Pearls and Irritations

Forty four years ago today as I am writing this (17/11/80) the harbinger of Donald Trump appeared in The New Yorker magazine. TV critic George W.S. Trow wrote a long essay (which later became a book) titled ‘Within the context of no context,’ giving notice to the world of what we now see unfolding across America in 2024, and what Australia last experienced with the 2023 No Vote for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.

Thanks to TV, now magnified a thousandfold by its much smarter little sister Social Media’s algorithms, the Audience has been atomised down to the situation of being totally Alone with the Advertiser, who can play freely with their Attitudes without either facing any moral consequence.

All thanks to the microscopically demographically sliced and diced ‘ordinary people’ deciding to live in a state of permanent and selfish childishness. Having abandoned any sense of the Commonweal, in favour of their appetite for Grievance and Greed. All fed a continuous diet of ‘What I like,’ picked up by the wonders of IT.

We’ve had forty years of warming up to the spectre of a self declared Sensorious Showman becoming the most powerful person in the world.

“Wonder was the grace of the country,” Trow wrote in November 1980. “Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?”

Trow went on to unpack the story of American business cynically commodifying its own people, in a whole different take on what was to become twelve years later the foolhardy but famous ‘end of history’ phrase coined by political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

“History. That movement, from wonder to the wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big – that was the movement of history. Then there was a change. The direction of the movement paused, sat silent for a moment, and reversed. From that moment, vastness was the start, not the finish. The movement now began with the fact of two hundred million, and the movement was toward a unit of one, alone. Groups of more than one were now united not by a common history but by common characteristics. History became the history of demographics, the history of no-history.” (N. USA’s population in 1980 was about 227 million, it’s now 335 million).

The experience of ‘the world in your living room’ that TV brought to Americans, and the rest of us, changed the way we saw ourselves. Trow cottoned onto ‘the con’ being run within this mesmerising show, and he expounded the need for people to wake up. But it was way too late, they were already permanently hooked.

“Television replaced radio as the dominant broadcast medium by the 1950s and took over home entertainment. Approximately 8,000 US households had television sets in 1946; 45.7 million had them by 1960.” (thanks to Wikipedia).

Leaving Trow in 1980 like a lonely curmudgeon, stuck in the columns of The New Yorker, watching the western world’s slow moral self immolation.

“The New History was the record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there.

“The Decline of Adulthood. In the New History, nothing was judged – only counted. The power of judging was then subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the idea became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be easily measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.

“Powerful Men. The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.”

Trow went on to describe how TV isolated the consumer in a world of simplistic personal choices, where life fluctuates between “the grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse.”

And, chillingly, Trow used General Eisenhower’s (and running mate Richard Nixon’s) successful 1952 presidential election campaign as an example of the sort of messaging that works best in America:

“The Aesthetic of the Hit. The power shifted. In the phrase ‘I Like Ike,’ the power shifted. It shifted from General Eisenhower to someone called Ike, who embodied certain aspects of General Eisenhower and certain aspects of affection for General Eisenhower. Then it shifted again. From ‘Ike,’ you could see certain aspects of General Eisenhower. From ‘like,’ all you could see was other Americans engaged in a process of intimacy. This was a comfort.” MAGA-style comfort.

Trow then forensically dissected the history of what Marshall McLuhan famously dubbed “the medium is the message,” showing how becoming a “Hit” with the people was an invitation to intimacy. Then applying the well informed knowledge of “Experts” helped lend credence to whatever message you might be selling.

But the biggest swing factor, in bringing the population along with you, was Celebrity. The ability to be identified on the world stage, and as an intimate friend in anyone’s living room. “I like Ike.” Watch out wetbacks.

How do we respond to this trend in shrinking morality? Regain a sense of ethical accountability rather than selfish Me-First-ism? Somewhere in between “the two hundred million and the unit of one alone” is the Civil Society and its commitment to the Common Good. A shared sense of responsibility for one another that forty plus years of neoliberalism and transglobal capitalism, alongside corporate lobbyists occupying the corridors of power and hypnotising politicians with their wares, has whittled down to a tiny shred of conscience.

I live in the perhaps forlorn hope that Australia still has remnants of that conscience. Pearls and Irritations is a living breathing example that it’s still possible.

(Within the context of no context, Atlantic Monthly Press, NY, 1981 & 1997)

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