Journo - Pomo

Maybe the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was the postmodern moment, the point of populist betrayal.  Maybe no pivot point can be defined.  Maybe we embrace the uncertainties of post modernism and reject the certainties of the goals of a left wing populism because we are racists.  White workers of the world unite… you people of color, you wait for a while until we get this right.

If interpretation is inextricably bound with reality, then egalitarian principles must be laid aside, lest Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer add the weight of their interpretation to the common mix. Paradoxically, while we deny Jeffrey Dahmer a seat at the table,
we accept Karl Rove. We accept Wolfowitz. We accept Rumsfeld. We accept
Perl. We accept Cheney. We do not accept Charlie. What contextual
filter do we use as a gating mechanism for cannibalistic predators in
our culture?

In his essay "We’re All Postmodern Now" (July/August 2024 CJR), Mitchell Stephens equates "spin" (the integration of interpretation with facts for purposes of aggrandizement - corrected 7/18) to post modernism in journalism.  Stephens laments, or at least acknowledges the loss of evenhanded dialectic, the loss of a willingness to agree that we can arrive at truth by a reasonable exchange of arguments.  But perhaps what seems lost was never found.  Stephens points out that in the nineteenth century, the newspaper reader could buy the Greeley point of view in the New York Tribune or an opposing point of view from Bennett in the New York Herald.  Did these clashing perspectives ever represent a dialectic, or was power always the name of the contextual game?

Take Abraham Lincoln… (this is not a Henny Youngman joke).  The Great Emancipator rose to power on the promise to end slavery.  Southern secession followed.  With the departure of the southern agrarian interests, the northern industrial interests were able to promote their agenda, particularly in the grand prospect of an intercontinental railway.  The "frickin narrative," as Dr. Evil might call it, had to do with freedom for slaves and equality for all.  The narrative was a populist production, no matter how unpopular with the southern white people.  The southern narrative I think had more to do with noble individualism and local democracy, the rights of man against the state (never mind the men and women held in bondage - they were property, couldn’t vote, racially -forgive me - beyond the pale).  The point is that Honest Abe came to office at a time when he could assure the primacy of his clients in the steel and railroad industries in the struggle for power in the US.  And the next two or three generations of American government and capital investment were dominated by industrialist robber barons.

How was The Rail Splitter different from George W. Bush?  What and who informed the electorate in 1860 and how does that information differ from so called "postmodern spin?"  I sense an historical cycle playing out, but my inference is probably naïve and wrong.  History does not repeat itself any more than the planets’ "retrograde motion" is evidence of epicyclical behavior proving that the Earth is the center of the solar system.  Stephens suggests that the postmoderns have rationalized "spin" as acceptable information sharing behavior and that this is somehow new.  Spin is neither acceptable nor new.  To spin is to lie and lying remains unacceptable.

The right recognizes that the people abhor spin, but they also know that the people are willing to forgive a few little lies.  The warmth of belonging to the fan-base of the demagogue more than compensates for the chilling effects of a few campaign exaggerations. There’s a right wing propaganda broadcast that touts itself as "no-spin."  This exercise in self-conscious ironic recursion speaks volumes about the public’s willingness to accept what they are told, so long as the story is presented in an entertaining fashion. "No-spin" is itself of course a spin.  It represents a clashing of values with the leftward perspective that the show’s performers are "lying liars."  No dialectic, no reasoned argument, is possible between these two positions.  The self-righteous left and the duplicitous right have no common ground for discussion.

Paul Krugman, writing recently about Karl Rove, said, "What Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we’re not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: The faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."  Stephens points out in his essay that this is consistent with the postmodern destruction of fact in favor of context.

The wikipedia article on Universal Pragmatics is worth a read.  One wonders how Jürgen Habermas would account for the speech-acts of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.  I think Atwater and Rove want to dominate and will do anything to win.  This gives them an enormous advantage in the normative context of conventional morality.  And a once strong academic critical voice based in modern historical analysis with solid philosophical and epistemological roots has yielded to a sophomoric set of European middle-brow linguistic contortionists with little more to offer than a blended understanding of EMW Tillyard’s "Elizabethan World Picture" integrated with common-sense cultural anthropological theory and practice.

The old populism of the thirties, the populism of workers, farmers, and the urban poor, has given way to a new populism - the populism of the "evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, gun-nuts, and Bubbas" (thank you Molly Ivins).  Liberals cower before their mighty NASCAR engines, and the working press is trying on a new set of ethics.