paid to be as unimaginative and pedantic as possible, and there’s the environment. Can’t you imagine some frantic lost author rummaging feverishly about in this swamp of syntax looking for the answer to what happens when Jack and Jill go up the hill he forgot to mention in the preceding 15 chapters? Well, you can understand the natural concern that the reading public will be aghast at the sudden appearance of a hill... although I would have thought it was a good way of selling medication to go with the books…
Then there’s the subsidiary industry of misinterpretation for profit. Even more frightening than mere relevance, what if someone thinks the hill is a subtle metaphor for underage sex in pails of water at high altitudes, and complains to someone? In desperation, the terrified gerbil-author rewrites the preceding chapters to ensure that everyone knows that Jack is a eunuch and Jill is gay, and so is the hill, so he can cash in on the impotent demographic and appease about 25% of everyone else he’s ever met at the same time. Not because he has any views whatever on impotence, or homosexuality, or hills, that’s how he’s been taught to deal with writing problems. It’s also how the publisher will look at his work; never mind what it’s about, …. who’s the market? A fairly broad spectrum of society, in this case; rewritten eunuchs, fictional gays, and sexually blameless hills. The author has escaped. Then somebody tells him that conjugating a verb doesn’t mean having sex with it, and he has to redo that bit…. Everything has a How To manual, and that’s how things will be done.
This, humans, is the machinery of failure as a species. If a disaster isn’t in the manual, it can’t exist, like Greenhouse, over-fishing, MTV market research, or Eurovision. Goosestep on down to your local sitcom, find a person/gerbil character you can imitate, and don’t bother being yourself, because nobody would recognize you. It’d make a great conspiracy theory, this state of human life, if it wasn’t so obviously a result of chronic stupidity and mental laziness. What price the chance that this sort of society-by-infant-primer-think can deal with something as demanding as feminism, environmentalism, human rights, or anything else?
In the Great Mundane, everything is about that wonderful person, Homo Spreadsheet, the ideal human, abstracted to the point of irrelevance and impotence, the prefect subject for Rent-A-Eulogy.