Dumbed down TV, dumbed down politicians, dumbed down ‘debates’ which are little more than exchanges of insults and slogans. Ever felt like you are living in a comic?
We live in a world of instant communication – stuff that is happening in our postcode and two continents away clamours equally for our attention. Our constantly pinging smart phones are the neurons of a planetary brain. Sarah at number seven needs some compost. President Trump wants to shut down the US Department of Education.
Reality is too complicated – there are too many permutations for the human brain to compute. Is it really so surprising that we have adopted a simplistic Marvel comics view of the world, which does not allow for character development or for moral nuance. Like the world portrayed in those comics, politics are blue and red, black and white, more than they ever have been. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it?
This Marvel paradigm comes to us from the 1930s, when comics and fascism were born. It is both infantile and sententious – Batman is now, ‘the batman’, a brooding Gothic anti-hero, with a frown on his painted face. This tortured role is said, by Jack Nicholson, to have killed poor Keith Ledger. No wonder.
Cards on the table. I was in the tribe of superman not batman when I was a kid, created by Marvel’s rivals, DC. It introduces a bias, but it doesn’t affect my argument. Before we used comics to storyboard life, we used to transmit what was viewed as ‘the record’ on paper, with words. These are words. The process was imperfect but the fact that it slowed things up at least facilitated analysis and pluralistic interpretation.
In our rapidly evolving digital universe, the physical record of what humans do is diminishing in importance – soon it will be as non-existent as a photograph album – a nightmare that not even George Orwell predicted. The implications are far reaching. In the metaverse, once normative categories are increasingly blurred – fact versus opinion and now, thanks to artificial intelligence, human versus machine. It’s an ontological mash-up.
Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of the digital revolution that has leapt into our pockets is that it seems to be ushering in the end of history, as a reflective and mediating process. Now there is only now. American political commentator, Francis Fukuyama, argued that history ended in 1990 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He believed that this would usher in the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. He was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
Victors write history
It is the victors who write history. Enabled by the internet, victors can simply declare themselves as such, either because they own a means of global communication, or they control it through the sheer reach and volume of the content which they and their followers generate. Goebbels would have loved the internet.
Thus an almost successful insurrectionist becomes a president; a sexual predator declares himself to be a follower of Christ – and an unrepentant one – and attracts even more followers. As far as we can tell, tousle-haired Russell Brand with his leather pants and his rococo vocabulary, admits to no sin. The priapic Jesus lookalike is merely the victim of a conspiracy, cooked up by the boring ‘legacy media’ to destroy the cult of Russell, just as it’s trying to close down anti-vaxxers and people who believe that the world began 6,000 years ago and that carbon dating is fake.
Hitler’s PR guy, Josef Goebbels, is whispering his poison into our ear buds, while Trump, following his blitzkrieg of the once sacred institutions of American democracy, bellows his fatuous me-centred discourse from a non-existent balcony mocked up for YouTube, with a dubbed on cheer track.
We all saw and heard what he did – he tried to rustle up missing votes from a state official who bravely stood his ground – and he recorded himself doing it! What do you do with that and with the proud boy uprising? You can’t change them or argue that they didn’t matter (unless you are morally reprehensible or an idiot). To preserve your mental equilibrium, you pretend that they didn’t happen, or you normalise them, to blend in with a new reality. Or both.
You welcome the guy to the Whitehouse and he pretends to be nice, not a brutal street thug. A voice inside you says that, if you don’t do that, you risk being grabbed on the street one day and beaten with billy clubs.
Fukuyama weeping
Fukuyama was doubly wrong – not only in how history would end, but in what would follow it. He must be weeping now. The 1930s are only an eye blink away. We had democracy for a few decades. Now we are back to the jack boot and men in tights – the triumph of brutal ignorance. Trump is set to make America stupid, not great – a country built in his own image.
They say that crowds have wisdom. It’s sometimes true. We have a geopolitical framework dominated by gangsters who have subverted democratic processes, or who operate outside them. Two of them need to be in office to avoid being locked up in prison.
One of them is an absurd looking orange-faced man with stretchy sports clothing struggling to contain his ample frame and a wife who looks as if she is made from plastic. This guy, see, he can video call the other leaders and they can sort out the world – carving it up between them, like gangsters in prohibition-era Chicago. In other words, in a world of bullies, we need the biggest bully.
The things is, in a Marvelised universe, this scenario has a logic and even a depressing appeal. Faced by Trump and an industrial assault on middle American opinion from Russian bot farms, the Democrats could not find an equally potent leader and a credible story to take on the Donald, the polyester horror.
Story is everything. A depressing conclusion would be that being nice, like Joe and Kamala, just doesn’t cut it these days. A less depressing one would be that an anti-Trump could have won the 2024 election, or could be found in time for the next one – a man or woman leading a US crusade for pluralism, tolerance and democracy – the founding values of the US – a titan at the negotiating table with a natural feel for the peasant brutality of Stalin’s successors, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
In previous decades, before swamp politics became the norm, this person could have been a Republican. They would be at vanguard of a high tech, world-leading assault on global warming. They would be gracious and cultured, and they would know the right cutlery to use at Buckingham Palace and how to behave next to a gracious monarch. Surely Marvel could imagine something like that into being? We have to hope so.