There's this from Stuart Jeffries:
"If you listen to Trump speak, it's all stream-of-consciousness gibberish. There's no real thought, no real intellectual process, no historical memory. It's a rhetorical sham, but a kind of brilliant one when you think about it. He's a projection of his supporters, and he knows it. He won by capturing attention, and he captured attention by folding pop entertainment into politics, which is something the critical theorists anticipated."
And then, there's this from Kevin Drum this morning: "Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off as Idiot."
So, yes, "stream-of-consciousness gibberish" in action! It does help when you have a few "neo-marxists," or "lefty all-stars" to consult!
And it's kind of head-opening to be reminded that my beloved Pop Culture actually promotes an insidious Capitalistic Totalitarianism! Manufacturing Distraction!
"Manufacturing distraction is exactly what it is. If you read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, you see him struggling with this problem. He sees in 1964 that everyone is getting too comfortable to revolt against oppression of any kind. People are distracted by the sexual revolution, by popular music, by virtually every aspect of mass culture."
By the way, here's another interesting piece of the puzzle: there's this little "brain study" that tells us it's really, really hard to change someone's political opinions. Seems those opinions are buried deep in the brain, in something brain scientists call the "default mode network," so an attack on our political opinions is perceived as a personal attack on our identities.
An "inconvenient truth," is like a threat to our being. So we evade, and dissemble, and double-down on our initial belief despite the evidence. Sounds familiar?!
So yes, we are seduced, and lied to, and it's okay, just let us buy stuff and let us believe what we want to believe, when we want to believe it. That's so damn human of us!
