Tomgram: Engelhardt, Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on October 29, 2015, Printed on October 29, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176062/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For those of you who, after reading today's
post, want to know more about how the Pentagon came to produce war as a TV
extravaganza, it's a subject I tackled in the updated edition of my book The
End of Victory Culture. Signed, personalized copies of that book are
available for a contribution of $100. And as the holiday season approaches,
TD is, of course, ever in need of support. So check our donation page for a
range of timely political books that are similarly available, including Greg
Grandin's Kissinger's Shadow, David Vine's Base Nation, Nick Turse's
Tomorrrow's Battlefield, and other works.
TomDispatch will be off duty this Sunday. The next post will appear on
Tuesday, November 3rd. Tom]
Four Score and Seven Years Ago... at Disney World
The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016
By Tom Engelhardt
You may not know it, but you're living in a futuristic science fiction
novel. And that's a fact. If you were to read about our American world in
such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right
smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben
Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre
American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we've lived through and give it
the attention it's always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and
the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you'll end up back
exactly where we are -- in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign
in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let's return to
late September 2001. I'm sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks
after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was
destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, "Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
I couldn't resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave
it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass
destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that's happened since,
including the establishment of a terror "caliphate" by a crew of Islamic
extremists brought together in American military prison camps -- all of
which you wouldn't believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing
would make Planet of the Apeslook like outright realism.
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks
"the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century" or "a new Day of Infamy," and
the attackers "the kamikazes of the twenty-first century." Remember the
moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the
rubble at "Ground Zero" in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and
swore payback in the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu
crowd shouted out things like "Go get 'em, George!"
"I can hear you! I can hear you!" he responded. "The rest of the world hears
you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will
hear all of us soon!"
"USA! USA! USA!" chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, "Americans have
known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil,
except for one Sunday in 1941." By then, he was already talking about "our
war on terror."
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal
just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize
the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As
CNN put it at the time, "President Bush... urged Americans to travel, spend,
and enjoy life." His actual words were:
"And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public
confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on
board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great
destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families
and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed."
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying.
Though that got little attention at the time, tell me it isn't a detail out
of some sci-fi novel. Or put another way, as far as the Bush administration
was then concerned, Rosie the Riveter was moldering in her grave and the
model American for mobilizing a democratic nation in time of war was Rosie
the Frequent Flyer. It turned out not to be winter in Valley Forge, but
eternal summer in Orlando. From then on, as the Bush administration planned
its version of revenge-cum-global-domination, the message it sent to the
citizenry was: go about your business and leave the dirty work to us.
Disney World opened in 1971, but for a moment imagine that it had been in
existence in 1863 and that, more than seven score years ago, facing a
country in the midst of a terrible civil war, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
had said this:
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom at Disney World -- and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
for lack of vacations in Florida."
Or imagine that, in response to that "day of infamy," the Pearl Harbor of
the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt had gone before Congress and, in
an address to the nation, had said:
"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our
territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our
airlines, with the unbounding determination of our people to visit Disney
World, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God."
If those are absurdities, then so is twenty-first-century America. By late
September 2001, though no one would have put it that way, the demobilization
of the American people had become a crucial aspect of Washington's way of
life. The thought that Americans might be called upon to sacrifice in any
way in a time of peril had gone with the wind. Any newly minted version of
the classic "don't tread on me" flag of the revolutionary war era would have
had to read: "don't bother them."
The Spectacle of War
The desire to take the American public out of the "of the people, by the
people, for the people" business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam
War, to the moment when a citizen's army began voting with its feet and
antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front,
but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began
to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army.
Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an
experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result,
on January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon
abolished the draft, and so the citizen's army. With it went the sense that
Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and
peace).
From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send
them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from
all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be
applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this
context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of
secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to
keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what
those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be
considered demobilizing trends.
This twin process certainly has a long history in the U.S., as any biography
of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would indicate. Still, the expansion
of secrecy and surveillance in this century has been a stunning development,
as ever-larger parts of the national security state and the military
(especially its 70,000-strong Special Operations forces) fell into the
shadows. In these years, American "safety" and "security" were redefined in
terms of a citizen's need not to know. Only bathed in ignorance, were we
safest from the danger that mattered most (Islamic terrorism -- a threat of
microscopic proportions in the continental United States).
As the American people were demobilized from war and left, in the post-9/11
era, with the single duty of eternally thanking and praising our "warriors"
(or our "wounded warriors"), war itself was being transformed into a new
kind of American entertainment spectacle. In the 1980s, in response to the
Vietnam experience, the Pentagon began to take responsibility not just for
making war but for producing it. Initially, in the invasions of Grenada and
Panama, this largely meant sidelining the media, which many U.S. commanders
still blamed for defeat in Vietnam.
By the First Gulf War of 1991, however, the Pentagon was prepared to produce
a weeks-long televised extravaganza, which would enter the living rooms of
increasingly demobilized Americans as a riveting show. It would have its
own snazzy graphics, logos, background music, and special effects (including
nose-cone shots of targets obliterated). In addition, retired military men
were brought in to do Monday Night Football-style play-by-play and color
commentary on the fighting in progress. In this new version of war, there
were to be no rebellious troops, no body bags, no body counts, no rogue
reporters, and above all no antiwar movement. In other words, the Gulf War
was to be the anti-Vietnam. And it seemed to work... briefly.
Unfortunately for the first Bush administration, Saddam Hussein remained in
power in Baghdad, the carefully staged post-war "victory" parades faded
fast, the major networks lost ad money on the Pentagon's show, and the
ratings for war as entertainment sank. More than a decade later, the second
Bush administration, again eager not to repeat Vietnam and intent on
sidelining the American public while it invaded and occupied Iraq, did it
all over again.
This time, the Pentagon sent reporters to "boot camp," "embedded" them with
advancing units, built a quarter-million-dollar movie-style set for planned
briefings in Doha, Qatar, and launched its invasion with "decapitation
strikes" over Baghdad that lit the televised skies of the Iraqi capital an
eerie green on TVs across America. This spectacle of war, American-style,
turned out to have a distinctly Disney-esque aura to it. (Typically,
however, those strikes produced scores of dead Iraqis, but managed to
"decapitate" not a single targeted Iraqi leader from Saddam Hussein on
down.) That spectacle, replete with the usual music, logos, special
effects, and those retired generals-cum-commentators -- this time even more
tightly organized by the Pentagon -- turned out again to have a remarkably
brief half-life.
The Spectacle of Democracy
War as the first demobilizing spectacle of our era is now largely forgotten
because, as entertainment, it was reliant on ratings, and in the end, it
lost the battle for viewers. As a result, America's wars became ever more
an activity to be conducted in the shadows beyond the view of most
Americans.
If war was the first experimental subject for the demobilizing spectacle,
democracy and elections turned out to be remarkably ripe for the plucking as
well. As a result, we now have the never-ending presidential campaign
season. In the past, elections did not necessarily lack either drama or
spectacle. In the nineteenth century, for instance, there were campaign
torchlight parades, but those were always spectacles of mobilization. No
longer. Our new 1% elections call for something different.
It's no secret that our presidential campaigns have morphed into a
"billionaire's playground," even as the right to vote has become more
constrained. These days, it could be said that the only group of citizens
that automatically mobilizes for such events is "the billionaire class" (as
Bernie Sanders calls it). Increasingly, many of the rest of us catch the
now year-round spectacle demobilized in our living rooms, watching
journalists play... gasp!... journalists on TV and give American democracy
that good old Gotcha!
In 2001, George W. Bush wanted to send us all to Disney World (on our own
dollar, of course). In 2015, Disney World is increasingly coming directly
to us.
After all, at the center of election 2016 is Donald Trump. For a historical
equivalent, you would have to imagine P.T. Barnum, who could sell any
"curiosity" to the American public, running for president. (In fact, he did
serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature and was, improbably enough,
the mayor of Bridgeport.) Meanwhile, the TV "debates" that Trump and the
rest of the candidates are now taking part in months before the first
primary have left the League of Women Voters and the Commission on
Presidential Debates in the dust. These are the ratings-driven equivalent
of food fights encased in ads, with the "questions" clearly based on what
will glue eyeballs.
Here, for instance, was CNN host Jake Tapper's first question of the second
Republican debate: "Mrs. Fiorina, I want to start with you. Fellow
Republican candidate, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, has suggested
that your party's frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as
president. He said he wouldn't want, quote, 'such a hot head with his finger
on the nuclear codes.' You, as well, have raised concerns about Mr. Trump's
temperament. You've dismissed him as an entertainer. Would you feel
comfortable with Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear codes?"
And the event only went downhill from there as responses ranged from
non-answers to (no kidding!) a discussion of the looks of the candidates and
yet the event proved such a ratings smash that its 23 million viewers were
compared favorably to viewership of National Football League games.
In sum, a citizen's duty, whether in time of war or elections, is now, at
best, to watch the show, or at worst, to see nothing at all.
This reality has been highlighted by the whistleblowers of this generation,
including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou. Whenever they
have revealed something of what our government is doing beyond our sight,
they have been prosecuted with a fierceness unique in our history and for a
simple enough reason. Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from
being watched by us. That's their definition of "democracy." When "spies"
appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are "spies" for us, they
are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era
Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do
and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage.
A Largely Demobilized Land
A report on a demobilized America shouldn't end without some mention of at
least one counter-impulse. All systems assumedly have their opposites
lurking somewhere inside them, which brings us to Bernie Sanders. He's the
figure who doesn't seem to compute in this story so far.
All you had to do was watch the first Democratic debate to sense what an
anomaly he is, or you could have noted that, until almost the moment he went
on stage that night, few involved in the election 2016 media spectacle had
the time of day for him. And stranger yet, that lack of attention in the
mainstream proved no impediment to the expansion of his campaign and his
supporters, who, via social media and in person in the form of gigantic
crowds, seem to exist in some parallel universe.
In this election cycle, Sanders alone uses the words "mobilize" and
"mobilization" regularly, while calling for a "political revolution." ("We
need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight
back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money.") And
there is no question that he has indeed mobilized significant numbers of
young people, many of whom are undoubtedly unplugged from the TV set, even
if glued to other screens, and so may hardly be noticing the mainstream
spectacle at all.
Whether the Sanders phenomenon represents our past or our future, his age or
the age of his followers, is impossible to know. We do, of course, have one
recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008
election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots
movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory,
only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Sanders himself
puts little emphasis on personality or a cult of the same and undoubtedly
represents something different, though what exactly remains open to
question.
In the meantime, the national security state's power is largely uncontested;
the airlines still fly; Disney World continues to be a destination of
choice; and the United States remains a largely demobilized land.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176062
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on October 29, 2015, Printed on October 29, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176062/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For those of you who, after reading today's
post, want to know more about how the Pentagon came to produce war as a TV
extravaganza, it's a subject I tackled in the updated edition of my book The
End of Victory Culture. Signed, personalized copies of that book are
available for a contribution of $100. And as the holiday season approaches,
TD is, of course, ever in need of support. So check our donation page for a
range of timely political books that are similarly available, including Greg
Grandin's Kissinger's Shadow, David Vine's Base Nation, Nick Turse's
Tomorrrow's Battlefield, and other works.
TomDispatch will be off duty this Sunday. The next post will appear on
Tuesday, November 3rd. Tom]
Four Score and Seven Years Ago... at Disney World
The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016
By Tom Engelhardt
You may not know it, but you're living in a futuristic science fiction
novel. And that's a fact. If you were to read about our American world in
such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right
smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben
Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre
American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we've lived through and give it
the attention it's always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and
the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you'll end up back
exactly where we are -- in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign
in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let's return to
late September 2001. I'm sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks
after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was
destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, "Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
I couldn't resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave
it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass
destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that's happened since,
including the establishment of a terror "caliphate" by a crew of Islamic
extremists brought together in American military prison camps -- all of
which you wouldn't believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing
would make Planet of the Apeslook like outright realism.
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks
"the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century" or "a new Day of Infamy," and
the attackers "the kamikazes of the twenty-first century." Remember the
moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the
rubble at "Ground Zero" in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and
swore payback in the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu
crowd shouted out things like "Go get 'em, George!"
"I can hear you! I can hear you!" he responded. "The rest of the world hears
you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will
hear all of us soon!"
"USA! USA! USA!" chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, "Americans have
known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil,
except for one Sunday in 1941." By then, he was already talking about "our
war on terror."
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal
just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize
the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As CNN
put it at the time, "President Bush... urged Americans to travel, spend, and
enjoy life." His actual words were:
"And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public
confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on
board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great
destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families
and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed."
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying.
Though that got little attention at the time, tell me it isn't a detail out
of some sci-fi novel. Or put another way, as far as the Bush administration
was then concerned, Rosie the Riveter was moldering in her grave and the
model American for mobilizing a democratic nation in time of war was Rosie
the Frequent Flyer. It turned out not to be winter in Valley Forge, but
eternal summer in Orlando. From then on, as the Bush administration planned
its version of revenge-cum-global-domination, the message it sent to the
citizenry was: go about your business and leave the dirty work to us.
Disney World opened in 1971, but for a moment imagine that it had been in
existence in 1863 and that, more than seven score years ago, facing a
country in the midst of a terrible civil war, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
had said this:
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom at Disney World -- and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
for lack of vacations in Florida."
Or imagine that, in response to that "day of infamy," the Pearl Harbor of
the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt had gone before Congress and, in
an address to the nation, had said:
"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our
territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our
airlines, with the unbounding determination of our people to visit Disney
World, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God."
If those are absurdities, then so is twenty-first-century America. By late
September 2001, though no one would have put it that way, the demobilization
of the American people had become a crucial aspect of Washington's way of
life. The thought that Americans might be called upon to sacrifice in any
way in a time of peril had gone with the wind. Any newly minted version of
the classic "don't tread on me" flag of the revolutionary war era would have
had to read: "don't bother them."
The Spectacle of War
The desire to take the American public out of the "of the people, by the
people, for the people" business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam
War, to the moment when a citizen's army began voting with its feet and
antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front,
but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began
to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army.
Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an
experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result, on
January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon
abolished the draft, and so the citizen's army. With it went the sense that
Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and
peace).
From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send
them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from
all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be
applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this
context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of
secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to
keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what
those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be
considered demobilizing trends.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20http://www.
amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20This twin process
certainly has a long history in the U.S., as any biography of former FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover would indicate. Still, the expansion of secrecy and
surveillance in this century has been a stunning development, as ever-larger
parts of the national security state and the military (especially its
70,000-strong Special Operations forces) fell into the shadows. In these
years, American "safety" and "security" were redefined in terms of a
citizen's need not to know. Only bathed in ignorance, were we safest from
the danger that mattered most (Islamic terrorism -- a threat of microscopic
proportions in the continental United States).
As the American people were demobilized from war and left, in the post-9/11
era, with the single duty of eternally thanking and praising our "warriors"
(or our "wounded warriors"), war itself was being transformed into a new
kind of American entertainment spectacle. In the 1980s, in response to the
Vietnam experience, the Pentagon began to take responsibility not just for
making war but for producing it. Initially, in the invasions of Grenada and
Panama, this largely meant sidelining the media, which many U.S. commanders
still blamed for defeat in Vietnam.
By the First Gulf War of 1991, however, the Pentagon was prepared to produce
a weeks-long televised extravaganza, which would enter the living rooms of
increasingly demobilized Americans as a riveting show. It would have its own
snazzy graphics, logos, background music, and special effects (including
nose-cone shots of targets obliterated). In addition, retired military men
were brought in to do Monday Night Football-style play-by-play and color
commentary on the fighting in progress. In this new version of war, there
were to be no rebellious troops, no body bags, no body counts, no rogue
reporters, and above all no antiwar movement. In other words, the Gulf War
was to be the anti-Vietnam. And it seemed to work... briefly.
Unfortunately for the first Bush administration, Saddam Hussein remained in
power in Baghdad, the carefully staged post-war "victory" parades faded
fast, the major networks lost ad money on the Pentagon's show, and the
ratings for war as entertainment sank. More than a decade later, the second
Bush administration, again eager not to repeat Vietnam and intent on
sidelining the American public while it invaded and occupied Iraq, did it
all over again.
This time, the Pentagon sent reporters to "boot camp," "embedded" them with
advancing units, built a quarter-million-dollar movie-style set for planned
briefings in Doha, Qatar, and launched its invasion with "decapitation
strikes" over Baghdad that lit the televised skies of the Iraqi capital an
eerie green on TVs across America. This spectacle of war, American-style,
turned out to have a distinctly Disney-esque aura to it. (Typically,
however, those strikes produced scores of dead Iraqis, but managed to
"decapitate" not a single targeted Iraqi leader from Saddam Hussein on
down.) That spectacle, replete with the usual music, logos, special effects,
and those retired generals-cum-commentators -- this time even more tightly
organized by the Pentagon -- turned out again to have a remarkably brief
half-life.
The Spectacle of Democracy
War as the first demobilizing spectacle of our era is now largely forgotten
because, as entertainment, it was reliant on ratings, and in the end, it
lost the battle for viewers. As a result, America's wars became ever more an
activity to be conducted in the shadows beyond the view of most Americans.
If war was the first experimental subject for the demobilizing spectacle,
democracy and elections turned out to be remarkably ripe for the plucking as
well. As a result, we now have the never-ending presidential campaign
season. In the past, elections did not necessarily lack either drama or
spectacle. In the nineteenth century, for instance, there were campaign
torchlight parades, but those were always spectacles of mobilization. No
longer. Our new 1% elections call for something different.
It's no secret that our presidential campaigns have morphed into a
"billionaire's playground," even as the right to vote has become more
constrained. These days, it could be said that the only group of citizens
that automatically mobilizes for such events is "the billionaire class" (as
Bernie Sanders calls it). Increasingly, many of the rest of us catch the now
year-round spectacle demobilized in our living rooms, watching journalists
play... gasp!... journalists on TV and give American democracy that good old
Gotcha!
In 2001, George W. Bush wanted to send us all to Disney World (on our own
dollar, of course). In 2015, Disney World is increasingly coming directly to
us.
After all, at the center of election 2016 is Donald Trump. For a historical
equivalent, you would have to imagine P.T. Barnum, who could sell any
"curiosity" to the American public, running for president. (In fact, he did
serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature and was, improbably enough,
the mayor of Bridgeport.) Meanwhile, the TV "debates" that Trump and the
rest of the candidates are now taking part in months before the first
primary have left the League of Women Voters and the Commission on
Presidential Debates in the dust. These are the ratings-driven equivalent of
food fights encased in ads, with the "questions" clearly based on what will
glue eyeballs.
Here, for instance, was CNN host Jake Tapper's first question of the second
Republican debate: "Mrs. Fiorina, I want to start with you. Fellow
Republican candidate, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, has suggested
that your party's frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as
president. He said he wouldn't want, quote, 'such a hot head with his finger
on the nuclear codes.' You, as well, have raised concerns about Mr. Trump's
temperament. You've dismissed him as an entertainer. Would you feel
comfortable with Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear codes?"
And the event only went downhill from there as responses ranged from
non-answers to (no kidding!) a discussion of the looks of the candidates and
yet the event proved such a ratings smash that its 23 million viewers were
compared favorably to viewership of National Football League games.
In sum, a citizen's duty, whether in time of war or elections, is now, at
best, to watch the show, or at worst, to see nothing at all.
This reality has been highlighted by the whistleblowers of this generation,
including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou. Whenever they
have revealed something of what our government is doing beyond our sight,
they have been prosecuted with a fierceness unique in our history and for a
simple enough reason. Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from
being watched by us. That's their definition of "democracy." When "spies"
appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are "spies" for us, they
are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era
Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do
and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage.
A Largely Demobilized Land
A report on a demobilized America shouldn't end without some mention of at
least one counter-impulse. All systems assumedly have their opposites
lurking somewhere inside them, which brings us to Bernie Sanders. He's the
figure who doesn't seem to compute in this story so far.
All you had to do was watch the first Democratic debate to sense what an
anomaly he is, or you could have noted that, until almost the moment he went
on stage that night, few involved in the election 2016 media spectacle had
the time of day for him. And stranger yet, that lack of attention in the
mainstream proved no impediment to the expansion of his campaign and his
supporters, who, via social media and in person in the form of gigantic
crowds, seem to exist in some parallel universe.
In this election cycle, Sanders alone uses the words "mobilize" and
"mobilization" regularly, while calling for a "political revolution." ("We
need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight
back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money.") And
there is no question that he has indeed mobilized significant numbers of
young people, many of whom are undoubtedly unplugged from the TV set, even
if glued to other screens, and so may hardly be noticing the mainstream
spectacle at all.
Whether the Sanders phenomenon represents our past or our future, his age or
the age of his followers, is impossible to know. We do, of course, have one
recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008
election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots
movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory,
only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Sanders himself
puts little emphasis on personality or a cult of the same and undoubtedly
represents something different, though what exactly remains open to
question.
In the meantime, the national security state's power is largely uncontested;
the airlines still fly; Disney World continues to be a destination of
choice; and the United States remains a largely demobilized land.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176062