A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  What did they mean? I didn’t know what they meant.

  The word ‘awesome’ hung in the smog above Los Angeles for the duration of my stay; it became fused in my memory with the wheeze of the hydraulic ‘low-rider’ cars I saw crawl along the city’s great boulevards and the hiss of the faulty Viper roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain. It drifted out of a broken machine and into the dirty air where it stayed and made no sense. ‘Awesome’ had become waste.

  I was lost in this decentralised, postmodern city that fancied itself as a relaxed paradise of smooth rides and enlightened Americans but to me looked, rather quickly, like a hell of dented vehicles and people who couldn’t commit to an idea. When the Qantas plane left LAX for Sydney, I looked down until the city was lost in smog. ‘It’s awesome,’ I said. And I wasn’t even sure what I meant.

  Los Angeles is, in the most literal sense, awesome. Or it was at least to Australian eyes shortly after 1992. Most obviously, it is a place whose primary business is producing the appearance of meaning and it was, in fact, on entertainment industry business that I first visited.

  I travelled to Los Angeles to interview the musician Courtney Love who was, at the time, extraordinarily famous, and when one approaches celebrity, as I once did often, one can feel very postmodern. Which is to say, I think it must be very much like a tour of a nuclear power plant. On the approach, you feel a little nervous to be visiting the place where dangerous energy is born. You imagine you feel the hum of the plant and you wonder—most particularly if you are interviewing Courtney Love—if you might not visit on the very day the core melts. You have a sense of the deterrence of the place at the same time as you feel excited to be visiting its centre. And then you get there. And there is no hum and no evidence of the thing of which you were so afraid. It’s a tiny thing that doesn’t look as big and explosive as you’d hoped and feared, and you can’t help wondering what all the fuss was about. But you never doubt for a minute that this centre, that doesn’t feel at all like a centre, is the centre.

  I should say that Courtney never showed; her husband, Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana, whom she had married just eighteen months before in 1992, had committed suicide. This left me alone for most of a week on the margins of a tragedy, which I was trying to find meaningful, looking for Los Angeles’ centre.

  Los Angeles has no centre. It is difficult to navigate and even when one has a driver—and Courtney’s record company had provided me with one—the car moves slowly through wide streets and even wider freeways that are only differentiated by the amount of money they cost to build. Classless California where Anyone Can Make It has visible signs of both wealth and poverty but is democratised by the pace of the traffic. Rich and poor alike spend much of their time stuck in cars. Los Angeles is a really inefficient place whose residents have given up on civic activity because it takes too long to get there (even though Angelenos will always insist that travel time is twenty minutes). Los Angeles is too big and too individualised to make any shred of sense as a city.

  I am not the first person to try to describe depthless postmodern life through the murk of Los Angeles. Thousands have talked about the meaninglessness of its entertainment industry and how its appetite for profitable mediocrity creates zombies. Hundreds have commented on the primacy of the automobile and the way in which one finds oneself always on the way to something and never actually there. Dozens have written about its theme park attractions and how these are, if not just as real as the city itself, then actually there just to give us some kind of reassurance that what is outside them is, in fact, real.

  Of Los Angeles’ Disneyland, French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real.’ Literary critic Fredric Jameson has a sense that he has not yet evolved to the postmodern future as glimpsed in a popular LA hotel. Its mirrored external walls reflect the city back at itself and its entryways are unmarked. It suggests a continuity of a city that doesn’t exist and it defies the guest to find his way to rooms that are, he writes in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, dark and miserable bins in contrast to the light-box lobby. The hotel destroys the ‘capacities of the individual human body to locate itself’ and there is nothing outside the hotel, or the text. The hotel is Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the hotel.

  This is what comes to us after the modern era of certainty, centrality and efficiency. It’s a time of doubt, confusion and systems that have begun to break down. Jameson observes that the boutiques of the hotel are, like everything else in the place, impossible to find. The place was built as a last-gasp architectural statement that would attract visitors and shoppers in droves. And it does. But no one can find the fucking entrance and even if they do, the boutiques behind it are invisible. Capitalism, like everything else, has begun to take place in a world that can no longer accommodate it.

  These are not metaphors but accounts of an actual experience of postmodern life in Los Angeles and in the world. There are, as people will often say, no longer any rules. Things move very fast and appear to lead to nowhere. No one can even find the fucking shops. So of course there is no hope for the survival of meaning.

  These are interesting times but these are devastating times. As one system (say, a global economy) eclipses another (a domestic economy) we are stuck using old rules to explain new practices. And when these rules don’t really work to explain and govern the new systems, one of the many casualties—and these include workers and marriage and living close enough to one’s school or work to walk there—is meaning.

  So we give up and say FML or FOMO or we continue using old routines to explain new stories. Or, if we are quite unusual, we do what Derrida did and say, in a very complex way, that meaning is all bullshit anyhow.

  Eventually, Derrida would return to material concerns. He and his cat enjoyed many conversations about ethics before his death. In the meantime, the great thinker left the world just a little worse off than he found it. With a new language to describe the crisis in meaning.

  Personally, I believe this crisis will play itself out. I believe that at some point, people will become so sick of conversations about nothing that they will vomit on the new, radical emperor and let us know, as is their wont, which philosopher best described their movements into a time that demanded reality.

  For the minute, though, we are very much enamoured of life trapped inside Derrida’s ‘signifying chain’. Matching sign for sign, we declare our disdain for unsound lavatories and sit-com characters with the use of an awareness ribbon. We use an unreal thing to condemn an unreal problem. We draw rainbows on the pavement to signify our support for sexual difference that we actually want to make the same. We change our Facebook avatars to ‘increase awareness’ of a paedophilia that everyone already (and always!) condemns. We say a black president is a ‘symbol’ of ‘hope’ and don’t really seem to mind that the most progressive thing he ever did was write legislation that would make health insurers more stinking rich than they had previously dreamed.

  We are caught in a ‘playful’ game of deconstruction that I really don’t think we can blame Derrida for entirely and one, I think, that would have surprised even him with its savage and self-reflexive meaninglessness.

  I used to like postmodernism at university. And then, one day, it really happened.

  HR

  10

  Hyperreality, authenticity and the fucking up of public debate

  A Sydney newsreader solemnly intones a story about a future bid for a World Cup. He ‘crosses live’ to a journalist standing outside the city’s largest stadium, for a thirty-second discussion that adds no new information. The journalist, standing alone but for a film crew in front of an empty sports arena, is thanked by the newsreader, who moves on to the next item.

  •

  A political leader dons a high-visibility vest and a ha
rd hat while visiting a construction site. Across town, or in another city, a rival leader dons a high-visibility vest and safety goggles while visiting a factory, where she announces a policy relating to the relevant industry. Evening news bulletins carry images of both politicians talking to workers, or nodding thoughtfully while listening to them. ‘This is about creating real jobs,’ one of them says.

  •

  An email is distributed to journalists from a public relations firm offering the results of a survey about the products of one of its customers. In addition to the link to a media release, the PR firm has included links to graphics, ‘case study’ examples to support the survey, contact details for a blogger willing to comment about the product, a summary of the survey and suggested ‘angles’ for the story for journalists. The following day, major newspapers carry a short item mentioning the product and the survey.

  •

  A political journalist laments the unwillingness of contemporary politicians to go beyond carefully constructed talking points in their public statements, saying it is contributing to public disillusionment with politics. The following day, a senior minister’s offhand remark on an issue is interpreted as evidence of division with the government, and declared a major gaffe.

  That Australia’s media is awful is an argument likely to unify a diverse group of people. Progressives complain of the right-wing bias of the mainstream media and of the dominance of News Corporation, a company openly and aggressively hostile to progressive political parties and, for that matter, much of reality. Conservatives complain about the left-wing bias of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Media aficionados talk of the decline of traditional journalism caused by a shrinking print media. Political junkies moan about the poor quality of political journalism; readers with a science background laugh and cry about the dismal quality of science journalism and other technical rounds.

  And Australians don’t trust their media; they rank journalists at about the same level as politicians in terms of trustworthiness and the only outlets they consistently trust at a high level are the national broadcasters. Nor are Australians alone in their distrust. In the US, trust in the media fell to an all-time low in 2012 and only slightly recovered in 2013. In the UK in early 2013, less than one-third of people said they trusted the media (albeit in the wake of one of history’s greatest media scandals).

  Okay, so far, so anodyne. Journalists have always ranked with used-car salesman and advertising executives in public esteem. But the Australian media, following international trends, is finding innovative ways to be more awful or, more correctly, to achieve a new kind of hollowed-out awfulness. This would no more be a cause for concern than the decline of any other industry, except that we rely on the media to provide a space for public debate about important issues and to hold the powerful to account. An intelligent, sceptical media is one of the core defences of a society against the kinds of Stupid that we’ve seen throughout this book. The fate of the media, therefore, is the fate of much of our public debate and our ability to fight Stupid, and increasingly our media isn’t a defence against Stupid but part of the problem of Stupid.

  One of the excellent conceits of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One is his ‘stragglers’, zombies who don’t seek to rend the flesh of the living in stereotypical undead style, but who remain fixed in place, forever poised to undertake some action from their past, some ritual or behaviour apparently randomly recalled from their days of living. It’s an apt image for much of the Australian media, permanently re-enacting the journalistic rituals of the past, or at least the past as communally remembered by the industry itself. The live cross to a journalist with nothing to say, at a venue only vaguely related to the story at hand, mimics the traditional ‘breaking news’ report from a journalist ‘at the scene’. The pre-packaged story from the PR consultant, complete with infographics, suggested journalistic angles and ‘independent’ commentary, mimics actual analytical or investigative journalism. Media conferences by politicians in which nothing of substance is said, and no questions answered, re-enacts traditional media scrutiny of political leaders. All are symptoms of, if not looming death, then at least serious and permanent damage to the news industry.

  The live but meaningless cross is said by TV insiders to be an effort by news producers to counter the havoc social media has wrought on their business model. In essence, that model was gathering people who wanted to know what’s going on—which used to be a large chunk of the population—together at one time so they could be advertised to. Television journalism is expensive, and subject to strict regulation, but can still garner large audiences and is traditionally seen as key to a strong prime-time line-up. But now, the people formerly known as the eyeballs can be informed whenever they want, and don’t have to wait until 6 p.m. to be provided with information in between efforts to convince them to buy stuff. Worse, they may well get better live coverage of events via social media or online sites than via broadcasters several hours later. Moreover, online users now only have to consume the news they’re interested in, whether it is sport, politics or entertainment, without any danger of being exposed to annoyingly irrelevant content, even to the extent of having to flip past it in a newspaper or wait for the next story in a carefully structured TV bulletin.

  Faced with this mutiny by their once passive audiences, television news producers try to match the immediacy that online news reports or social media provide by offering the drama of live coverage, albeit coverage of empty stadia or deserted streets where a newsworthy incident occurred hours before. It’s a ritualistic mimicry of traditional breaking news events where live coverage would be relevant.

  Online competition is also the reason why PR companies are happy to issue pre-prepared stories for the media, confident that even if one journalist angrily throws it back in their face, there’ll be someone, somewhere who will use it. Newspaper companies are under greater pressure than ever as a consequence of the erosion of their revenue by new media, and are employing fewer journalists and demanding that those journalists whom they do employ cover more rounds and produce content around the clock and across multiple platforms: a print journalist might now produce stories both for a morning print edition and, during the working day, do video segments, conduct interviews for affiliated radio companies, and is probably covering a number of rounds compared to analogue-era journalism, when they might cover one or two. Media companies are also becoming more editorially risk-averse: the pockets that once funded defences against legal action by those they sought to hold to account are now much shallower. This is one area where citizen-journalists and social media can never match the mainstream media: it is only large media companies that can afford to fight defamation actions and suppression orders. As media companies lose revenue, so they lose the capacity to hold the powerful to account.

  As a consequence, there’s been both a decline in expertise and in the time and effort journalists can physically bring to their craft, making them an ideal target for PR companies peddling fictitious ‘reports’ of the kind we’ve previously examined, or pre-prepared stories, even though they’re of no news value. A survey in 2010 found that over 50 per cent of all stories in major Australian newspapers in a one-week period originated as public relations, with one senior News Corp editor explicitly blaming the shift of resources away from journalism and towards PR. In this particular front of the fight against Stupid, the resources Stupid can bring to bear are outmatching those of its opponents. And the result is more media self-mimicry, with outlets behaving in ritual fashion—even slapping ‘exclusive’ on a story if they’ve been given privileged access to it—without any actual news content or journalistic effort applied.

  A history of the good times

  Such mimicry is that of the straggler, representing the lingering race memory of what the mainstream media used to be like, in the analogue days. Before the internet and the bad times.

  That media environment, which was in place for much of the twentieth cen
tury, had several important characteristics. It was, most importantly, a highly unified space: most consumers tended to consume the same products; they watched the same programs and read the same papers, no matter where they were or how they voted. Commercial broadcasters networked and affiliated their operations so that most people, even if they lived far apart, got the same radio and, especially, television programs; publicly funded broadcasters in countries like the UK, Australia and Canada provided national services to all citizens, and even though newspaper circulations fell over the course of the second half of the century in Anglophone countries, even as late as the 1970s three-quarters of Western households were getting a newspaper every day.

  The environment was also controlled by a relatively small number of companies and national broadcasters that wielded substantial influence and often operated across some combination of newspapers, television and radio. Commercial mass media created a passive role for audiences and readerships, whose only function was to absorb the advertising directed at them, having been lured into the commercial firing range by the promise of content. And journalists, editors and producers played the role of gatekeepers, determining which information would be conveyed to people—particularly overseas news, which before the internet was heavily controlled by media companies with contracts with overseas media outlets.

  In political journalism, this role was not so much gatekeeper as priest-like. Political reporters—usually men—worked in close proximity with politicians and then translated and interpreted their statements and actions for the masses; the only access to the pseudo-divine workings of power for voters was through such journalists, who alone possessed the training and wisdom to mediate and explain the doings of the high and mighty. As neoliberal policies took hold in the 1980s, political journalists also assumed a sacerdotal role in relation to the explanation of economic reform to voters, even if few fully comprehended the divine mysteries of economic deregulation.