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Thoughts
on America’s Election and its President-elect
By Peter McKenzie-Brown
Like most Canadians, I woke up disgusted the day after
America’s recent election. And my inbox was full of words of horror. The first
note I received was from my friend Robert Bott. “The words in my head on awakening
this morning were: ‘What hath God wrought?’” he said. He added that the phrase comes
from the Book of Numbers in the Bible. Those
were “the first words transmitted by Samuel Morse between Washington and
Baltimore on May 24, 1844 to demonstrate the invention of the telegraph.”
Over the next couple of days, his
note circulated to others, who contributed ideas of their own. The purpose of
this post is to codify them, in the hope that our collective thoughts can throw
some light on the madness that took place south of the border.
Demagoguery is nothing new. The word
dates back to ancient Greece, and it’s hard to imagine that these people were
not around for hundreds of millennia before that. The American election brings the word to the
fore again, and I’d like to take this opportunity to comment on what happened
south of the Canadian border. I’m speaking, of course, as a Canadian. However,
I am starting from the position that – although he clearly won the Electoral
College, Trump is unfit to hold office. For example, The
Atlantic opined, “the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump … might
be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year
history of the American presidency.” It was only the third time in the magazine’s
long history that it weighed in on a presidential election.
But let’s view the story in
another light. It looks as though H.L. Mencken
– a cynical, acerbic, dyspeptic but terrific American journalist – nailed last
week’s events a century ago: “As democracy is perfected, the office of
president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people,” he wrote,
for the Baltimore Evening Sun. “On some great and glorious day the plain folks
of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron.”
“The larger the mob, the harder
the test,” he continued. “In small areas, before small electorates, a
first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with
him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the
fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of
personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the
man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most
easily, adeptly, disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.”
In the email discussion Bob instigated,
a number of us opined on the US election. We were all appalled at the outcome,
but Bob put election night’s events into an interesting context: the revolutions
that have arisen from the evolution of technologies that affected
communications. His points were the following. I don’t use quotation marks, but
I am quoting him directly.
1. The evolution of The Gutenberg Press (1436) made
possible the dissemination of Martin Luther’s theses (1517).
2. Water-powered paper production was common by the
1700s and undoubtedly facilitated the Enlightenment and the American and French
revolutions.
3. The telegraph, rotary printing press, and paper
manufacture from wood pulp were all commercialized in the 1840s. By this time,
railroads and steamships also were accelerating movement of people and goods,
including books and newspapers. Not surprising perhaps that popular uprisings
erupted in Europe in 1848 and agitation in the 1850s led to the U.S. Civil War.
4. Mass circulation magazines, inexpensive books,
the telephone, and the trans-oceanic cables are all in place by the turn of the
20thcentury. In the
U.S. we see the Progressive movement, muckraking journalism, many reform laws,
and labor agitation—followed by WWI mobilization, the Red Scare, women’s
suffrage, and Prohibition. Elsewhere the Boer War, WWI, Bolshevik
Revolution, etc.
5. Radio and movies in the 1920s enable and empower
Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill (among others) in the 1930-45 period.
Then we have television in the 1950s, bringing forth figures like JFK as well
as the U.S. civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war
movements. Xerox reproduction, FM radio, and offset printing probably played
roles too.
6. Facsimile transmission should not be overlooked;
fax was a key means of communication in overturning Soviet hegemony in 1989.
The spread of multi-channel satellite and cable broadcasting in the 1980s and
1990s certainly had impacts in the U.S. and elsewhere; cable news provided a
new kind of access to the Gulf War, Rodney King, the Clarence Thomas hearings
and so on.
7. Then, around 1995, the World Wide Web emerges
from its government-academic closet and becomes a global mass medium by around
2002 when blogs began to proliferate. A few years later we get the “shared
information spaces” like Facebook and Twitter. So far the results include the
elections of both Obama and Trump, the Tea Party and Occupy movements, and the
spread of radicalism of every kind from ISIS to the Alt-Right.
Although I am a Canadian, I remember well how excited we were because Obama had been clever enough to use social media as a stepping stone to the White House eight years ago.
As American academic Pamela
Rutledge explained at the time, his first Presidential campaign “made
history. Not only was Obama the first
African American to be elected president, but he was also the first
presidential candidate to effectively use social media as a major campaign
strategy. It’s easy to forget, given how ubiquitous social media is today, that
in 2008 sending out voting reminders on Twitter and interacting with people on
Facebook was a big deal. When Obama
announced his candidacy in 2007, Twitter had only just started and there wasn’t
even an iPhone yet.”
As the discussion progressed, the discussion shifted to the
great Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan,
whom Bott quoted from a March
1969 Playboy interview. “By stressing that the medium
is the message rather than the content,” he said, “I’m not suggesting that
content plays no role – merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role.
Even if Hitler had delivered botany lectures, some other demagogue would have
used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side
of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties.
By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we
lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on
man, and thus we are always dumfounded by – and unprepared for – the
revolutionary environmental transformations induced by new media.”
Another participant in this discussion,
Seymour Hamilton, had been one of
McLuhan’s students in the 1960s. He described the printing press as “a
one-to-many communication method,” like radio and TV. “They are therefore instruments of central
power, providing excellent trumpets down which dictators and demagogues shout
at their subjects. Telephone is
essentially one-to-one, and as private as a hand-written or typed letter or a
fax.” The CBC radio program As It Happens
“is a clever adaptation.”
By contrast, “the internet is
one-to-one but public,” which makes it critically different from telephones,
faxes and letters, Hamilton says. It is “much
more ubiquitous and immediate and therefore favours simplistic or gnomic
utterances. It flattens communication in
ways that were forecast to favour democracy.
Unhappily, this prediction appears to be going the same way as forecasts
about radio when it was called “the wireless” The same is true for TV, “which
some of us remember being touted as ‘holding infinite promise for education.’”
The Internet has “flattened discourse
down to the lowest common denominator,” he says. “Anyone’s opinion equals
anyone else’s opinion, regardless of knowledge or truth.” To cite an
extraordinary example, during Trump’s campaign the false
news circulated that “News outlets around the world are reporting on the
news that Pope Francis has made the unprecedented decision to endorse a US
presidential candidate.” The item
originated at “WTOE 5 News,” a fantasy news site.
McLuhan said new technologies “obsolesce
something, enhance something, retrieve something, and leapfrog on to the next
thing,” Hamilton said. His example was
the zipper, which “obsolesces buttons and bows, enhances clasping, retrieves
long flowing garments and leapfrogs on to Velcro.”
And what can we say about the Internet as
technology? According to Hamilton it reduces privacy, both individually and
internationally. It enhances ubiquity and community of the like-minded. It also leads to “shaming, bullying, coarse
language and pornography.”
But the really new aspect of the
digital age, he says, are algorithms – the ones that “lead you to more and more
of what you react to. Algorithms enhance the echo-chamber effect, feed the
trolls, reinforce lies, misconceptions, and baseless assertions,” he says. And
sadly, the whole process is confused with research, therefore proliferating
ignorance and falsehood by equating the weight and truth of all opinions.”
Good News? It was a great shock, but there is also good news – for Canadians,
at least. For the most part, the border
will shield us from the worst of the Trump government’s outrages. As Canadians
we will likely benefit economically from unbridled capitalism in the US.
Also, of course, there are
Constitutional checks and balances in the American government, and the civil
service should keep him in check to some degree, at least. Also, unless he
actually does a good job, our southern neighbours likely won’t elect him twice.
Thus, they’ll only have put up with him for a single term. Or am I being too
optimistic?
The bad news that I can’t argue
away is that the planet will not do well in terms of global warming and other
environmental issues. That may not affect me much, but my progeny it will.
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