An Endless Series of Hobgoblins
Propaganda, John Candy, and more
One of the oddest manifestations of American exceptionalism is that our tendency to believe, as a country, that we (meaning the U.S. government) do not engage in propaganda and that we (meaning the citizenry of the nation) are, more or less, immune to propaganda. Propaganda is something happens in other, less free lands; it is associated in our collective consciousness with oppressive communist dictatorships, banana republics ruled by comical cabals of generals, and fanatical failed states run by someone whose religion is different than our own. Even the name itself – propaganda, a sinister-sounding Latin backformation cooked up by the untrustworthy Papists of Rome – is foreign and alien to the tongue and the ear as well as the eye. More educated Americans will sometimes accuse their ideological enemies of both consuming and distributing propaganda, as when liberals call FOX News a “propaganda network” or conservatives mutter about propaganda in the form of the socialist indoctrination they believe their children are unwillingly exposed to when they go off to college, but for the most part, it is believed to fall on deaf ears, inured to the very notion of propaganda because we are smart, we Americans, certainly too smart to fall for such crude and obvious manipulation.
This is yet another failure of the American allergies to education, historicity, and self-analysis. “Propaganda” was once a relatively neutral word, meant to describe a very specific activity for a very specific purpose; it only began to acquire a negative association after the Enlightenment, when the ‘rationalists’ of the British upper class began to develop the absurd idea that there was such a thing as a principle unmoored of human perspective and that, therefore, it was both possible and desirable for politicians, philosophers, journalists, and all manner of other respectable professionals to be in some way ‘objective’. Before postmodernism appeared hundreds of years later to explode this ridiculous myth – a favor for which we have lacked even the simple decency to thank it – we operated under the unchallenged assertion that there were two things, one called ‘truth’ and the other called ‘propaganda’, and never the twain would meet (the former being the dominion of decent rational folk and the latter being a blunt instrument wielded by rogues against rubes.
In fact, of course, America is exceptionally talented at propaganda; so much so that, as with most other things subject to the invidious influence of public relations, when we do it, we call it something else. Much of the moral content of our law is nothing more than fiddled-with Mosaic scripture, but we pretend it is the result of some kind of widely accepted social contract rather than a bizarre hangover from a period of religious governance. Our history of racism, imperialism, and colonialism is utterly repulsive and has left behind a legacy that adds to its centuries-old body count every day, but the absence of this perspective from our textbooks is considered unworthy of correction, comment, or even recognition. We act as if our country unilaterally embraced bandit capitalism of its own accord, and do not discuss how it is accepted because of a century and a half of nonstop lobbying, bribery, coercion, and the systematic suppression of any possible alternative. We even have an adorable stock phrase – “winning hearts and minds” – to reflect our deep-seated belief that when we do propaganda, it’s cute.
The average American sees more propaganda in a single day than most residents of authoritarian dictatorships see in an entire lifetime, most of it by choice; we just aren’t accustomed to calling it that. We call it “advertising” or “public service” or “editorial content”, saving the P-word for what the college kids are swallowing down at the quad. We wake up in the morning to news broadcasts that are managed and dictated by the interests of the people who own them; we listen to politicians of both parties echo talking points that are fed to them verbatim by the same groups of paid industry lobbyists; and we watch show after show after show that portray cops as morally upstanding defenders of the innocent, interrupted by advertisements that sell us the goals of wealth accumulation, constant consumption, and growth without consequence. The less aware of us undergo this nonstop, lifelong bombardment with flagrant propaganda with very little though; the professional class accepts it just as fully, but goes the extra bootlicking step of pretending that it is all very rational and natural and desired by all, because if it wasn’t, how would it even exist? If they’re educated enough, they might spare a snarky chuckle at that poltroon Marx and his condescending idea of “false consciousness”. Now who doesn’t think much of the working class, eh Karl? Ho ho.
The pushback against the rather obvious fact that Americans are exposed to ideological propaganda nearly every second of their lives is usually to deny that it’s propaganda at all. This sort of stonewalling of reality, of pretending that nothing exists outside of the present reality and nothing is possible beyond what has already been tried, should be familiar to anyone who is in a cult. If faced with someone a bit too clever to fall for the idea that we all just collectively chose unrestricted capitalism and stopped talking about it because it was working just as intended, the argument usually shifts to something called “whataboutism”, a new-ish term for the tu quoque fallacy so beloved by people who think following a bunch of arbitrary rhetorical rules is a good substitute for doing politics. Maybe we do engage in propaganda, this argument goes, but what about the Soviets and their big portraits of Stalin? (The correct response to this question is “What about them?”, a question that may shock you in its ability to cut through thick crusty wads of sun-dried bullshit.) It is not a serious argument and should not be treated as one.
It is long past time that we stop pretending that our country doesn’t do propaganda. It is time that we start calling it what it is, wherever we find it – from our television entertainment to our news media lying us into another disaster to the speeches of our civil leaders to our educational system. But beyond that, it is time that we take the rationalist stink off of the word and start producing propaganda of our own, proudly presenting it as a tonic, a cure, a social good; an unapologetically leftists approach to mass communication that abandons the soft pretension of objectivity and influences the public not to blindly accept, but to look for itself and see that there is more than one story it can believe. Soft power is of crucial importance, especially when hard power is hard to seize. We have let the boss class buy the whole concept of truth, and we can’t let the concept of persuasion remain a tool it alone possesses. Winston Smith may have learned through slow, painful manipulation over years to love Big Brother, but we’ve been convinced to love Victory Gin for a fragment of the time and effort.
You really don’t have to look that far for examples of American propaganda in either the private or public sectors. Every administration of the last century has had a huge propaganda budget for both domestic and foreign consumption, and the size of that purse (paid for by us, of course) gets bigger every four years. We’ve been engaging in imperialist propaganda since we started doing imperialism and anti-communist propaganda since there’s been communism. (An underdiscussed aspect of the claim that socialism has been ‘proven not to work’ is that everywhere it’s had a chance, it’s been undermined nonstop by the capitalism-imperialist powers, through words, deeds, and unthinkable quantities of money.)
Even beyond what we prepare for export, our domestic propaganda machine is something to see, even if you remove the private sector from the equation and pretend that our media doesn’t get half its content hand-fed to it by corporate interests. Again, we tend to think of official censorship as something that exists in other countries, relics of a less enlightened past or tools of oppressive authoritarians who fear their own people. America, whatever its faults, does not have an official policy of censorship, nor does it have any means of enforcing it.
This, naturally, is a particularly preposterous claim. It would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Hays Code that governed the motion picture industry for decades and which forbade, for example, the portrayal of any law enforcement officer as corrupt, criminal, or incompetent; it would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Comics Code Authority, cooked up for similar reasons by some of the same people; and it would come as a surprise to anyone who knows the CIA’s history of funneling vast amounts of cash into virtually every aspect of the entertainment industry to warn hep-cats and vulnerable teens away from Red temptation. In a more modern sense, it would come as a shock to anyone who knows how heavily we censor news and communications intended for prisoners or soldiers overseas; or anyone who knows how quickly you can lose your job because of the expression of a private belief being made public. Many are genuinely shocked to learn that backing the BDS movement – that is, agreeing to abide by a humanitarian boycott by deciding what you will buy with your own money – is enough to get you disemployed in more than a few American states. The boss class is smart and dangerous, and they’ve picked up on “cancel culture”, whatever that is; it’s been turned into a voice of suppressing dissent (and, more importantly, of stifling conversation and substituting for real action and change) quicker than its originators must have dreamed.
And so we strip-mine old television for any embarrassing racial references, and selectively enforce the now-accepted notion that white people shouldn’t pretend to be black people in animation, while still doing next to nothing to help actual black people by, say, eliminating, defunding, or even prosecuting the cops who torture and kill them on a daily basis. This we do not call propaganda. But pointing out how little the oppression and subjugation of black people has changed since the Emancipation Proclamation and urging them to keep fighting for their owl liberation and the destruction of a system that degrades and ruins them? Baby, that’s propaganda – and, if many legislators on both sides of the aisles get their way, it’s propaganda you could go to prison for.
Back in the old days, networks would show actual theatrical movies – usually late at night or on weekends. (The last time I remember this happening was Schindler’s List, which was felt important enough to warrant postponing an episode of All-Star TV Bloopers.) Because of the existence of Standards & Practices departments – one of many American institutions that promote censorship without being characterized as propaganda or oppression – the networks had a limited amount of power to delete or edit the films, usually to prevent nudity or foul language from creeping through; because the censors were usually clueless aging bureaucrats or well-meaning bluenoses rather than actual creators, this would sometimes result in hilarious scenarios similar to the one portrayed here, which will probably make no sense to any under the age of 30. (Interestingly, the coming of cable and pay TV didn’t so much get rid of censorship – every network still has S&P – so much as allow people who paid enough to choose whether or not they wanted to see naked people and hear bad language, under the longstanding American tradition that only those with money can be trusted to make decisions about their lives.)
Anyway, back in the early ‘80s, I have a distinct memory of watching a movie called Going Berserk on afternoon television one weekend. A meat-headed comedy of no distinction but with a weirdly impressive cast (among others, it starred a pre-legendary John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherty), it was subject to the usual strict codes of the time, but because of conflicting regulations, most of them union-won rules about the ability of anyone but the releasing studio to cut content, one memorable moment shone through. There’s a scene set in a punk club (with all the authenticity one would expect from a cheap comedy in 1983), and though it contains a lot of cursing, all of it gets dubbed over with the usual clumsy homophones. However, because of the restrictions on editing, the entire scene – which I recall lasted at least five minutes – featured a young kid with a mohawk walking around repeatedly in front of the camera wearing a sleeveless t-shirt with “FUCK YOU” written in huge, bold letters on the front. It was the best part of the movie, and, cards on the table, the only part that I can remember, other than a corny kung fu movie parody and poor hapless Ernie Hudson playing a guy named Muhammed Jerome Willy in a dismal proto-Weekend at Bernie’s scenario. Television! It was bad.
This week in end-times cultural effluvia, the Eisner Awards — the most prestigious prize in comics — is a little, uh, less prestigious this year; The Baffler looks at how keeping your data secure from corporate snooping has become just another corporate hustle; VICE examines the hilarious history of bad cops lying about people adulterating their shitty fast food orders; and Sianna Ngai, the “heavy-metal Marxist” whose book, Our Aesthetic Categories, breathed some new life into the tired corpus of cult-stud theory, has a new book out. Also, I didn’t know if it was legit or not, but this outfit appears to have bought up and paid off a significant chunk of the medical debt I racked up after a nightmare week in Texas. So, thanks, RIP Medical Debt! Now get us Medicare for All.