… the public repository, also a euphemism for the propaganda which works for a specific ideology or collective undertaking. Think of America, and an instant flood of vignetted images surface. Think of patriotism, crime, family, God, evil, happiness, or pleasure, and it’s like opening separate drawers containing files of archived responses. This morning someone knocked at my door. First drawer marked “F” for fear. Second drawer marked “C” for curiosity. Third drawer marked “P through S” for perspective, responsibility, and sobriety. – What did they all have in common? Not one response was that of my own making.
Images and responses are what society chooses. They are what it decides is important. And in that sense, there’s no such thing as a collective memory. It is, as Susan Sontag once said, a “collective instruction.” It is not memory at stake but (rehearsed, dictated) selection. The flip side is that if you don’t respond in the way you’re supposed to, you’re flawed and/or intentionally subversive.
This is why someone who follows her/his gut or intuition is often not a candidate for “good citizenship.” It depends on how deeply the indoctrination is and if the gut and the drawer are simpatico. If so, then the drawer is either exceptional or the gut is blind. The files are either intelligent or the gut leads to senseless conformity. You question nothing, and if you do, the questions themselves are scripted enough so as not to endanger the file. – I think of this every time I watch a national news program. The conversation is scripted beforehand and decided on what subjects will be discussed and what questions will not be asked. If the interviewer oversteps the contract (even worse embarrasses his guest, especially a Senator or governor), the program risks a defamation lawsuit and lost ratings for the future. This is why “subversives” (those who ask the “wrong” questions, submit the “wrong” answers) are never invited.
The memory museum therefore is how to think about everything. It is a public library where we’re encouraged to visit regularly for refresher courses on how to be good citizens. And if we can’t go to the museum-library, it comes to us in a myriad of ways, especially by way of the internet. The internet is another drawer.
Another drawer is the mass media. It’s a huge collection of files that says “Give us 22 minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” That says it all! There’s no hesitation or ambiguity about it. In his book, The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), Robert McChesney wrote that the very first problem is how to define a “problem.” “The policies, structures, subsidies and institutions that are created to control, direct, and regulate the media will be responsible for the logic and nature of the media system.” This is the problem “for any society.” The first problem is with “content.” The second problem “deals with the structure that generates that content.” In other words, society which decides the media it listens to, which in turn informs it – a continuous feedback loop. Overall, the media system (corporate-owned), supports its own empire and “minimizes effective opposition.” Hence, the “corporatocracy.” It’s pretty straight forward.
But something else happens too. In time, as these drawers keep opening and closing, they’re no longer the selected drawers. They’re the only drawers. Every objective choice, every “thought about another thought” is erased (in other words, consciousness itself). It’s no longer even the erasure of free will, not even “operant conditioning,” but the erasing of even the notion of free will. It’s a thorough brainwashing. The “subversive” element has finally been wiped clean from the collective imagination. Society is now sanitized. This was Nazi Germany’s stranglehold in the mid- to late 1930s. Half the population was already completely sold on Nazi ideology, while the other half held back just enough to (silently) question what they were doing. But half of those obeyed orders anyway, while those who didn’t suffered terribly.
This is also the Huxleyan (versus the Orwellian) theory of social control: tyranny from the “bottom up” – versus – tyranny from the “top down.” Huxley’s way has more staying power because citizens don’t know that they’re own thought patterns are being manipulated, exploited, and erased. When one is born into it, how can he possibly know? My previous analogy of the “crack baby born to an addict” illustrated this point. Orwell’s 1984 is the reverse of this, where power if coerced from the top-down, where citizens are fully aware of their oppression.
This is where America hovers today, somewhere between Huxley and Orwell – in a gray middle-distance between total allegiance to “the drawer” and those who open the drawer but remember another room with another set of drawers. One manifestation of this is (by now) an already very sore subject – guns. I bring this up because the subject will simply not resolve itself. This is because we’ve always had guns. Guns are an American staple. We put them up there with hot dogs, apple pie, and the flag. At the same time “part of who we are” is killing Americans. We hover over them like a parent who doesn’t understand her own child. The two are complete strangers to one another. So, the memory museum opens a drawer with a script telling us how to respond. It’s not about understanding the problem but image-building by way of a forced narrative.
Regarding the file “G” (for guns), there’s the narrative we learn: Guns symbolize strength, stability, patriotism, the 2nd Amendment, the flag, heroism, martyrdom in battle, and songs about American pride. The indoctrination come in when the mind automatically makes it a synonym for ten different things at once, homogenized into a single national image with its own drawer. To speak of one is to speak about all the others at the same time. We’re exalted the gun to an unimpeachable height, and to criticize it is tantamount to spitting on the flag and cursing Jesus Christ.
Ordinarily, narratives help us understand. But they’re also intended to keep us in the dark. This is why they haunt us. No matter what we do as a nation today – go to war, build a wall, help the inner-city, address street crime, go to church, attend a football game – it doesn’t matter. We open the drawers we’re supposed to and read the intended files. But “some of us” retain just enough cryptic memory to recall another golden rule: not simply to read more, but question what we read.
Nazi Germany decided to exterminate the mentally ill because they embarrassed the “master race.” The gun-community blames mental illness as the cause of gun-related violence. Which must cause considerable anguish because it means scapegoating that which keeps vindicating it. Without them they’d be left to face the heat. The gun community also says it’s “not the gun but the user.” But that’s like saying that road rage is caused by mental illness. Obviously, it is not. It’s mostly the cause of normal people simply having “bad day.” The problem with so many guns (400 million and counting) is access into the hands of people having a “bad day.”
The malaise we feel today is double layered. This is because there’s hypocrisy even about our indictments on hypocrisy. The messenger himself is being fooled. In other words, our memories must also be under suspicion. The problem of memory goes much deeper than political-cultural indoctrination. This may seem a little over the top, but in fact it’s where the “gut” (intuition) actually collides with the drawers, the files, and sometimes even the room itself. It’s a domain which is immune from the infestations of (super-)ego, guilt, shame, social “belongingness needs” and expectations. It simply knows what it knows and has a nasty habit of showing up uninvited (on talk-shows). It tells us what we don’t want to know about drawers and takes on a drawer of its own. It then comes down to the extent and depth to which we decide to “listen.” – What comes up for me is Borges Library of Babel. Somewhere in that cemetery of galleries sits a drawer marked “Empty.”
There’s an ancient meditation exercise whereby one imagines the room he’s in existing inside himself. He then becomes larger than the room. He looks down upon the room with himself inside (this works well with claustrophobia). It’s a useful (and timely) exercise as we might imagine an entire library-museum with ourselves wandering down its hallways. We say “there we are.” From there we can erase the entire room and rest in free flotation, without words, without files and drawers. Or we can keep opening drawers and files. A meditation is what you do with it. – Something to play with, something to ponder.
© 2024 Richard Hiatt
The Subversive Imagination: Dispatches from the American Frontier 