Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
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Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
A couple of summers ago I read a lovely book called "The Metaphysical Club - A Story of Ideas in America", a Pulitzer Prize winner, by Louis Menand. The book is about a group of philosophers: William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, thinkers who grew out of the yeast culture of Emerson and Thoreau's Boston. The period in which these men worked, was the aftermath of the American Civil War, a time marked by an explosion of sordid robber barons and hucksters of every stripe whose patron saint might be P. T. Barnum, certainly not Saint Dismas, the "good thief".
At that time two America's coexisted, one dark and sleazy: the America of Jay Gould and Boss Tweed and another pure and bright: the America of James and Holmes. As different as they were, both of them, each in their way, were as real, as clearly drawn, as mordant and as "what you see is what you get" as the writings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville.
While I was reading the book I kept getting the feeling that the sense of reality that permeated that era of America's past, has been almost entirely lost. I have experienced some of that reality myself in the person of my grandmother, who was born and raised in 19th century America, and the men and women she grew up with in the tiny Midwestern village, where I spent many of my summers as a small boy. I wondered, while reading, "The Metaphysical Club" when and how America had become such a sinkhole of spin and mendacious euphemism, storytelling and bullshit. I had no answer, only the feeling of a better, nobler, America that had been lost. An America I am much proud of, hardly recognizable in the bloated, deluded, self-indulgent America of today. Who was responsible for wrecking it, when, how? I had no answer.
Then, the other day, a good friend sent me the link to the video that I have posted at the top of this piece and I suddenly was getting an idea when bullshit became America's native dialect. When I saw it, I thought it might have been some historical fiction dreamed up by Doctorow.
Here is the summary of the video.
BBC resume of "The Century of Self":
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.
I am going to say some pretty strong and uncomplimentary things about Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, so before going any farther, I wish to make clear, that I consider Sigmund Freud himself as one of the noblest and most creative minds in western history, a man who dedicated his life to fearlessly exploring the darkest recesses of the human mind with an intent solely to heal and ameliorate the human condition. As a tiny, but revealing sample of Freud's nobility and humanity, this sample, his account of his meeting with William James, will have to suffice.
Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.
The video shows that it was Bernays' public relations skills that made a scientist like Freud and his very complex and esoteric theories a household word in middle class America on the order of Picasso and Charley Chaplin and led to today's enervating psychobabble and of course led to the insidious and Orwellian monster of American marketing.
Where Freud saw knowledge for healing Bernays just saw money and he showed America's corporations how to mine humanity's dark side for profit. Pimping is an honest dollar compared to Bernays' game.
One of the great ironies of this video is to learn that Eddy Bernays, the man who taught American women to smoke, was also a major influence on an admirer of his, Joseph Goebbels, who used "Uncle Siggy's" insights into the levers and pulleys of human emotions to whip up a bestial frenzy in the highly civilized German people, a frenzy that ultimately killed and "smoked" six million European Jews. Sigmund Freud fortunately died in the first months of the war and so never really learned what use his ideas had finally been put to.
If you stop and think about it Bernays may be one of the most poisonous and evil men in history, certainly in America's history, nobody, not even Ayn Rand, can touch him.
This video is an hour long with three more to follow, but it is a true treasure. Please watch it.
Comments
They call it Politically Correct speech I call it sanctimonious bull shit.
by cmaukonen on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 3:56pm
You and our late lamented Mr. Carlin got it right. Now go and watch the video and see how it happened.
by David Seaton on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 4:17pm
Great quote C.
by Richard Day on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 4:47pm
Here's a little trivia: before it was called "shell shock" in WWI, it was called "soldier's heart" in the "Civil" War. It might be funny, but there's a lot of what he says in that spiel I don't agree with. There are some good reasons for some so-called politically correct speech.
by Verified Atheist on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 5:57pm
Dingos kidneys !
by cmaukonen on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 6:48pm
No, that was the revolutionary war.
Now, if we take Carlin's theory to heart that fewer syllables are better, than we'll notice we went from four ("dingos kidneys") to three ("soldier's heart") to two ("shell shock") before starting our exponential climb to four and then eight. Now, an ignorant sod might think this means that WWI was the height of honesty and all that was good with the world, but what's much less known is that during the Spanish-American war, it was simply known as "fuck". Those were the salad days we should all be yearning for.
by Verified Atheist on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 8:17pm
I had not heard of Bernays or his pernicious influence, David. Thanks for the introduction.
It's interesting that Bernays coined the phrase "engineering consent." The way Noam Chomsky rephrased it suggests he understood that we have moved past the design stage into full-fledged mass production.
by acanuck on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 5:23pm
how America had become such a sinkhole of spin and mendacious euphemism, storytelling and bullshit. I had no answer, only the feeling of a better, nobler, America that had been lost.
You clearly haven't read any 19th-century American newspapers.
by artappraiser on Wed, 02/16/2011 - 5:59pm
There were always the two Americas, the crummy and the noble. 19th century newspapers published the Lincoln Douglas debates and people all over the country read them and discussed them intelligently, they led to Lincoln becoming president. No debate of that quality between comparable candidates could be "packaged" in today's America.
by David Seaton on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 5:50am
When asked what the first thing he would do if crowned emperor, Confucius replied that he would, "clarify the language". Clear speech being a clear sign of clear thought and clear thought being a sign of a clear conscious.
Under the leadership of Bernays and his followers, American English has been significantly degraded, indeed debauched, as George Carlin skillfully illustrates in the monologue that cmaukonen has kindly posted here.
As serfs of corporate America, its citizens are encouraged to use this debased language as feudal serfs were encouraged to use religion: as an opiate or evasion from fear, pain and oppression.
As someone in the film points out, democracy is about changing the traditional relations of power, however the genius of American democracy has been to use democracy to maintain the traditional relations of power. This inevitably leads America's political course into doublethink and doubletalk, rather like the sermons of a TV evangelist with a taste in massage parlors.
by David Seaton on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 5:49am
How exactly does one measure the clarity of language? I find clinical terms (such as PTSD) more precise than colloquialisms (such as "shell shock"), and I find precise terms to be clearer. On the other hand, I think such "politically correct" terms such as "police officer" over "police woman" or "policeman" are sometimes less precise as they (deliberately) remove the sex of the subject from the description. In this case, however, I'd argue that the reduction in precision actually improves the clarity as it helps us to make fewer assumptions.
That said, there are many phrase changes that are deliberately obfuscating - "collateral damage" comes to mind.
by Verified Atheist on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 6:34am
I am not a Taliban on this, for example I think it is better to say that somebody is suffering from Down's syndrome than to call them a mongoloid idiot
by David Seaton on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 10:13am
Which would also vilify the regular idiots. Like those who are currently in congress.
by cmaukonen on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 11:32am
My biggest problem with politically correct speech is that far, far too often it is phony, superficial, shallow and dishonest. Concealing the users true thoughts and feelings on the subject. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear it is....bullshit.
by cmaukonen on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 11:10am
My biggest problem with the way that politically correct speech is often portrayed is that different people mean different things when they raise that particular bogeyman and thus the phrase "politically correct" is among the least clear and least precise terms used. If a particular phrase is phony, superficial, shallow, and dishonest (and just to be clear, I'm in complete agreement that many phrases are), attack it on those grounds. Don't use "political correctness" as a proxy for the real problem.
by Verified Atheist on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 11:27am
I'm not that concerned with politically correct in itself, more with the debasement of language so I agree with the the line, "Don't use "political correctness" as a proxy for the real problem."
by David Seaton on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 3:37pm
Mmm, wait. So this post is not going to include a recipe for Bearnaise sauce?
by LisB on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 2:30am
You are a quick study!![Smile Smile](/sites/all/libraries/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-smile.gif)
by David Seaton on Sat, 02/19/2011 - 7:19am