Cat Show. 5/14/2021

VG: Last week I posted something about Breznevization of the world. Banners, marchers, senile ineffective governments, sloganeering at the expense of real solutions, virtue signaling, censorship. But we know that the world is a two way street -- we are all connected. So there is a parallel movement of the Americanization of the world: pervasive advertisement, Hollywoodization of history, persistent simplification, imposition of the Manichean schemes upon complex reality, brainwashing carried out by slick politicians and slick media. Let’s address it today.

HOBBS: You’ve touched upon my favorite topic, for sure. Look at Alice: the American product through and through. No sense of tragedy, groundless optimism, embrace of the latest intellectual fad, naïve hope that the new guru or a new catch phrase peddled by mass media will solve everything. And -- what is even more disturbing – is when this naivete is connected with certain pragmatism and cynicism: whatever is going on, whatever tears are being shed – let me exploit it. If there is Covid crisis, I’ll horde toilet paper. If there is gas crisis –l’ll store as much gasoline as I can. I simply can’t afford wasting time by trying to comprehend the reasons behind it the crisis: there is money or fame to be made here.

ALICE: What a blatant and vicious lie! I am involved in mankind as much as any other educated and liberal person is. I read NYT and listen to NPR and BBC. And they tell me everything there is to be concerned with. Modern liberal media serves its community. NPR calls itself, Public’s Radio. They are not peddling the interests of Russian or Chinese government: they serve the public. Same applies to BBC. So what else is there to know? Outside BBC lies the area of barbarism, and only paranoid cultists, like this black cat Hobbs, can take barbaric pronouncements of his cult leaders seriously.

VG: Alas, that’s what I was talking about. This scheme: NPR or Cultist barbarism is as American as anything. Why this simplistic scheme? Greeks, who came up with the opposition of Greeks vs. Barbarians, at least embraced complexity within their own midst. They knew that the world is tragic. They knew that in the conflicts of Oresteia or in the decisions of Antigone – there is a tragic choice between good and good. Not between white hat NPR and black hat of alternative press.

HOBBS: Great point! Say, Antigone. She has this need to bury her treacherous brother. Creon, The leader of the city, Creon, refuses to bury the traitor and rebel. So as the Greeks watched the tragedy unfold, they would do their best to come up with the understanding, which acknowledges certain correctness of both sides.

ALICE: That’s why Greeks were eventually replaced by the much more straightforward Romans, the Americans of the Ancient world. What’s there to think about? Antigone, as a woman is always correct, because she is not driven by these stupid male preoccupations like wars or laws. So during Romans, there wouldn’t be any tragedy at all. Creon would be proscribed as the enemy of everything progressive, imperial and feminine, his possessions seized by the state, his position replaced by the Office of Public Safety, which would demand everyone to be buried within 48 hours; the media and the Ciceros of the day would denounce Creon as the dangerous autocrat in the service of Carthage, and the tragedy of Antigone and Creon would be staged as a musical. In the finale of this musical, Antigone and her newly resurrected brother would perform a very sultry and sexy dance on the grave of the public enemy, Creon, while destroying Creon’s monument.

HOBBS: That’s a scary image you’ve conjured up, Alice. At least you know how the cookie crumbles. In fact, I am totally speechless, as Alice had taken words out of my mouth. That’s exactly, what Romans or Americans would do with a tragedy, demonizing one side, and turning everything into a cheap farce to be commodified and exploited. But the problems remain, even if you simplify and commodify them. The issues of capitalism vs. socialism are not solved just by demonizing of one side. The issue of people of various races, religions or cultures inhabiting the same piece of land is not solved by demonizing and commodifying hatreds and paranoias. They remain with us, and like any uncured decease they flare up now and again.

VG: Agree with you both. The issues are not solved for sure, but rather than agonizing like Hobbs, or trying to find a middle ground which would make all sides turn against you, it is much better, as Alice have suggested, to exploit the situation, while presenting oneself as the noble defender of freedom and democracy. You are afraid to go to the shop? -- Amazon will deliver. You are afraid to meet another person face to face --there is always Zoom. The issue of this or that country is confusing -- there is always a pundit on TV who’ll tell you what to think. You don’t like the rhetoric or manners of the political leader and the half of the American population who voted for him-- cast them all as dangerous lunatics, and make a political career out of that.

HOBBS: That’s exactly what is happening all over the world. Organize a focus group, study their responses, find out what sells and what does not, simplify and sell, while casting yourself as the champion of all the beautiful and noble and the enemy of everything barbaric and retrograde. Americanization beats Brezhnevism any time.

ALICE: Now you two simplify my complex position. Granted that what you’ve described works very well in the market when you need to sell a product; in the ideological sphere, I prefer to be agnostic. I am ready to acknowledge that there are plenty of complex, even tragic situations. But that’s why we have specialists, scientists, public intellectuals to investigate all the nuances and complexities, and then, in a good American way, to offer solutions and identify the culprits. We have Rachel Maddow and Anne Applebaum, and Masha Gessen, and even this brilliant Yale University mind, Timothy Snyder – all scholars and serious thinkers to explain things to us. You, Vladimir, didn’t last at Yale, but Snyder did, because he wrote about the tragic suffering of East Europeans caught between evil Hitler and evil Stalin. So you can’t say, that Americans don’t understand tragedy. They do, but they also know how to milk it. Look at this Snyder, for example. He wrote an accessible and timely booklet, entitled modestly, On Tyranny, in which he pointed correctly, that to defeat Tyranny the world simply has to get rid of Trump and trumpism — the one and only threat to democracy if there ever was one. That’s what I call, to have a tragedy and eat it too. And that’s the greatest legacy of Americanism to the world’s political sphere: let no crisis go to waste. And sure enough, politicians of all stripes and all over the world had learned that lesson well.