Donald Trump is a clear and present danger. But he needs to be understood, Chris Hedges writes, in the context of the digital revolution -- which has made the electronic image paramount:
Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions, prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W. Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.
Postman understood what was coming:
“It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse,” Postman points out. “It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.” Americans, because television stages their world, “no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.”
And Trump is the embodiment of all that:
Trump is what is produced when a society severs itself from print, when it pushes art, ethics, classics, philosophy, history and the humanities to the margins of the universities and culture, when its members spend hours sitting inert in front of a screen. Information, ideas and epistemology are, as Postman writes, given form today by electronic images.
The result is not just cultural regression. It's cultural nihilism and narcissism -- something that John Ralston Saul has opined about:
“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation,” John Ralston Saul writes. “We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. And the image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.”
Trump has been at the centre of that communications empire for a long time. The power the electronic image has given him is what makes him so dangerous. The more we worship electronic images, the more powerful he becomes.
Image: New York Magazine
