We’ve
been removed for a very long time now. Historians and other
astrologers of the past could probably pinpoint a date, but
that’s neither here nor there. One benefit of being removed
is that you don’t worry much about when you started being
removed from what you can’t conceive of ever having been
closer to.
Once
upon a time, when the picture of a factory on a paperback cover
purported to mean something, the removal phenomenon was referred
to negatively as 'alienation.' The basic thought was that workers
didn’t feel a connection to the goods they were producing,
that the only difference between them and the anonymous cogs
they worked all day was that they had to have a specific name
for punching in every morning and punching out every evening.
The same alienation was discerned in stock brokers who lost
track of millions of dollars before noon and in advertising
executives who sold fantasies as raisin bran. To give you an
idea of how long ago that primitive notion of alienation reigned,
it was before Sigourney Weaver stripped down to her panties
in outer space and before every kid on the block got some variation
on an Invader Earth play station for his birthday.
Back
in those days, alienation ran concurrently with a second perspective
that said all problems at home, in Latvia, and in the cosmos
could be resolved by 'communication.' The premise here was that
individuals felt at a remove from one another because they didn’t
have the opportunity to exchange their feelings in a compassionate,
intelligible way. Although this outlook provided a nice living
for psychotherapists, psychologists, and other psycho-s learned
enough to fill out the applicable word, it ultimately stumbled
over the hard truth that candor was not always its own best
reward, that on the contrary some people (and nations and planets)
bared such profound enmities that they were better off staying
away from one another. In other words, the sense of removal
denounced by the alienation principle perversely ended up winning
endorsement from the communication principle that was supposed
to have eased alienation’s strains. How could this have
happened?
The
short answer was removal’s favorite trope --- irony. The
long answer appeared to be the human condition. Fortunately
for getting on with it, there was also a medium answer captive
to neither the glibness of tropes nor the cynicism of grand
conclusions. Irony of ironies (what else was new?), that medium
answer was the mass media.
Other
attributes notwithstanding, the most indispensable element of
the mass media is the screen --- in the composing room, in the
movie house, on the television set. And the screen wouldn’t
be a screen if it didn’t keep those watching removed from
those promoted as worthy of being watched. So advanced did the
technology of the screen become that it didn’t even have
to be a visible, concrete barrier; space itself was found to
serve the same role. But materially or virtually, the objective
was to spread and confirm the screen’s separation qualities.
One conspicuous example was channeling the screen’s entertainment
functions into politics. Thus we witnessed (very literally)
political protesters explicitly playing up to television coverage,
actors playing political protesters who were serious about being
political protesters as actors, and actor-protesters who didn’t
know where their winks ended and their tics began. We also witnessed
presidents preempting Mystery Theater to introduce live wars,
generals sharing blurry rocket vapors with the bravado of having
beaten the machines at Willie’s Action Arcade, and soldiers
with helmet cameras trudging through rubble in military versions
of The Blair Witch Project. It turned out that the
only difference between the screen’s in-your-face entertainment
and information was having to fret too much about the information
part.
One
question raised by such near-experiences was whether we weren’t
better off in our state of removal. Had we evolved to the point
that losing it would expose our weakened constitutions with
fatal consequences? There was evidence to suggest so, not least
the fiasco attached to all those hopes for the magic of communication.
The public byways were filled with the corpses of the foolhardy
who had braved the sun without sunglasses and baseball caps.
Sponsored studies of the question generated only suspicion.
The ones that urged us to be ourselves and think for ourselves
sounded like the screen’s latest franchise schemes. The
mere use of the word 'individual' mocked John Donne, dated Karl
Marx, and turned quacks like Ayn Rand into neglected philosophers.
Which
brings us to a live (not previously taped) update. The search
is on for a new creation myth --- one in which removing a rib
won’t be admired as both the natural and supernatural
order of things. Near-experience has shown that only insentient
things start to happen after that.
Also by
Donald Dewey:
History
of Humour in the Cinema
Cartoon
Power
