Storytelling is a codified, public strategy. It is often used opportunistically, as a psycho-social trope aimed toward a predetermined result—a schema selling a product or a pitch or a persona, a therapeutic process, a technique to persuade the public to favor a politician’s hairball agenda. Television conservatives, amply backed by parties and think tanks and strategists, don’t do anything by accident—unless it’s a mistake. Crafting their ideology as narrative is a studious marketing ploy. How best to sell this agenda, this tax cut, this Democrat demonization?
Tell a tale. Campfire stories about Commie boogeyman and welfare cheats, bedtime stories about how things used to be, once upon a time. To dip even your littlest toe into the river of conservative media is to hear stories, stories of evil homosexuals, beatific soldiers, heroic Republican presidents, and halcyon days of law, order, authority and traditional values.
The problem is, leftists do not tell stories—whether true or fabricated—that involve the past. Progressives opine for the practical future, a future that they aim to create free of turmoil or injustice. That is, a future without stories. Stories require conflict, emotional desire, heroes and villains.
What kind of story could a liberal tell about an unconflicted and equitable tomorrow? Unless you are able to invoke an idealized past, which you can mythify as narrative, your hands will be tied.For progressives, the past, as a tale told, is not on the docket.
We’re talking about presentation, not laws and rights and actions. As long as American politics remain a matter of simulacra—of rhetoric and persona—the storytellers will dominate the discussion, doing what myth has always done—supply order in place of chaos and uncertainty. This is our modern tragedy: Recent history offers a parade of evil fabulists, from Hitler to Karl Rove to Kim Jong-Il, all of them bewitching storytellers.
The Tea Party movement is nothing more than a cycle of antique fictions told over and over again, distorting themselves as they go.
Friday 3 September 2010
Once Upon a Time, in America… ☀
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