Circus Circus
Serendipitously, as I was thinking about what to write to sum up 2016, my good friend Zach Howe sent me a passage from Ethereal Shadows, a book about Berlusconi and Italy and all the way that communications can support or challenge fascism.
The book describes Radio Alice, a radical radio station that believed its job was not to counter the misinformation of the ruling class, nor provide a truth-based counter-narrative to the ruling regime’s media. The leaders of Radio Alice understood the power of media lies in “acting on the social imaginary, circulating plays of fantasy and flows of desire capable of destabilizing the dominant message of work, order and discipline.”
They knew they could not win the public’s imagination by attempting to win a game with rules set up by its controllers. So they ditched the idea of traditional information sharing, and decided the purpose of media,“was no longer a search for objective truth, corresponding to the deep dynamics of history, but rather the construction of a process of autonomous expression, capable of confronting, entangling and contaminating other meaning-producing processes.”
Radio Alice began broadcasting on a morning in 1976 with a message spoken in a soft voice, imploring people to “not get up this morning, to stay in bed with someone, to make musical instruments and war machines for yourself.”
I believe the Trump presidency comes from a failure of imagination. We (and by ‘we’ I mean people who oppose fascism, so I hope that includes you) have to acknowledge we’ve failed to imagine an alternative to the terrible realities of our current world. What does the liberal imagination speak of? Who does it speak to? When we read Vox, Mic, the New York Times, The Atlantic, do we feel inspired? If you, the person reading this, have money and live in a liberal coastal city, and answered ‘no’, then imagine how uninspired everyone else feels reading and engaging with our media. No wonder they’re leaving in droves.
I’m not really interested in journalism anymore. I’m interested in figuring out if we can imagine another world.
I’m very disheartened that the media has decided to respond to the Trump presidency by doubling down on its idea of truth — this idea that if only we could all see the same way, someone else would be president. That’s why they’ve launched a war on ‘fake news’ — not because they’re scared of misinformation, but because they’re scared there is an information, an imagination, beyond the frame of their own lives. They rail against fake news for the same reason they rail against anything to the left of Hillary Clinton: The most threatening thing to the establishment is the idea that anything, especially truth, can exist outside of it. (For the record, I think fake news is bad, but I think the reason the media hates it is less because they’re truth tellers and more because they’re scared of what it represents).
So we in the media need to decide what our job is. Is it to create works that prop up the powerful, that contribute to a narrative of incremental change (change so incremental that we’ll probably all be underwater by the time we feel victorious)? Do we want to create a media so unimaginative, so staid, so unrelatable, that the country runs from it––to fake news, to fascism — in search of anything that feels less crushingly boring? Or can we reimagine what media is, as Radio Alice did?
There’s a line in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when he’s walking around Circus Circus, watching Americans having a blandly good time: This is what the whole world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won, he thinks.
Circus Circus peddled in fun, the media peddles in truth and a sense of righteousness, but they’re both the same in a way: we are creating a world just inspiring enough for people to spend money on, but not imaginative enough to challenge the fascism, the poverty, the racism, that rages outside its walls.
I’m hoping that will change in 2017. If it doesn’t, I believe we’re all fucked.
