22 January 2004
On Jan. 5, 2004, two events occurred that have a striking resonance. One, Howard Dean was featured on the covers of both TIME and NEWSWEEK for the second time. And Bernard White, program director for WBAI, the New York flagship of the Pacifica Network, violated the by-laws created for the then imminent Pacifica Elections. In the former instance, the “angry” Dr. Dean was being questioned as a viable presidential nominee for the Democratic Party.
In the latter, Mr. White, by illegally endorsing a candidate and libeling some of his perceived political opponents, was confirming doubts that the Left could justifiably continue to take the high ground as the generator of a wiser, more sophisticated, and principled program for peace and justice. And I am assuming both “media events”, as macrocosm and microcosm, should be seen in the context that the Right’s agenda, since the shocking events of September 11/01, has been successfully promoted as a saner, more practical response to the media-generated bellicose atmosphere that has enveloped the planet as its inhabitants enter the post-millenial 21st Century.
Certainly the apparent hegemony of the Right in political opinion organs has made the Left very angry in this election season. I have heard some critics of the Bush administration urging their compatriots to make it a “religious mission” to defeat the President in November. But if this righteous indignation can be focussed on such an “unscrupulous liar”, why can such blatant arrogance be tolerated in the local case of WBAI and its embattled management cowering around Bernard White? Where is the moral acumen of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, or Al Franken when it comes to their own politically sympathetic media outlets typified by the Pacifica Network and The Nation magazine. Why haven’t they weighed in on an important development in WBAI’s history as it trembles on the brink of bankruptcy? What about the New Left’s guiding motto of “Think globally and act locally”? And Howard Dean is vulnerable to the same accusation of hypocrisy when he refuses to release documents pertaining to his own years as Governor of Vermont. The Left seems rather to prefer resting smugly in the security of “thinking globular and acting loco”!! Such blinkered denial on the part of the Left can be pardoned if one accepts the assumption that its war on the Right has no time to consider such puny issues when it’s very life is at stake. But it is mistaken when one remembers how the mainstream, centrist media makes or breaks candidates on the tiny, insignificant details. The “media” thrive on magnifying the inconsequential. We all know that. However, this may be a clue as to why the Left remains impotent in the face of a colossal preference. But before I explain this important pattern, let’s first survey the mise-en-scene for our dilemma.
It might seem remarkable that a century, the 20th, that began with the political empowerment of the common woman and man would end in their despondent political impotence. This theme has been observed by many commentators on the Left in recent years, but not many are confident in explaining how this happened. And if they do pretend to know the causes, they fail to get a consensual assent from the citizen of the new century to mount a successful program to re-empower the “people”. Meanwhile, the Right maintains that the exact opposite has happened: that the average citizen is richer, happier, and freer to exercise choice than has ever been experienced in human history. With this fait accompli, the Right is optimistic that the few kinks and headaches still remaining can easily be assuaged, even on a global scale, if they stay the course and successfully keep the “grossly deluded and misguided” Left on the political and economic sidelines.
As I write the above, I can’t help but be aware of the stereotypes that the intelligent reader should recognize enclouding my opening sentences. And I agree. There is more to be discerned around these issues of political, economic, and social power than can be adequately addressed in the conventional cliches of Right versus Left. And even that insight is a cliche today. We’ve heard it stated many times during the last thirty years. So, an entirely new approach has to be taken to assess where we are living and working in the “naughty Naughts”: an approach that engages the Present empirically before it seeks new, or reinvigorates old, principles.
The obvious, unforeseen, empirical condition that caught the common worker of the twentieth century by surprise was the fact that, by the later decades of that era, information and/or entertainment came to be the dominant occupier of mundane time, both vocationally and leisurely, and a source of unimaginable wealth on the collective scale as well as in the private realm. Even traditional images of power were affected by this situation to the extent that former President George Bush, during the 1992 campaign, stated that Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson had more power on a daily basis than he did. Though many might have heard a smarmy and cynically self-effacing tone in that remark, we would be better advised to note that Bush was referring to more than a half-truth. Hence, the very real grievance underlying the “joke”. But Bush might as well be an “everyman” in that statement since it is applicable to every person on the planet. Or so is the conventional wisdom. The more relevant enquiry may really want to seriously investigate what constitutes power today since the information age is so dependent on polls, ratings, and focus groups that one could just as easily say the public is the real “power”, even tyrant no less. The superaudience, like the superenterprise, works for itself, “stupid”!!
Another factor in our present mediascape is the fragmentation and diversity of this “superaudience” in which demographic profiles are the given rule in marketing. Socially, this has led to the scrapping of the old homogeneous social space – the “public”. Note the popularity of the book, Bowling Alone. At the same time, the audience has been globalized to the extent that national identities are only fodder for cartoons and Saturday Night Live sketches. As a matter of intuition, the very word “globalization” is beginning to sound worn and creaky. Why? Because the very medium I’m typing this on allows me to take breaks and scan infinite threads of information and image- stimulation faster and more efficiently than I would find at any national or local library, or even in a nearby cinema. (Right now I’m on Mars checking for updates on NASA problems. Boring. So I’m now looking at a book review by Alexander Pope written almost 300 years ago. O.K., on to China and the new SARS outbreak. All the while I’m listening to K-Rock here in Manhattan. You get the point.) Which leads to a second point, then, if I can remember what I was originally discussing… Oh yes, Dean and White: what are the consequences for politics when more and more millions of citizens in any country are on- line (it ain’t gonna stop) and attention-challenged? I reference “politics” because, even though it may seem unfair to swallow the diverse programming of the Pacifica Network under this category, one has only to look at the recent coverage of WBAI’s upcoming elections in the New York Times to see how it’s stereotyped as a Lefty political operation. But macrocosmically, American politics is shown to be marginalized not only by the fact such a small percentage of Americans actually vote, but by noting how the President himself has to appear to never stop campaigning during his term just so he can keep in these multi-publics’ splintered eye. Edmund Carpenter summed up the dilemma for politicians in a very cogent paragraph:
“Electronic media have eroded traditional individualism, weakened representative government and led to a general loss of those freedoms and protections enjoyed under literacy. The ballot box simply can’t create images for the electronic world. Freedom has shifted from government to art [media – ed.]. Today’s varied media, each a unique codification of reality, offer range and depth for human expression and fulfillment perhaps equal to those abandoned.” – THEY BECAME WHAT THEY BEHELD, 1970, p.47.
And this was aptly and presciently noted over thirty years ago. Carpenter was getting to the bottom of a situation that explained why the Left, traditionally opposed to a capitalist government’s infringement on freedoms of economic and social expression, began to appear anemic in its aims and accomplishments in the Seventies. The mediascape had obsolesced the Left’s mandate. But Carpenter’s perception, so relevant to a simpler time, mediawise, is not quite relevant to today’s hypermedia environment. The Internet has inverted the situation where now “individualism” is empowered locally, nationally, globally, even cosmically. So much so, that Tom Ridge’s Homeland Security Department is at a loss to define actually who the “enemy” is, let alone get the American public(s) to unanimously take his goals seriously. National Security has been ghettoized, along with its ardent critics on the Left: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Michael Parenti, Cornell West, and Angela Davis. Having a bestseller (the tiny figure of 40,000) is not a furlough from the book publishing ghetto. At best, in an election year, one can count on the “CIA” buying up books by Moore and Franken in order to give them a higher profile for “liberal-bashing” when the electioneers play hardball in the fall of 2004. It’s called “creating the disease, and offering the cure.” It happened at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August, 1968, when the centrist media could be more easily manipulated. Now it can still be done but not in the public space of the “street”. Instead, the cultural products of the opposition are massaged for abuse value. And it’s only one of many options for the political spin jammers in a 24-7 news cycle.
It’s not that the Right has the wits to understand and be relevant to the real problems of our time. Not in the least. It’s just that the Right knows it’s in a specialty market and accepts its affluent ghettoization. Yes, national politics is a ghetto. The majority of Americans don’t live there anymore. They have agonies and ecstasies in many other more pressing areas (for example, the biggest killer of Americans is the medical establishment – three-quarters of a million people per year). Fox TV is not interested in them. It will shrewdly stick to its tiny demographics. And this is perhaps why the Left is seen more and more as headquartered in Hollywood since the old centripetal TV, radio (see Michael Wolff’s June 10/2002 column in New York magazine), and movie empires are being ghettoized and shipped overseas, too. In no small part due to their being pushed aside by the biggest entertainment industry ever, video games.
Now, the Right has known for over twenty years that the small percentage of Americans, who still believe there is “power” in national politics and take their voting rights seriously, are always going to think in “patriotic” and “conservative” terms. So they run their candidates in those iconic contexts. This was the secret to President Reagan’s charisma. The political Left doesn’t know that the role of representing populist and “progressive” issues has been in the hands of scriptwriters for TV and cinema during the last several decades. Ironically, for those who consider themselves “concerned and informed” citizens, a movie often serves, in no small degree, to be a cathartic experience for clearing the conscience. The old media capital of the world, New York City, had to be “liberal”, and still must be. It’s a job and somebody’s got to do it. But that doesn’t stop it from being marginalized, perhaps even ghettoized, too, in a time when outsourcing of the white-collar services sector is threatening America’s deepest privileges.
Unfortunately, “progressive” politics must have a public space to engage in. And since the arrival of the World Wide Web, there ain’t no such thing. What has replaced it is the postmodern, postliterate individual’s “virtual” public space, not any the less real than the former literate, industrial space. In fact, it’s more real because it’s interactive and two-way… no, actually, three-… four-way. Not one-way as in the old broadcast media days. It’s so real, involving, and participatory that there had to be a poor man’s Internet: talk- radio. And we all know what that did to national politics – ghettoized it further, of course. Talk-radio meets a felt need generated by the newer Net.
Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan’s description of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, in retrospect, hits the bulls-eye when applied to our interactive-media world:
“… Burroughs, whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another, there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.” — The Nation, December, 1964, pp.517-19.
My larger point is that this “total involvement” is not limited to politics. There are millions of chat groups and forums for every conceivable social fetish and obsession. Just think of the role of email in your life, not to mention misspelled “spam”. Where’s it coming from? And it doesn’t mean American college kids are dumb when they can’t remember a recent President’s name or role in history. They don’t live in the United States. They live overseas, above the seas, and under the seas. No wonder we don’t stress the importance of the “ABC’s” anymore. I recently heard Henry Gates, Jr., bemoaning the fate of the “African-American country” (35 million whereas Canada has only 27 million) inside the borders of the United States. He says the only way to save Black culture is to get the urban ghetto schools on the Internet. Even though he fails to see that the Internet is a culture that will swallow Black culture, he knows that African-Americans have no choice but to prepare themselves for the globalized (I prefer the term “solarized”) economy and should stop thinking economically in national contexts.
The other persistent theme on the Left has been that the Republican Party ignores issues of race, gender, and class. Again, what Chomsky et al. miss is that such categories of social grievance don’t apply to the new multi-media spaces that Americans live in. Such classifications refer to the relations among actual physical bodies. But what has occurred over the last fifteen years is the digital shrinking of formerly huge media environments to non-obtrusive prosthetic devices, such as the lap top and the Palm Pilot, wherein a seven-year-old can treat them with the familiarity of a household pet. They have effectively become new physical appendages with all the joys and demands of our genital organs. The older, original organs have been marginalized to make room for sensory experiences provided in the no-less-real “virtual” climates. This explains the present lack of appeal to younger Americans of long-validated struggles over injustices incurred in the realm of the “flesh” body. It explains the rapidity with which beachheads have been won in the battles for recognition of gay and lesbian rights. These would not have occurred if the chemical body (my preferred term) wasn’t ghettoized. The same applies to the Right’s obsession with abortion and the rights of the fetus. All the more intense because it’s a ghetto, too, in the sense that our newer bodies (the TV-screen and chip bodies) have no precedent for social recognition and therefore are ignored as causal factors in social tensions.
So these are some of the most important aspects that make up the background for looking at the Dean/White parallels. First, Dean appeals to college students by using the medium where they live, the Internet. College students have a superiority complex natural to their years and circumstances of privileged access to knowledge – a knowledge that is largely book-based. A literate sensibility is not going to be impressed with a postliterate sensibility represented by President Bush. Dr. Dean is portrayed as a “lefty” because he presents the image of someone determined to “take our country back”. He is, in fact, harkening back to the pre-Internet image of America that he encountered as a country doctor. That is an image that contained the possibility of a homogeneous public space. President Bush rode to power on that image, too – an image cultivated by the upstart FOX TV, that “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Ironically, Dean uses the Internet to coalesce his campaign around an image that is pre-Internet. Hence, the appeal of his nostalgic angry demeanor. But Bush now has an image that is post-Internet, one that refuses to communicate meaningfully to the older one-way media, thus appealing to the general hatred for the journalists of one-way “mainstream media”. An image that carefully cultivates the “patriotic” image for the tiny audience of politics.
However, there are some other nuances that have to be considered so we can see why the Left gets lost in this multi-media complexity. Governor Schwarzenegger provides the clues. He recently gave a careful policy speech which evoked responses from a Hoover Institute expert that is revealing. The pundit noted how Schwarzenegger presented a tough budget-cutting face to the business sector, a “green” face to the environmentalist in the Hollywood sector, and several other faces to other constituencies. The perceptive observer will note that the real strategy is not to have one’s image limited to one point-of-view when addressing an actual physical audience in person. However, this won’t work in the soundbite-ruled TV-scape. The Governor keeps it simple on TV. This is the key to “power” today – the ability to use the different media and their audiences’ biases. Many journalists are saying that Dean has this ability. I would say this is merely a sentimental judgment of the necessary strategy for any politician in a centrifugal, discontinuous mediascape.
But can one sculpt an image around one point-of-view if one is limited to access to only one medium, like radio, as in Bernard White’s particular case? Yes, if one is in an environment where radio is the dominant medium as happened in the Thirties – a long time ago. But no such opportunity is afforded the Pacifica Network and, in addition to that, it’s on the Internet. Surely one would be stumped if asked to define what is the purpose today of such an ancient medium if it is looked at as merely “radio”. The mandate for Pacifica is no longer limited to the traditional realm of radio. This is what White fails to see. So he continues to have and represent one point of view – a futile strategy in the Twenty-First Century.
So, case closed? Not necessarily. Here is the rebuttal: What is the common pattern in the following stages of Western cultural evolution:
- the fifth-century Greeks of ancient Athens converted the Homeric oral tradition into an art form under the impact of the new phonetic writing technology (e.g., Plato’s works) which would eventually drive Alexander the Great beyond the Greek precincts and contradict the decentralized city-state structure of his homeland;
- three hundred years later the Romans looked to the previous Greek culture for their spiritual values (the Eleusinian mystery religion and democracy) while papyrus enabled them to construct a centralized empire of previously unknown proportions only to stagnate in constant crisis-management mode until the Egyptians mercifully cut off their papyrus supplies;
- the Dark Ages witnessed an attempt to revive and establish the Holy Roman Empire (Charlemagne) as the stirrup created a whole new feudal system of social organization;
- the Renaissance looked to the decentralized Middle Ages for cultural nourishment (Shakespeare’s dramas) while the printing press flung Europeans to the ends of the earth to inaugurate colonial and imperial ambitions;
- the Nineteenth Century valued the lessons of the Renaissance (literate education in the new sciences as a birth right) while the steam engines and railroads dehumanized villages and cities;
- the Twentieth Century accepted the norms of mechanization as the model for collective values (recall any World’s Fair) while electric and electronic media created the “superhumanized” Entertainment State?
The pattern seems to be one of finding cultural and spiritual values in the previous environment while the actual present environment, curiously, is not a source of cultural nutrition. The new is, for many, ugly, alienating, or threatening. We seem to walk backwards into the future. This tendency should not necessarily be faulted as a cultural failing or a case of collective denial. It’s a natural human characteristic that any New Yorker, in the “world capital of the art world”, can’t but appreciate, thanks to New York’s plethora of museums creating no less than a kind of secular version of the Akashic Records described in Theosophical theology. But there is a deeper pattern here that can be summed up with the observation that it would appear that the technological communication devices, fostering new environments as they become widely used, have effects the laws of which are not noticed. McLuhan explained this blindspot, or “narcissus narcosis”, as due to the sensory fact that any new environment numbs the human senses it extends. McLuhan described the process this way:
“During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.” –The Nation, December, 1964, pp.517-19.
Once we understand this pattern it becomes obvious that Lewis Hill’s designs for the Pacifica radio stations could not avoid the pressures from later developments in media evolution on such an older model of community participation based on the older literate and private values of expression. But I’m not suggesting that WBAI became obsolete in the late Eighties. One of McLuhan’s insights was that older media find new uses when they are bypassed. That has been one of the chief features of art forms throughout Western history. For example, when Western manuscript culture became an environment, the older pagan rituals were reassigned new roles and transformed into Greek theater. When television obsolesced the radio environment, radio allowed the entry of new styles of music created by very young performers, which subsequently invented the “teenager”. It was a renaissance of cultural and artistic democracy. And new unexpected sources of wealth were tapped. Radio also became an important service in expediting automobile traffic on the new post-war superhighways. Similarly, the “countercultural” radio of the Sixties and early Seventies, a later adjustment in roles thanks to the computer and satellite era of global theater (think of the Yippie! slogan “The whole world is watching!”), was forced to find new uses in the new digital environment. This created the need for a counterbalance to the social and economic anarchy that came from the “individualistic autonomy effect” of digital technology. So WBAI retrieved its Sixties’ anarcho-syndicalist themes and applied them to the new mood of identity politics, or “ethnic group mind”. WBAI reached out to offer air time for marginalized voices or “sub-cultures” within the so-called marginalized communities that were themselves demanding representation and respect in the knee-jerk mainstream media. WBAI was actually turning the “political correctness” trend into an art form. The solution was in the problem. Good for Pacifica. But that was then, over fifteen years ago. What happens when the speed-up of communicational improvements follow Moore’s Law which points to an inevitable knowledge revolution every eighteen months? It means you need to upgrade your accessories, digital or cosmetic, at the same pace, whether you want to or not. What happens to the media law which reveals the process of how the past forms of knowledge become an art form? A tough question for the practicing postmodern stock broker, let alone your Pomo art critic or WBAI programmer.
This brings us back to Hill’s mission to present an alternative in radio fare to the mainstream American cultural cliches. Since Art’s mission, at least that of the greatest Western artists (Giotto, Da Vinci, Mozart, Picasso, Henry Moore et al.), was to provide a correction in perception, an anti-environment to the habits of dulled perception in a culture, in order that its public could see, hear, or feel the sensory world afresh, then “counterculture” has actually been an honored tradition for hundreds of years. But once the satellite environment made everyone a participant rather than a spectator (“all crew and no passengers on Spaceship Earth”), the fulcrum from which to create a counter-environment became more unsteady and mercurial.
By the middle Nineties the national board of the Pacifica Foundation seemed to intuit that times were changing again and the tribal “political correctness” taboo was weakening its hold on the American sensibility. The pressing need for a new mandate and role for its stations in the threatening digital soup seemed to be knocking on the back door. Many micro-programmers were removed and the pressure to attract new listeners by trawling the fishing nets in bigger lakes seemed to have a new urgency. But this strategy apparently did not work. The identity crisis in Pacifica’s audience induced by this seeming move to go “commercial” was too intense for the Board to deflect. The reason may lurk in the fact that this occurred exactly when Americans were surfing even further inside their nerves with the new Netscape browser which finally brought the Internet into the laps of Middle America and flung them into the bottomless seas of the World Wide Web. The fact that soon any ten year-old could have the massive corporate media environments of the last150 years, from the telegraph to the satellite, not only miniaturized but available for editing and redesigning, really ended the reign of one-way broadcasting no matter how decentralized and niche-marketed it had previously designed its programs. The autonomous Web surfer/spammer could spit in the face of mainstream icons so regularly that the millennium ended with even the poor off-line American miming the interactive Web: thanks to TV programs like the Jerry Springer Show. The image of the floating astronaut circling the Earth and its media environments in the Sixties was now an experience offered to anyone and everyone by the Information Highway, the poor woman’s own private NASA. Yet we wonder why UFO abductions became a national craze.
McLuhan had a little known aphorism for this effect – “the user is the content”. Sounds tome like a pithy description of many a WBAI programmer over the decades. This is not to denigrate a rich kind of radio, a style pioneered by WBAI’s Bob Fass. But remember, now the Burroughs paradigm was being mass-marketed (or McWebbed) during the “dot.com” boom of the late Nineties and early Naughts. Where could you go on the WBAI programming schedule to find a counterculture to the virtual-reality matrix that was just begging for someone to translate into that ancient medium, the movie – the All-American archetype? Of course, I’m talking about the wildly successful movie “The Matrix” (1999). Again, the insight that every new medium is an epiphany to the extent it reveals the characteristics of the previous environment helps us to see what this movie is telling us. It turns out that the user of the digital landscape is not just the solitary human being. The other user is the complement to the human being – her community as a hologram.
The “political correctness” movement was really the right to turn the tribal community into an environment that includes the universe. Each tribal history must have the right to be translated into the art form of virtual reality, the collective hologram. “The Matrix”, remember, is a movie, the mechanical precursor of the hologram. And it’s set in New York City. Is New York City a hologram? Can you say Times Square = Disneyland? If millions of New Yorkers spend hours on the Web every day and night, when are they actually in New York? Are its unique institutions and museums inevitably Disneyfied? Can WBAI resist the environmental pressures to be a hologram, the contemporary art form? Are its supporters sending in checks to prop up a hologram of the counterculture? With Moore’s Law applied to the changes in the counterculture, how does one keep the counterculture from fragmenting into many sub-cultures? Which decade were you counter? If a decade lasts only 12 months (compared to previous slower centuries) due to a sped-up social life, then that speed-up flips into an apparent “slow- down”, a conserving tendency. Then time as duration becomes a running on-the-spot and resonating omni-directionally. A grab bag of holograms offers you the art form of your choice. And the hologram of the hyper- race for the Presidency must have a “conservative” agenda, not a “change agent’s” agenda. This is what caused the outrage at the First Lady’s proposed health-reform legislation in 1993.
So, I enjoy WBAI and listen throughout the week. I also enjoy the disputes on the Pacifica WBAI Message Board. I’ve got a few opinions, too. But I have to remember that WBAI is a radio station; in the end it’s only radio. I get to experience the unique qualities the radio medium, especially WBAI, provides. But I also listen to many other radio stations in the New York area. So this makes me pause when I hear explanations from the programmers of the different stations on why they are a great station and why we listen to them. I always think, regardless of their various boastings, that they’re not the reasons why I listen to their shows. I listen to spy, soak up a mood, or to learn some details about something I knew nothing about. Any station provides that for me, not just theirs.
I also wonder how to translate the radio experience into political action. Which then makes me question what political platforms I’m for. I might think I’m for universal health care. Sounds fair. But since I listen to different stations I eventually see the subject is more complicated. But I decide to remain focussed and ignore counter- arguments to my opinion. I can rely on WBAI or NPR to reinforce my opinion. NPR is slicker and more professional in pushing for this view and certainly reaches more people so NPR is where legislative reform will be instigated, if at all. But if I want to hear sub-cultural reasons supporting universal health care I tune into WBAI. It’s interesting to hear the anarchist, Marxist or libertarian position on the issue while I wait to vote every four years. Just think of the amount and variety of information we can hear on the radio about this topic over four years while waiting to pull the lever. Once the time comes, I’m forced to ignore the nuances of the debate and push on through to vote for a basic beachhead to establish new legislation. I am always reduced to a knee-jerk response in the democratic republic.
WBAI, in particular, claims that it provides alternative information to the mainstream. This certainly was true before the middle Nineties, but the Web trumps WBAI on that front. So why do I listen to WBAI? Usually to hear the quaint, eccentric programming. The programmers are sincere but in practical terms what they offer can’t be applied collectively. The postmodern thinkers call it the death of “public space”. This is essentially true, but a more precise way to explain it is that we now have the birth of many new media spaces each creating their own publics.
The old public space of strictly literate citizens has taken a back seat or gotten lost in the shuffle. The “chickenhawks” around President Bush have taken advantage of this fact by appealing to the oral, semi-literate consumer of radio and TV. Meanwhile, WBAI as radio gives the New York area local color in our media diet. But it is only radio, and management has to keep the programming going 24 hours a day non-stop. Presently, it claims to be re-evaluating all programs. In the name of what? The only way it can improve is provide more variety of subcultural views. The best way to do that is limit programmers to 8-week stints and allow more people to have programs. I recall a persistent caller named “Monroe” advocating this. Perhaps he’s right. But if this proposal is impractical, then let’s admit what the situation really is: WBAI is the “Hyde Park” of local radio, hijacked by a necessarily limited number of programmers, and that’s all it can be. This is entertaining enough, but please don’t make any dramatic “narratives” out of the facts. Overall, any radio station offers discontinuous ear candy. It depends on the temperament and taste of the listener to decide when the sugar is transformed into real nutrition. It’s hyper-subjectivity all around.
I would hazard the guess that the common denominator of the WBAI listener is a desire for peace. The perceptive among us know the question is how to achieve it. When a million diverse voices instantly respond to this issue when it’s raised in the mainstream media whirlpool, might we consider that social peace is aggravated by instant, simultaneous access to information? I suggest this is the cause for the death of a public space that the “Left”, for most of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, was quite adept in shaping. However, we don’t live there anymore. So is WBAI condemned to the role of being a reminder of what the old issues and revolutions were? Just to be a kind of nostalgic hologram. What would happen if its management stated this as a social fact on the air at least once a week? It would certainly evoke a passionate debate among the listeners.
If WBAI wants to attract new listeners, then it must broaden its appeal. It would have to include “politically incorrect” programming to really accomplish this. Am I wrong to conclude this is not likely? If so, then we are back to square one. WBAI cannot adapt to the new realities. It must remain true to what it represented in the past. But the past doesn’t offer a challenge to perception and awareness. Only the uncategorizable “new” does. And that will always be provided only by new communication devices and their ensuing environments. So WBAI can only be a Noah’s Ark for countercultural and subcultural effects from previous media. And this is perhaps enough for most WBAI listeners. “Past times become pastimes” wrote James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
However, there now are new, idealistic “youths” arriving on the social activist stage every day. What are we to say to them? “Honor our efforts. Pay your respects.” This is not enough when their sense of urgency is so intense, especially in these apocalyptic and dangerous times. I’ve noticed that these more innocent enthusiasts don’t have national, racial, or sexual differences clouding their visions. They are instinctively denizens of a tiny planet. Why even speak to them in the categories of any verbal, literate language, let alone English? They live a simulation of ESP. One just has to check out the Matrix movies to feel the pulse. So, a slow, verbal medium like WBAI looks to them like a sick old turtle. Now, over the next couple of years, as they confront older technological environments that are too unwieldy to be removed or bypassed, they will be forced to check their techno- ESP for older forms like speech. At that point WBAI may appear relevant – a kind of lithium, to buffer their “shock of the old”. THEN we can recruit them in the campaign for universal health care. And then this museum just might become a successful “political” force.
To return to our macro resonance, this is exactly what Dr. Dean was doing. But unlike White, he wasn’t running for the position of program director. He is not a “politician” in media as is White, but a politician via media. Even though Dean is hardly a leftist, in the post-Internet era, if a politician puts on an overly critical mask in the race to become President, he or she will appear to be insulting the tribal hologram to which the national political stage is reduced and marginalized. This is why the Democratic candidates who are “Washington insiders” like Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman, and Gore (in 2000) are forced to be bland. However, the Democrats are strapped to a legacy of one-dimensional, Fordist, pre-Internet tribalism whereas the Republicans have the upper hand because their tribalism is suffused with the image of post-Internet individual accountability, privatized or not. The iconic image of the President will always be “Republican” no matter what political party wins the election. That is a law mandated by digital life. That was the real “Reagan revolution”. So, the role of a critical counterculture has a new task in confronting its adversary, somnambulism – an adversary in a far subtler milieu.
I often hear Gary Null on his Natural Living program marvel at listeners who have newly-discovered health problems, like cancer, even though they’ve been listening to his program for ten or more years and should have understood and applied his preventive regimens. This example should encapsulate what radio is really all about. That it’s a massage rather than a careful exchange of remembered point-by-point information. (This is why music is the real source of power today.) Perhaps most media end up in that role. And today, with so many media available for tactile exchanges, I could understandably be amazed WBAI is still here. But I’m not, because the wealth of our time means there’s nothing old under the sun. Although this, in practical economic terms, means every environmental artifact (hologram) has its hand out.
I’m reminded of another quotation from Carpenter:
“Dreams, myths, rituals are all forms of total involvement. The dreamer divests himself ofprivate identity and unites with the corporate image of his group… Tribal man requires less night- dreaming because he achieves this corporate identification through daytime rituals, myths, art, language. We’re reentering the tribal world but this time we’re going through the tribal dance and drama wide awake.” – THEY BECAME WHAT THEY BEHELD, 1970, p.97
The American composer Frank Zappa seemed to have an inkling of this dilemma. He once said in an interview in 1988 that when he considered the question of whether the world would end in fire, ice, paper, or nostalgia, he picked nostalgia. He had observed that musical fads were recently succumbing to new trends every six months which led to revivals of the older fads within a year or two. If this process kept accelerating, he reasoned, then we would reach the point when we would be so nostalgic for the previous moment we would not be able to move. This was how the world would end.
In retrospect Zappa predicted the fate of WBAI. Because after the intramural warfare of the past 3 years at 120 Wall Street, it is apparent its management is heading back to the Eighties as the only previous moment it recognizes. Granted it seems the world in general has made the same move since the events of 09/11/01, and WBAI is following in lockstep fashion back to its own hologram. But what is the present technology that is becoming a new hidden environment and turns which past into an art form when all times are being theme- parked inside us? There is an answer to this seemingly impossible question. It points to where all technologies come from – our bodies. If we project to the inevitable outcome of the miniaturization of new environments, then we will understand that we will meet ourselves, the origin of our long technological evolution. Perhaps we will meet our clone as we make the final turn on the last lap of the human race. But what this means is that we never really knew what we were made of and we are now still excavating the body we inhabit. No culture’s anthropomorphic images predicted the addition of the cathode ray screen (the TV body) and then the fiber optic cables (the Chip body) to our bodies’ constituents. And just maybe they were always there. We just had to keep unpeeling the revelatory layers. Either way we are becoming cognizant that we are inside a Mystery body whose mapping is nowhere near completion. The Mystery body is the only counterculture to the technological extensions that are coming with all their ecstasies and tribulations. We might think the evolution of art forms would appear, in the long view presented in this essay, to be rather mechanical and predetermined. But this response forgets that each technological phase numbed its occupants so much that they would easily feel they were experiencing in their day the “last word” in human novelty. Even collective somnambulism has its good points. But the last word for our time is that we must live with the knowledge of this determinism if we refuse to take advantage of its epiphany. And this is the key for WBAI’s survival. We can turn the process around and make the present unperceived environment an art form, in order to begin to perceive the lineaments of the Mystery body. The Mystery body becomes the irresistible political force bypassing the immovable object of the known body, regardless of culture. Our health becomes the unifying agent and rallying cry of political solidarity. This is the ground on which we can take our stand and hijack all known forms of expression to serve in pointing to the invisible environment of physical well-being, innovating a technically holistic response to disease.
In short, the Left must recognize the environment Americans actually live in and with, and find a way to coherently address its effects on our social, physical, political, economic, and psychological lives. The constituents of that environment are:
- the Western chemical body excavated by I. G. Farben and its subsidiaries;
- the astral body excavated by psychic, religious, and spiritual experiences;
- the TV body excavated by pollstergheists;
- and the Chip body excavated by the Department of Homeland Security. If the Left fails to bravely and perceptively meet our present situation, then it will continue to be humiliated by the exposure of its self-created hypocrisies such as were displayed on Jan. 5, 2004.
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen for the last forty years, most Americans are forced to improvise responses to this new hyper-communicative crucible without any guidance except those found in the transient adoption of fashions in all genres. The travel agent has only traded on a third of the tourisms Americans engage in, both inner and outer. These new, persistent, and demanding voyages have proved so exhausting to Americans that we have failed to see them as the real cause of the political and cultural impotence afflicting the not-so-common man and woman of the new Century.
Note: Since this article was written in January 2004, events have rapidly borne out the factors I said will ultimately lead to Bush’s second term. The White House is an image for the TV environment. The Internet at present only affects the primaries to make them exciting. But the election is geared to the museum of TV so the Democratic candidate has to become dull. Dean happily passed the reins to the appropriate image, John Kerry. Meanwhile, those addicted to the excitement of the primaries must have an outlet. Air America Radio will fill the bill but will become irrelevant in the Fall “hardball” campaign as even President Bush will be forced to limit his image to the museum meme.
You see, it is not understood that President Bush is the first President of the last one hundred years to be relatively indifferent to his image in the media. He is surfing on the effect of the chip- body environment which makes its users feel independent of the one-way broadcasting media. The fact that Bush can circulate outside the mass media creates an image that appeals to the daily consumer of information overload. His halting speech, incomplete sentences, and garbled syntax actually make him appear more appealing because most Americans would be in the same position if asked to lead a nation in a post-national world. But the image of the White House must remain the refuge and security blanket to alleviate the new social anxieties created in the “chaosmos” of the chip body. In short, the World Wide Web has transformed the function of the Executive Office from change- agent to a necessary ballast for the ship of State. The autumn Presidential race will see both candidates striving to show they are more rooted in the past than the other.
At best, Air America Radio, as it becomes shrill and hysterical about its fate, will push voters towards Bush because its content will remind them about what the office of the President is not about. After the election, the illusions will have melted away and WBAI may want to realistically assess its future in light of what had happened to Air America Radio.
