dragons surrounded by silent, expectant crowds of people; the electronic eyes of the world riveted on the unprecedented spectacle of these mysterious beings which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere in huge numbers to quietly occupy our major urban centers; in New York the Security Council meeting behind closed doors; local officials urging calm even as tanks and artillery rumbled into position, ready to counterattack if need be….the world held its breath.
And—nothing happened. The dragons yawned, blinked, and phlegmatically jostled for position with pigeons and crows for space on limbs and dead generals and politicians’ marble heads. The sun crawled across an indifferent sky. People started to doze where they stood. Babies fretted; someone’s stomach growled. Then, some some local dignitary grumbled loudly, “Hell, these little bastards ain’t gonna do squat!” The crowd laughed, and the tension was broken. People on the outskirts of the crowd began drifting away. This tableau was repeated in its essentials across the globe that day, pacing the sun. It became known as “The Great Nothing”, and now one could just as easily visualize the media mandarins gnashing their teeth in disappointed fury as their anticipated windfall flew away with the drowsy flap of a dragon’s wings.
3
The whole affair turned into an unmitigated disaster for the media, for reasons that were both simple and instructive. For perhaps the first time in modern (meaning, televised) history, the general public could see with its own eyes the huge gulf between The Story the 24/7 media machine had concocted and the simple, incontrovertible truth. In The Story, there was an Enemy, and thus the reassuring possibility of Heroism; a Confrontation was in the cards, so alluring Violence could not be far behind; and to top it off, a Neat, Happy Ending (those bizarre invaders driven off!) seemed likely, which always made one feel better about the universe.
The Story was conceived, packaged and sold in the same cheerily amoral manner that countless ‘products’ had been sold before. Individual citizens never had a chance to touch any event directly, except for that tiny minority of people who were directly involved. As soon as it came to the attention of the media, a piece of news, no matter how genuine or unique the original story might be, acquired a patina of artificiality, of something contrived and unreal. Nothing was good enough on its own, in its pure form; it had to be made spicier, or sweetened, or mixed with something else more appealing. And so an actual event, involving a real person or phenomenon—an election, a coup, an affair, a business move—was transmogrified into a fungible product, a packaged construct that could be sold by its purveyors and bought and consumed by the people.
At the dawn of the modern era it was all more or less innocent: tabloid newspapers, fighting rambunctiously like teenaged boys for market share by trying to come up with bigger and bolder headlines. But by the turn of the 20th century this high-spirited exaggeration had become “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, and other types of jingoistic nonsense and intentional misdirection less celebrated if no less egregious. And a hundred years later, media consolidation, the accelerating concentration of wealth and power concomitant with unrestrained capitalism, and the sheer technological sophistication and reach of cutting-edge IT had created a ravenous, hydra-headed monster that no one could control.
Of course the people at the top thought that they could. A mantra like “If it bleeds, it leads” was seen not only as an honest description of industry SOP but as a valid and useful insight into human nature. The industry used every trick of the trade to carefully ‘position’ the public, to create the perfect ensemble of conditions that would lead to….what? What nefarious scheme were all these machinations in service of?
Potato chips! Or cars, or dishwashers, or a new brand of jeans-- take your pick. The daily global extravaganza of frantic buying and selling, the Consumer Show, had to keep its top ratings at all costs. Beyond this admittedly banal but undeniable rationale one searched in vain for a deeper, more diabolic, conspiracy.
It’s true that regimes all over the world took it for granted that world events, social and business trends, statistics, etc. were there to be ‘finessed’ and ‘managed’. It’s also true that certain nations and individual leaders were far more aggressive than others in the extent to which they manipulated and filtered the raw data of the world. But such overly enthusiastic displays were mere blips on the vast coruscating screen that now formed the electronic warp and woof of the world.
In retrospect, when one considers the enormity of the entire enterprise (by which is meant the toxic brew of rapacious corporations, militarized, elite-serving governments, and hyper-commercialized media) one almost feels a grudging admiration for its creators and perpetrators. The sheer scale of the thing! In the late twentieth century scientists had discovered that the largest single organism in the world was not a magnificent blue whale or a towering redwood. It was a slow-growing fungus that covered nearly 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) of Oregon mountainside. The system under which we all lived now was like that fungus: subtle, obscure, rarely revealing the true dimensions of its size and power. And, like the fungus, the complex of forces that controlled every aspect of our lives was fundamentally parasitic and self-perpetuating.
How much it had already accomplished! It had with single-minded determination transformed means into ends. It had trained us to like what was offered us while hypnotizing us into discarding many of our most cherished and traditional values. It had turned politics into an arena sport and reduced government to an often despised service provider. It had raised technique and efficiency to the status of virtues. It had ruthlessly co-opted new modes of technology such as the Internet while smothering every potential dissent in the soft, deadly embrace of electronic distraction and relentless consumerism. It had subverted and suppressed local ways in favor of a monolithic world culture. Perhaps gravest of all, it had kept us firmly focused on what was, as opposed to what should have been. Scientists theorized that the Oregon fungus was at least 2,000 years old, perhaps much older. No doubt those who were running things were hoping they could control the world for a similarly long timespan. And they had every reason to be optimistic: it seemed highly unlikely that anything could ever loosen the elite’s tentacular grip on the reins of power, or on our hearts and minds.
Which explains the veritable frenzy of schadenfreude that erupted when the visitors refused to play ball. Simply by sitting and doing nothing they had given the lie to the power elite’s initial depiction of them as hostile, malevolent creatures spoiling for a showdown with humanity. That characterization was patently false. They were, if anything, passive and innocuous to the point of invisibility. One really had to be on the look-out to spot them in a scrum of cooing, statue-splattering pigeons. The more we watched the dragons the more ridiculous it seemed that they could ever harm us. Actually, they tended to grow on one; they were cute in the same way that a snuffling, irascible English pug dog could be said to be.
All this became more or less clear to the public over the course of that single long afternoon. But the fires that had been so assiduously stoked by the media and the government were not to be so easily put out: all that psychic energy had to go somewhere. And with the dragons out of the picture, there was no other target around except the media itself. So on that day something truly unprecedented happened: journalists and newscasters all over the world were jeered, scolded, and had their live broadcasts disrupted by every manner of indignity and insult. One well-coiffed female reporter who had formerly been known for the adroit use of her knowledge of politicians’ dirty laundry to gain access to information was reduced to tears when she found her commentary being simultaneously parroted and refuted by the crowd. “It’s a tense scene down here at the Mall….” “No it’s not! It’s completely chill!”… “Uhh, government troops are on alert nearby, waiting for the word to—” “ That’s utter bullshit! Those dudes went home hours ago!!” And so on. The people loved every minute of it.
More canny reporters just turned the microphones over
to the public in a bid to defuse the tension and negative energy they had belatedly recognized as being directed at them. This worked reasonably well in some cases but not in all. In London the nation’s top TV broadcaster was forced to undergo a lengthy, ribald kangaroo court in which he, his network, and the industry in general were accused in no uncertain terms of willfully distracting the public from more important issues, of creating conflict where none had existed before, of constantly protecting the rich and powerful, and “just generally fucking things up, you wankers!!”
All in all, it wasn’t a very good day for corporate media.
The War of the Worlds devolved into a million dates and ballgames, impromptu picnics, and parties. The talking heads beat a hasty retreat. And above it all, the plump dragons indifferently blinked and yawned, apparently unaware that they had won their first battle with the great and the mighty. The most important consequence of the entire debacle, one that was to have far-reaching repercussions, was that henceforth the mainstream media quarantined