Pushers and Pimps of Perpetual Crisis

When I turned on the news again after my little spring break, it felt like a nest of angry hornets had invaded my garden. I dodged and swatted at the pestiferous buzzing as best I could. But it was almost impossible to escape the stings and scams and rip-offs that are sold to us every second of every day by American mass media, that great generator and habitat of anxiety that is the profit center of the Information Age. 

I couldn’t help but think that without the goad of lurking traumas, the ceaseless humming of misinformation and panic advertising, of political lies and commercial manipulation, we’d never be driven to consume all those tsunamis of machines and gadgets, nostrums and balms of fashion that keep the economy humming along. The Jurassic Park of mass communication is so distracting we actually forget, most of the time, that the wealth and power of billionaires depends on us losing our peace of minds and being scared out of our wits.

Historian and critic George Steiner described these hornets of profit and anxiety perfectly in his 1970s book “In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture.” He wrote about the “perpetuity of crisis” that has become the daily news. In Western culture, he wrote, “wherever ordinary men and women look…across the garden hedge, they…(see) bayonets passing,” even if it’s only in their minds’ eye.

When Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published their book “Manufacturing Consent” in 1988, a title borrowed from columnist Walter Lippman, who coined the phrase in the 1920s, many of us saw for the first time how “corporate sponsored propaganda” worked to turn citizens into frantic consumers of business ideology and its hyped-up, obsolescent products. It’s vast success is propelled by creating a scatter-brained information environment so full of looming crisis and catastrophe that the consumer of news is constantly scammed into buying “solutions” to dire problems dreamed up by the pushers of the products themselves.

I found one tiny example of such a sting in my medicine chest this morning. One of my deodorants was labeled, in a triumphal font, “stain shield.” I’ve never been worried about perspiration staining my clothes. It must be a worry for someone, but I bet the propaganda gimmick here was to just mention the problem of a “stain” that could be a potential crisis of embarrassment in your wardrobe, and while mentioning it, present you with a product that would heal and solve the shame of it all.

A far bigger hornet, a whole infestation of them in fact, is the interminable news coverage given to Donald Trump. The commercial propaganda of corporate media doesn’t even have to invent a perpetual source of crisis with The Donald. He IS a perpetual crisis all by himself, just by existing. I don’t think it’s far fetched to suppose that the incessant, pestiferous buzzing of Trumpnewshorror is purposefully used to create a climate of anxiety that’s perfect for selling all kinds of advertising products to all kinds of dazed and traumatized political consumers. Add to that “investigative” hints of Trump intimidating jurors at his various trials, and shop-til-  you-drop anxiety results in a boom of profits.

Back to a garden variety news sting, the kind that conveys ideology in the form of “information.” A little news item appeared recently in the archly conservative Albuquerque Journal that is a perfect gem of  the partisan misdirections of corporate propaganda. The little news item conveyed the idea that it was a good thing that the federal government had coughed up many millions to help New Mexico clean up long-abandoned corporate coal mines. It implied that this was some sort of beneficent windfall. In fact, as federal tax payers, New  Mexicans were being gulled once again to pay for the clean up of a private mine that the corporate owner should have done and paid for long ago. Once again, private pollution had become a public cost. It’s a classic example of a corporate sting.

The mass media is swarming with such malicious magic tricks. If you’re trying to stay informed, how do you get the buzzing out of your head? You can’t turn it off any more than you can turn off the hornets in your garden. There’s no pesticide for the perpetuity of crisis news. The first thing you can do is to remain on high alert to the brainwashing pranks of profit pimps who keep poking the hornets’ nests in our gardens. That means we must be constantly refining our standards of veracity and rational viability. We must rigorously counter our own gullibility by trusting ourselves and acting on the “still small voice” of our internal “no” in the face of any sly or outrageous message buzzing in our ears, telling us in endlessly uncertain terms exactly what to think and feel.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Photo by Cory Doctorow)