Election Day Angst (2016)

Our Reactionary Age 

From the New York Times (Op-Editorial)

To live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological transformations, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.

Mark Lilla—

Mark Lilla’s nice article makes more sense of the election day angst than all the hours of teeth-gnashing from left leaning CNN journalists and right wing Fox News partisans, the briefest of tweeters, the longwinded radio tycoons, the neocons, the rabble rousers, the rooftop shouters, the Cubs fans, the Kardashians, The View, the others with an obstructed view, the great unwashed, The Voice, those others without a voice, The Housewives, the white educated ladies in the Philly suburbs, the Latino voters, the vote suppressors, the Second Amendment gun toters hiding up in the hills loading up on ammo, Taylor Swift, LeBron James, Jay-Z and Beyonce, the dog whisperer, the paint sniffers, opioid abusers, Jimmy Fallon and his unnamed sidekick (Steve Higgins), the victims of micro-aggression, the refugees, the terrorists, the fellow travelers, not to mention Flo from Progressive, the Mayhem guy and the Good Hands guy, all keeping us safe 24/7 but still we feel so vulnerable.

Lilla’s op-ed makes more sense than almost everybody else—with a single, powerful exception, a man who speaks to us most eloquently, even from the grave, the great thinker and media guru Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan always argued for the need for an awareness of present circumstances. We must bring to consciousness the vortex of swirling media energy encircling us. Mcluhan compared the situation to an Edgar Allen Poe short story, Descent into the Maelstrom, a cautionary tale in which a fisherman finds himself caught in the midst of a whirlpool of swirling waters.  The fisherman saves himself  by achieving a moment of clarity in the midst of the whirlpool. The Norwegian fisherman in Poe’s story gathers himself for a brief moment and, by observing the wild vortex of energy, ocean waters swirling with debris, finds a solution. He separates from his boat and grabs on to a steamer trunk as a way out of the maelstrom.

McLuhan referred to the story in his first book, The Mechanical Bride, (1951) devoted to the subject of advertising and written before the real advent of television. McLuhan the book with a reference to the Poe story, and the hope that his work will render the maelstrom better understood. Here is McLuhan’s statement:

The present book likewise makes few attempts to attach the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress in which everybody is involved. From the analysis of that action, it is hoped, many individual strategies may suggest themselves.

(McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, preface)

The maelstrom has clearly grown wider, deeper and more ferocious than in 1951, but McLuhan always retained the Poe story as a core metaphor for the man’s need to study the vortex of media energy as a means for survival. The question for the present age—Have we determined even a single strategy for protecting ourselves from the maelstrom?—unfortunately remains unanswered.