Reading Assange and Manning Through Zizek's Criminality of Law and Order

Zizek's Introduction is Perfect.

Snowden Escaped Barely in Time Thanks to Assange

Foucault's Genealogy of Parrhesia- From Ancient Greece

Write to Assange in Solidarity

Manning Back in Jail. Obama Waited Too Long to Free Her

Zizek's Introduction

....anarchist outbursts are not a transgression of the Law and Order; in our societies , anarchism already is in power wearing the mask of Law and Order - our Justice is the travesty of Justice, the spectacle of Law and Order is an obscene carnival - the point made clear by the arguably greatest political poem in English, Shelley's 'The Mask of Anarchy', which describes the obscene parade of the figures of power:

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came anarchy: he rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood,

He was pale even to the lips,

Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;

And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

On his brow this mark I saw - 

'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

And is not this Hegelian-Chestertonian shift from the criminal transgression of Law and Order to Law and Order itself as the highest criminal transgression directly enacted by Mao (read the US here)  himself? This is why, while setting in motion and secretly pulling the strings of the self-destructive carnival, Mao nonetheless remained exempt from its turbulence: at no moment was there ever a serious threat that Stalin (or Mao) himself would be ritualistically deposed, treated as 'yesterday a king, today a beggar' - he was not the traditional Master, but the 'Lord of Misrule':

And who is our Lord of Misrule? Trump? Congress? Or all of them? 

NO

It is the reign of today's global capitalism which is the true LORD OF MISRULE!

ZIZEK

HILLARY'S EMAILS!ALL OF THEM!

Where Are Her Emails? 

Here They Are! Why Kenneth Goldsmith Printed Out All 60,000 of Hillary Clinton’s Emails for His New Show in Venice

Kenneth Goldsmith’s “HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails” is on view at Despar Teatro Italiano, Campiello de l’Anconeta, 1944, 30121 Venezia, May 9–November 24, 2019.

So Goldsmith didn't think they were so bad. I read the ones posted in a column on my timeline and I was appalled.
To me they were exactly like those nasty notes sent in high school to certain people from certain people.
Yes it was just like high school.
Only Hillary wanted to be president of my country and interact with rulers of other countries,
only she was still in high school.
That is the mentality of Hillary Clinton.
I dont want high school to rule the world for me.

TRUMPS TRAP - Trumps Wall Getting Stone Walled!

Fast Food for Congressional Critters to Debate his Wall

Or is it TRUMPS TRICK

HEADS HE WINS, TAILS HE DOESN'T LOSE

HEADS THEY LOSE, TAILS THEY DONT WIN

IT'S CALLED A CATCH-22 REMEMBER

IF HE GETS HIS WALL, HE WINS. IF HE DOESN'T HE GETS TO MAKE FOOLS OF HOW THEY ARE STONE-WALLING HIM AND HE WILL DO A TRUMAN AND RUN AGAINST CONGRESS AND THROW THEM OUT OF OFFICE

So he begins with a lunch of Fast food. 

It is a very funny INSULT! 

Did he really do this?

Trump set the trap, closed the door by shutting down the gummint. Then he padlocked it by instituting a danger shutdown involving DANGER to the American people. Oh my! All they have said so far is that he is behaving improperly. You know how parents tell you you are being impolite when you say the truth directly and embarrass them. That. They have no other DISCOURSE but their everyday Political Discourse and still dont realize they are in it. Well ya know, the fish doesn't get water either until she is out of it.

Trump refuses to play ball on their playing field of Political Discourse and they cannot follow him and mirror him. Alexandria Ocasio - Cortez does though. She is the woman Trump has been waiting for all his life. She is his biggest challenge. She mirrors him and BEATS him! She makes a statement with her clothes, her hair, her makeup down to her finger nails. She is on his wavelength and one ups him on the way. Poor Melania couldn't even get the message on her jacket right then flubbed her explanation. Oh well, she is beautiful and that takes a lot of time to remain well preserved as you age. And you know how Trump throws the old ones under the bus. 

Congress closed the gummint on Clinton and he waited until they felt the pressure and gave in.

Trump has flipped it. Inverted it and done it himself to put them in a Catch-22. 

Now the neo-liberals and the neo-cons are cooperating with each other against Trump. What we knew all along was really one playing good cop/bad cop

is now visible!

Trump's Trap of demanding his wall is a trick of strategy waylaying Washington D.C. political critters. The trap was open, they walked in, Trump shut the door and locked it with his shutting down the government. Congress did this to Clinton and he bluffed them and won. It has been threatened but this is the first time a sitting prez did it. I think anyway. Be careful what you do as it can be inverted and turned against you. Now the precedent has been set for a president to close up shop. Gulp.

U Cant See Anyone But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

When people noticed the monochromatic look, Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter, writing, "I wore all-white today to honor the women who paved the path before me, and for all the women yet to come. From suffragettes to Shirley Chisholm, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mothers of the movement."

Is that SAVVY or is it SAVVY!

And there's more. Her red lipstick, fingernails and gold hoop earrings like

 SONIA SOTOMAYOR!

HER BRAIDS

INSTAGRAM!

And her suit is not a knockoff of a Hillary suit. Makes Hillary now look old timey too even though she is not here. 

She is more here by being absent.

Trump loves her I bet. AOC I mean. 

She is his biggest challenge as she knows his game and plays it better.

Cortez is doing PROTEST. 

This is

PERFORMANCE ART FOLKS.

This is one way to do it. Copy it and it will get boring.

SEPARATING CHILDREN FROM ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

The MESSAGE of this separation of children makes it an EVENT. A Foucauldian CUT in strategy.

Actually it is an excellent strategy. for accomplishing what the state wishes to accomplish. Now I look at it genealogically:

Those entering illegally may also have been considering using their children as kinds of hostages. Taking them creates problems for the US that they probably don't want to have. Maybe it will help if we take them?

BUT it continues separation as a PRECEDENT for obedience to the STATE, as it has genealogically in the past when it was done for the same reasons.

Sparta did it to raise warriors. The Catholic church did it without doing it but "give me a child until s/he is 6 and they will be mine forever. Hitler did it with Hitler Youth and if you have ever met any of them as middle aged adults they will tell you it was the happiest time of their life, the most free.

Ok now we did it to Native Americans. I once had an Inuit patient - depressive and alcoholic. His story was that he was one of 7 - 8? - brothers. His father had a wonderful family, large and cohesive and they would have done very well in their community. But all the children were taken and sent to US schools. My patient told me that they were not allowed to speak their own language and any infraction meant they would have to walk - run? - the gauntlet where they ran naked in the cold and were whipped as they ran to the end of it.

So separation means that children will not speak their parents's language and will be adapted into the ruling culture by the foster families - schools in Native American experience. And this is the MESSAGE! The content is irrelevant as McLuhan tells us so empathizing with the terrified and distraught parents over the loss of their children WILL NOT BE EFFECTIVE.

All it will do is make you feel better at expressing your feelings of injustice about it. It will not help them.

At the same time the parents who wish to enter illegally with their children are put in a catch-22. They want their freedom to make a new life. But they risk losing their children - biologically their DNA. This is a sort of Sophie's Choice alternative.

Different potential immigrants will feel differently maybe? It may present them with a choice they secretly wish for. It may not. We cannot know. But this action has been made in The Order of Production of the State and it is being criticized in the Symbolic Order of Exchange and Death.

Or to look at it and read it through McLuhan who has told us not to use moral justifications to oppose a state decision that frightens us and sickens us. Capitalism wishes these immigrants to come in illegally. It means really cheap labor. These were the ones used for ripping out asbestos, for doing demo, the dirty and health dangerous jobs the unions prohibited without stringent restrictions that were very costly.

The CONSEQUENCES for the STATE that Trump's decision will continue for decades, forever. These children will have a variety of experiences from great to horrific. Certainly someone who was a Jesuit careful thinker as Jefferson might have considered the future waves that would come from kidnapping Africans and putting them into slavery in a country founded on the freedom for all.

We are still paying for their actions and will continue into infinity it seems. The same is going to be true for Trump's action. 

AND THIS IS WHAT THE OPPOSITION MUST CONSIDER OPPOSING AND FORBIDDING IT ON! 

It's horrible consequences NOT   Oh  those poor people losing their children.

That is true but it won't work.

Liken it to slavery where children were separated and sold to others. We did it before and the long term results were so horrible we are still suffering from them.

If I think genealogically - FOUCAULT -  about issues more comes up for me to think about, so I am sharing that here.

Let’s Dump on Trump Some More-Hey It Rhymes!

Scapegoating On Trump Again

A huge dump of information on Trump's doings in India.

As if no one knew that all big real estate deals involve unbridled corruption and payoffs. And as Foucault said, "Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not knowing." So the long lived zine continues on its path of least resistance, Trump bashing. It is pages long and detailed. And this is what pays the bills for journalists. And not just recently.

It seems few have read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and fully understood her deconstruction of the media - newspapers. Raising the Banner to the level of mediocrity to dominate the minds of the mediocracy (that Ellsworth Toohey has programmed) that read it until they can be told and sold (what happens when reading Nietzsche) on anything you want.

Go on read it again until you get it

The title has an addition: Trump Inc. and the corruption of the American Presidency. Well well that's something NEW? When did it stop? Hearst said, "I don't report the news, I make the news." Isn't that plain enough. What is new about the corrupt media displacing on Trump for corruption?

Got me.

Inside this edition is the article Anti-Intelligence another bashing one on Trump.

Ironically, much of the danger Trump poses can be laid at the feet of Barack Obama. Assuming that past norms would be future norms, Obama created the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever seen.. Over eight years, he spent more than $100 billion on everything from eavesdropping satellites encircling the globe, to a million-square-foot building in the Utah desert for storing massive troves of intercepted data, to secret taps on the hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables that carry everything from tweets to Google searches to endless chatter. He also unleashed fleets of killer drones around the world, authorized the assassination of Americans without trial, and jailed more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. (p.17)

Ya still didn't get Snowden didja honey?

While blaming Obama for not seeing consequences - Clintons on student debt,3 strikes, repeal of Glass-Steagall etc - I ask when did the last president ever see the consequences of his actions? I cant remember. Someone tell me please!


Whistleblowers are not whistleblowers. They are PARRHESIASTES and Foucault's genealogy on this term goes back to ancient times.

parrhesia

Obama punished more than all previous administrations combined. 

This indicates fear/hatred or maybe even terror/rage

There is no question that Putin started being agressed against when he gave Snowden asylum. A great humiliation for the Free World eh. An inversion from our giving asylum from the USSR Cold War. Two can play this game.

So now Trump is the evil one for being able to use the evil Obama unleashed on us and the world. Does that just make Obama a dummy? Or does it make Obama evil? I know what I think. Do you? (Ssssshhhhh. How about BOTH?)


Wait a minute. Suppose the consequences are different. The spy industry is institutionalized which means it will continue after a presidential administration is forgotten history. But the danger to wives, husbands, children family are still dangers. They will depend on the spy industry to protect them and "their loved ones" in all the years to come. But what happens if they confront the spy industry? Will they take exceptional precautions for you? 

Trump has his own security detail. He trusts them NOT.

The above paragraph is absolute VIOLENCE! And that is not worse than anything Trump has even imagined so far? Gimme a break! and it is embedded in an article (SO WE PROBABLY WONT NOTICE) with tons more information that is not knowledge  - and knowledge is not knowing.

And we are supposed to respect journalists, even from a well thought of zine like The New Republic? A zine that has accumulated respect for decades, over a hundred years isn't it now? Even good journalists are unable to openly tell the truth and they haven't been ever.

EVER!

Can we please be reminded of Chomsky's 

Manufacturing of Consent

Why a Journalist can NEVER tell us the Truth

All the truthtellers have been manufactured out of their jobs.
You know. They disrupt the discourse, have their own opinions, disagree, argue with the editors and they are weeded out sooner or later and censored before they can do any damage.

Hopefully the resistance that Trump has spawned will make them braver but I haven't seen much evidence of that yet. 

Have you?

Reading Donald Trump Through Marshall McLuhan: Part 3 BANNING

Trump Signing An Executive Order-One of Many

Recently Trump signed an executive order repealing the ban Obama made on waste dumping into rivers, streams, etc.

Trump is subverting many other environmental BANS.

What is a BAN? 

It is a law that makes dumping - in this case - illegal. What does illegal entail? Only that it is a VIOLATION and a violation comes equipped with a FINE. Now if a corporation dumps into a river and a $200,000 or $300,000 or $1,000,000,000 fine gets slapped on them - IF THEY ARE CAUGHT AND PROSECUTED - their lawyers on retainer will take it to court, get multi continuances, drag it out as long as possible to forestall paying this fine for this violation. 

Meanwhile back at the ranch it would take say $6,000,000,000 to deal with the waste without dumping. So by dumping they save $6,000,000,000 and prolong the violation payment and perhaps even get it waived.

THESE FINES ARE HIDDEN TAXES FOR DOING BUSINESS

Obama banned waste dumping in rivers. He was cheered and loved for taking an environmental stand with integrity. Banning is CONTENT. What is the MESSAGE here of the Presidential MEDIUM? 
So Obama used banning as PR and as a way to collect HIDDEN TAXES.

Not so shabby eh.

AND INVISIBLE!!!!!!

Anything that is BANNED can be UNBANNED. 

A child's game of building a HOUSE OF CARDS.Build it up so another child can knock it down. 

Build it up knock it down.

This goes on through the decades as now LBJ's Great Society is being dismantled piece by piece and FDR's New Deal also.

But hey. Look at all the good PR Obama got by BANNING DUMPING!

Look at all the BAD PR Trump is getting by unbanning dumping. Sorry, unbanning appeals to a large segment of his constituency, while banning appealed to a large segment of Obama's constituency. Different strokes for different folks.

All that I said above is CONTENT. As McLuhan says, "CONTENT" is irrelevant. 

Obama's Ban had no teeth in it. It was never meant to have anything but gummy gums. 

It was a SPECTACLE concealing the REAL of EMPTINESS.

Were you fooled?

Are you still fooled?

My question is this: 
Is Trump using these executive orders as TEACHING MOMENTS to educate us on the futility of demanding bans on what we don't like? Is he using unbanning as a way of telling us that federal agencies are scamming us. IF they collect $$$$ from violations then their bottom line looks good eh. These federal agencies exist to collect hidden taxes.

So the MESSAGE is what?

Reading Trump Through Marshall McLuhan:The MEDIUM is the MESSAGE

The MEDIUM Is the MESSAGE

The CONTENT Is IRRELEVANT

Meanwhile back at the ranch online all discussion concerns CONTENT.

Especially his LIES

Trump LIES at least 6 times every day some stat person said. On Monday he says X and on Tuesday he contradicts X and on Wednesday he contradicts what he said on Tuesday and so on and so on as Vonnegut always said.

Trump lies excessively. He lies worse and worser. He is the worsest liar of all.

This is Nietzsche. You want to get rid of something? You do it WORSE and WORSER!

EXCESSIVELY!

The focus on CONTENT allows distraction to rule. 

ALL POLITICIANS LIE AND HAVE LIED TO US FOREVER. 

Is this something new? Nope. 

The Trump Administration is a MEDIUM. 

The MEDIUM is the MESSAGE.

The CONTENT is IRRELEVANT.

So what is the MESSAGE in Trump's public display of LIES?

The Message is INVISIBLE. 

It is GROUND not FOCUS.

My reading is that Trump's lies are in your face. 

Trump's LIES are SLAPS in your face. 

They are meant to HIT you in the face. 

They are DIRECT, obviously lies, often disgusting, and relentless.

What is the truth in the lies?The message in the bombardment of lies? The excessiveness of Trump's lies? Are Trump's lies to be perceived as truth or as lies? 

That is the question.

We have always been lied to. From George Washington's I cannot tell a lie I did chop down the cherry tree to this cascade of lies from Trump.

What is the message? Is it still invisible to you?

All of them lie all the time. They always lie and they always did lie. 

Then there are lies that are wearing the MASK of TRUTH.

Is Trump lying directly or is he lying his lies with the MASK of TRUTH covering them?

5 Critical Essays in This Edition That Are Superb-Miller's especially

This is a profound question. Joseph Conrad poses it in 1899 in his Heart of Darkness. Conrad had said, "he wants his readers to THINK!"

Marlowe goes to see Kurtz's Intended at the end of the novel. She is deeply in mourning. 

He tells her Kurtz's last words which she is desperate to hear. 

Does he tell her the awful truth: "THE HORROR! THE HORROR!"

 He does not.

"His last words were.....your name."

"I knew it! I knew it," she says.

Marlowe gives her the lie MASKED by TRUTH. 

The question asked by Trump to the world is:

Do you want the direct lie or do you want the lie MASKED by TRUTH? Do you want the truth? Or do you want the truth wearing the MASK of lie?

So which do you want?

You can avoid choosing by a focus on CONTENT.

CHOMSKY  thinking would read this as surface structure of meaning and deep structure of meaning. The surface content and the INTENT. What is Trump's INTENT?

Is he trying to teach us or distract us?

A Reading of Derrick Jensen's ENDGAME Through Dostoevsky, Conrad and Cormac McCarthy

LINK

Derrick Jensen takes on civilization in this Volume 2. Almost 160 years after Dostoevsky first saw it coming. It is very late in the game now.

This edition contains many of his best short novels

This edition is translated with an introduction by David Magarshack and it is wonderful. From NOTES I am quoting:

...that to be too acutely conscious is a disease (p. 111)

...whatever happened, happened in accordance with the normal and fundamental laws of intensified consciousness and by a sort of inertia which is a direct consequence of those laws.....(p. 113)

He is stupid__I am not disputing that. But perhaps the normal man should be stupid. How are you to know? (p. 115)

...And what, pray, does civilization soften in us? All civilization does is to develop in man the many-sidedness of his sensations, and nothing, absolutely nothing more. And through the development of his many-sidedness man, for all we know, may reach the stage when he will find pleasure in bloodshed. This has already happened to him. Have you noticed that the most subtle shedders of blood have almost invariably been most civilized men, compared with whom all the Attilas and Stenka Razins were just innocent babes, and if they are not so outstanding as Attila or Stenka Razin it is because we meet them so often, because they are too ordinary, and because we have got used to them. At any rate, civilization has made man, if not more bloodthirsty, then certainly more hideously and more contemptibly bloodthirsty. In the past he looked on bloodshed as an act of justice and exterminated those he thought necessary to exterminate with a clear conscience; but now we consider bloodshed an abomination and we engage in this abomination more than ever. Which is worse? You'd better decide for yourselves. (p. 128)

He continues to deconstruct science as the cure and details how science will measure desires and limit risk for ready-made solutions. We are experiencing the assembly line manufacturing of desire for us.  All Dostoevsky said has come to pass. 

It is industrial society  that Dostoevsky condemns. And in 1862 abroad for the first time he goes to London and comes face to face for the first time with the industrial society which he regarded as the triumph of Baal. The thing that struck him most was the contrast between the colossal facade of riches, luxury,  and general prosperity of the few and the abject poverty of the many and their coolie-like acquiescence in their fate. In the face of such enormous riches, such immense pride of the spirit of domination, and such triumphant perfection of the creations of the spirit, Dostoevsky wrote in the April, 1863 issue of Vremya, in which he described his impressions of his first visit abroad, the starving soul is humbled and driven to submission, seeking salvation in gin and dissipation and beginning to believe that this is the way things ought to be. Facts oppress the spirit, and if scepticism is born, it is a gloomy, accursed sort of scepticism which seeks salvation in religious fanaticism. (xix)

There follows a description of London to break your heart.


In 1890 Conrad sets sail for The Congo which results in his masterpiece The Heart of Darkness.

1989 St. Martin's Press edition

 And again we have his horrifying novel of Marlowe telling of Kurtz who is a human accumulation of  European civilization. In this edition are five literary reviews of this classic work. Karl - also Conrad's biographer and a psychoanalyst - has written a devastating account of the coming apocalypse which is deconstructed by J. Hillis Miller in a different essay. The accumulation of IVORY to be shipped back to Britain and exported globally for artistic artifacts is chilling to anyone who reads through Foucault on default. We see graphically the intersection of the CUT into capitalism, mercantilism, of DETERRITORIALIZED CAPITALISM that is our state of world economic power today. It is not likely Conrad knew where in the jungle Kurtz was exploring to acquire such massive piles of ivory, more than all the other colonial traders together, operating under the MASK of being there for the purpose of bringing the savages to a civilized social existence. We know though. As Kurtz goes alone in his solitary journeys into the deep darkness of unexplored wild jungle to make contact with other tribes of natives, he is certainly shown the cemeteries of the elephants who make a pilgrimage to their burial grounds as a regular memorial to fondle the bones of their ancestors. How easy to gather up incredible amounts of what Kurtz labels reclaimed ivory in such volume as to amaze those back home in Britain. This is why the journey to him must be made, to import all this loot back home. And it comes at a terrible cost to the natives who have been conquered by the technological demonstration of such weapons as they have never imagined the existence of. Kurtz's dying words are the horror, the horror!  as he at last sees this horror brought into the world. This greed is far beyond the desire for the forbidden fruit in Eden. The destruction of a continent, the enslavement of its people, all for artifacts to be carved from the ivory over the dead bodies of elephants. And now these elephants plundered for the last 160 years are going extinct. 

This is Dostoevsky's vision of the future he sees. We are living it now, the Congo worse than it ever was, the world exploited and depleted.

Dostoevsky saw the unimaginable riches of the earth that could and would be exploited for world industrialization. 

Dostoevsky was a liberal before he stood waiting in front of the firing squad only to be part of a "joke." He was deported to Siberia to labor in a prison. The initial beginning of The Gulags.

When he served his time and returned to Russia he was no longer a liberal thinker. 

As ZIZEK has told us:

Liberal thinking contains the poison pill of its own destruction.

Liberalism teaches us to tolerate the intolerable.

Obama and Clinton were intolerable and INVISIBLE.

TRUMP is INTOLERABLE and VISIBLE.

This is what made Trump more acceptable to ZIZEK and to me.

I do like the MESSAGE of the MEDIUM of the Trump administration. Eyes have been opened and are being opened every day as he is so outrageous that ultimately he offends and enrages everyone last one of us. 

It is a pleasure. 

The Holocaust of North American Natives Beginning in 1849

BLOOD MERIDIAN is Cormac McCarthy's homage to Heart of Darkness. Its theme, its hidden apocalypse, and its characters. Conrad felt maybe he had symbolized Kurtz too much. McCarthy says no no a thousand times no and makes Judge Holden so excessive, so symbolic, so incredible, that Kurtz begins to seem rather normal.

The American has overreached the British monster.

Blood Meridian begins in 1849 when the American Government seeking to extend its reach to California now that gold has been discovered. The Gold Rush is to begin but it must have a clear  journey from east to west without Native Americans to impede it. The US government is paying $100 per single scalp to clean them out. It will be a 30,000,000 Holocaust, far beyond anything Hitler imagined or did to the Jews. It has been enfolded into amnesia in American history. At the end of it there remained 300,000 Native Americans herded onto reservations. Let's think of them as sanctuaries which is where many wild animals are now being transported to before all can go extinct. The ARK has been broken up into fragments scattered all over the world. Gone is the web of elephant ancestor memories, a Native American culture rich and different from the industrialized white man, and is just the stepping stone for a life of circumscribed imprisonment until the land is wanted for the exploitation of its riches. People will be dispossessed as will the wild animals.McCarthy ends his novel in 1862 and we see a depraved barbarian society of the west rivaling that of Dostoevsky's London in the same year. 

More horror. 

Anyone who disputes Jensen's call for the end of civilization needs to rethink their premises about any goodness to be preserved in this ongoing atrocity and horror of apocalypse. 

One is reminded of Isaiah and Jeremiah warning the Israelites to not defy the Assyrians at this time.

And while Rome burns we fiddle around.

Reading Donald Trump Through Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!#AmericaFirst #Trump2016 https://t.co/42OpVsjXjp

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2016

Look at this image.Trump's wife is in shocking pink upstaging the red of the American flag. Ivanka, his beautiful and intelligent and FEMINIST daughter is in black matching Trump. Neither is adoring him.

MCLUHAN:THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE or FIGURE/GROUND

McLuhan left the "cliche it became" and reframed his thinking into; 

Medium as GROUND and Content as FIGURE

Digressing and Summarizing: The Medium is the Message STATES that the Medium, the Media, the Technology IS THE MESSAGE. Its CONTENT is irrelevant. Print as the Medium most influential for 500 years was the TECHNOLOGY carrying the MESSAGE. Books, newspapers, etc provided the CONTENT. While content was debated, analyzed, critiqued, studied, written about, spoken about, thought about,like angels on the head of a pin in old timey times, the Message was embedding itself in our minds and bodies. This is "The Inscription of the Body" detailed by Nietzsche and elaborated by Foucault, it is invisible. We were unaware for centuries that the MESSAGE carried by the Medium  of PRINT was invisible. THE MEDIUM IS INVISIBLE. The content is visible.The GROUND is INVISIBLE, the FIGURE is VISIBLE. Children have no problem in perceiving Ground, but as adults trained in the linear reading of PRINT the Ground becomes INVISIBLE, the FIGURE - content -dominates the visual and thinking field for us adults.

We can no longer SEE the GROUND. It is INVISIBLE  to us.

?OK so far?

The ICONIC figure: 

MUHAMMAD ALI; MALCOLM, PRINCE, BEATLES, EINSTEIN et al and THE DONALD, TRUMP  are all ICONIC

Ali and The Beatles

What does McLuhan have to say about the ICONIC figure?

THE ICONIC FIGURE merges Figure/Ground in ONE figure. (Merges the Medium and the Message.)The context and the content are ONE.

This is easy to see in MUHAMMAD ALI, THE BEATLES, EINSTEIN because they are DEAD, finished, their works now part of our culture, and so can be seen WHOLLY instead of piecemeal as they emerge for us, when alive. IMO the same is true of great buildings, monuments but NOT as they were being built, only when finished, named, visited and worshiped. Music, art - Picasso, Pollack, Leonardo, et al - the same.

!TRUMP HAS EMERGED IN THIS CAMPAIGN AS A VISIBLE ICONIC FIGURE!

He has merged Figure/Ground - Medium and Content

The Media for the Masses  CONTINUES to focus on CONTENT. 

The MESSAGE of the MEDIA is INVISIBLE! AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN!

So what is the MESSAGE we are getting about Trump? What is the CONTENT we are getting about Trump?

That's easy too. The CONTENT we are getting is that he is racist,  brutal, inexperienced, a bully, etc. What is the MESSAGE of the MEDIUM we are getting? 

That is the real QUESTION.

What is the INVISIBLE GROUND?

FEAR!

THE POLITICAL DEBORDIAN SPECTACLE

The CAMPAIGN is a SPECTACLE

The PRESIDENTIAL FIGURE is a SPECTACLE

CONGRESS is a SPECTACLE

The AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is a SPECTACLE

VOTING is a SPECTACLE

COUNTING the VOTES is a SPECTACLE

And so it goes as VONNEGUT would say.

The SPECTACLE CONCEALS the REAL - DEBORD;Baudrillard

If you wish to destroy something you MUST carry it to EXCESS - NIETZSCHE, AYN RAND ( The fictional Nietzschean disciple) or as Nietzsche said, "You must be WORSE!"

Donald Trump is WORSE. He is an ICONIC figure. He is the hyper-campaigner, the excessive campaigner, the outrageous campaigner, the campaigner who is WORSE! He cannot be debated in the Dominating Discourse of classical Hegelian opposition, that gray boring prose of the Political Discourse. 

HOW? THE DONALD silences all opposition.

ONE CANNOT ARGUE WITH OUTRAGEOUSNESS AND PARRHESIA

Interspersed with this outrageousness is PARRHESIA - FEARLESS SPEECH - the TRUTH that risks everything for the PARRHESIASTES! Trump has risked it all. WHY?

FOUCAULT

Trump has a deep CONTEMPT for the present charade, corruption, stupidity of the American political process and he is out to destroy it. He has destroyed the GOP which so many of us have been trying to do by our focus on CONTENT which does not and can never work, as it debates on THEIR playing field in an endless game of ping pong, he said, she said.

No one can win on that FIELD of DISCOURSE.

So Trump is playing on a different field. A field that is NOT INVISIBLY VIOLENT concealed by the ACCEPTED Political Discourse

TRUMP IS PUTTING-ON the entire POLITICAL SYSTEM OF MACHINERY

TRUMP IS A PUT-ON and if you are in on his game you can see it and cheer, revel in the downfall of a corrupt and unfixable system. 

What will be next? 

As Plato has said, "All DEMOCRACY leads to TOTALITARIANISM since democratic candidates must always appeal to the lowest common denominator to get elected." 

Trump is following PLATO. 

\

DEFINITELY GOOD COMPANY