When editorial cartoons turned into political MEMEs they changed the world - Pt. 3

In his book Four arguments for the elimination of television (1977), Jerry Mander describes “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.” In his chapter, Argument One - The Mediation of Experience, Mander asks the reader to:

“Imagine that like some kind of science fiction dictator you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this:

1) Eliminate personal knowledge. Make it hard for people to know about themselves, how they function, what a human being is, or how a human fits into wider, natural systems. This will make it impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide all the answers.”

This week’s story is about electric vehicles, why we should be transforming our transportation structure to EVs now, and how America’s MAGite culture is stalling or perhaps even trying to prevent a move to electric vehicles.

The primary idea I want you to think about today are the ways Political MEMEs are used in that story.

This piece does focus on war—but it is not about Jews or antisemitism.

For thousands of years, people have blamed almost anything they can on Jews just because they want to. In fact, last week Jews celebrated the holiday of Purim which commemorates the defeat of the Persian King who ordered all the Jews in his kingdom to be killed.

For anyone who would like to understand why making the Jews the cause for a MAGite-led American war on Iran—instead of America’s thirst for oil—I suggest reading this piece by Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi about America’s history of war with Iran.

They do outline strategic engagements, negotiations, and political considerations facing America in responding to Iran’s political actions today, and over decades of time. Oil received only a small highlight in their story. The authors described America’s most urgent political issues with Iran as merely a set of unlisted “strategic interests.”

One idea is made very clear in this piece. Israel lives with an existential fear of a nuclear Iran.

The authors explain Iranian leadership goals toward Israel back in 2007:

In denying the Holocaust, (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad aims to undermine what he believes to be the sole justification for Israel’s existence. In the years before World War II, Nazi propagandists prepared Europe for the Final Solution by dehumanizing the Jews; now, Ahmadinejad is preparing the Muslim world for the destruction of the Jewish state by delegitimizing its history. And not just the Muslim world: Holocaust denial is also aimed at the West, which many Muslims believe supports Israel only because of Holocaust guilt. Strip away that guilt, and Israel is defenseless. “The resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel,” commented Mohammad Ali Ramin, head of a new Iranian government institute devoted to Holocaust denial.

— The New Republic magazine, January 26, 2007

In 2026, Israel will work to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability whether America joins in or not and regardless of whether oil was on the line. The on-going firehose of bad ideas and actions out America’s current government and it’s so-called “leadership” is at fault and we should not be blaming Jews for the MAGite-in-chief’s attack on Iran.

Don’t forget the MAGites telegraphed all of this by changing the name of the Defense Department.

Suffice it to say that the Nobel Peace Prize committee was correct.

BUILD YOUR OWN ARMY OF MESSENGERS

America’s MAGite culture moves with such impunity these days because they created the appearance of a lager group of followers that somehow bestows a “mandate” to act in any place they deem necessary to take action.

Loyalist MAGite viewers increased the popularity of certain media outlets and promoted ways American citizens could use social media to communicate their ideas and influence and embolden other individuals to echo chosen words.

They can also quickly chime in and be a “never-apologist” with some fake reason that proves they are in the right.

What happens when this same technology becomes available to help you build and shape your own listeners, readers, and followers?

In 2015, Facebook political sales manager Eric Hawkins told NPRs Morning Edition that it was easy to market a campaign with hundreds of different ads targeted at specific, similar, and related audience groups.

In talking about his work for Ben Carson for President on Facebook, Hawkins claimed:

“We can help you build audiences that look just like the custom audiences you have. If you have a custom audience of your most active donors, maybe you want to talk to a lot of people who are similar to them and we can enable you to do that.”

With the influence of digital media, MAGites now believe anything a current government official says.

This has led us to experience things like the MAGite-in-chief virtually shitting on his self-appointed political opponents and showing President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes, and the MAGite people are “never-apologizing” for him all along the way.

My friend Steve posted just such an apology for the war in Iran with a text only MEME. By the playbook, Steve added his own personal words encouraging people to stay away from the “Fake News.” Of course he won’t tell you that if you watch those news outlets you would learn there is no such thing as a “47-Year War With Iran” and the impact can’t be undone.

Today, American citizens use MEMEs to “prove” an idea.

No need to fact check.

No need for a degree in History or Political Science or Government to be “fully informed” about America’s military actions abroad.

You just need to copy and paste a MEME to your social media.

The more followers you have . . . the better.

WARS FOR OIL

America’s wars for oil are the biggest distraction from Electric Vehicles. And the wars are not just on the battlefield. It’s basically the whole economy.

America’s chief MAGite in charge of government regulations left his position last week after dismantling all of America’s environmental restrictions.

Not just on cars and car pollution.

All restrictions.

I imagine him leaving his post at the White House with a warm feeling inside after gutting America’s moves toward a cleaner and more sustainable world by helping sustain America’s automobile, gas, and oil industries.

In a New York Times editorial last week the paper wrote that America’s leadership believes: “it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, . . . and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.”

The Times quotes Interior Secretary Doug Burgum who corroborates this idea by saying “then you’re in a position where now the military power, tied with the economic power of tariffs, tied with the courage to be able to actually use that, you’ve got the degrees of freedom”—to use American military power in foreign countries.

The success or failure of America’s electric vehicle industry is directly linked to the politics of war in America today. Maintaining an economy based on the internal combustion engine instead of moving toward Electric Vehicles is an important story in America. We know this by how much firepower we sent to the Middle East AND by how MEMEs are used to bash the industry by people who should be on board with the new transportation technology. The true cost of automobile transportation in America is subsidized by trillions of dollars of US Government money, military action, and dead soldiers.

Energy independence cannot be achieved in an oil based economy.

LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES MAKE IT ALL HAPPEN

Read it and believe it, this is the way of the world now.

This MEME example attempts to communicate a recommendation for a negative position on the idea of electric vehicles in America.

I believe it is mostly irrelevant whether or not to consider the origin of any particular message or MEME, especially whether or not they were created by political operatives from outside of America.

What is important is the ability of the viewer to parse the information and conclude whether it is true or false, and whether or not it was intended to have a negative impact on particular people, movements, or ideas.

We should be able to know the political intention of the message.

When I was teaching about political MEMES I had many students who didn’t want to do them because the students weren’t interested in politics or social media. I had one student who had a parent who was a Political Science/History teacher at the California State University. She not only refused to do the assignments but warned me that eventually MEMEs would be used in a very bad way in politics.

I knew what she was talking about.

That’s why I doubled-down on the idea because I knew students would encounter these communications. They need to know the difference between truth and fiction and they need to know what it means for politicians and political movements to support and spread false ideas and information using these tools.

The coal train MEME post by a friend from Detroit, MI came just be for the election in 2024. It’s also fake.

The irony of this MEME today is so great when you consider the amount of money, energy, and water resources being devoted to the technology infrastructure to hold data server farms of FAKE intelligence.

The intelligence we get from these data facilities is not artificial . . . it’s fake.

THE CHILD AS PRODUCER

Because (television) production always involves more knowledge than mere perception, it seems likely that once children have had experience as producers they will be more sophisticated consumers.

Allowing children to act as producers helps overcome the limitations of the electronic media as relatively passive, one-way forms of communication.

—Patricia Marks Greenfield—Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers, 1984

Young people quickly embraced digital tools. Many educators learned how to use them just like I did. We knew people would use these tools for communicating with, and influencing, other people.

As an educator this was always my mantra. I knew my students wanted to speak up about the things that were important to them. I knew that if they were artists then their art would reflect things that were important to them. I knew if they were not artists, but I taught them a few things, they could be good enough to communicate their own ideas in my classroom using digital tools.

I surmised that students would want to create images, texts, videos and other artifacts that reflected what they learned about any given topic we were discussing.

Like the Civil Rights Act of 1866. When it came time to talk about this, my students couldn’t wait. Most people don’t even know there was a Civil Rights Act of 1866. My students read the text and some chose to use for an assignment to create a political MEME celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day back in January 2019.

Here the student is actually quoting from the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He adds to that a caricature of our “president” who clearly doesn’t care about Civil Rights.

Think about the facial expressions in this MEME and compare them to government officials right now talking about the murders of American citizens protesting in the streets seven years later. The MEME caricature looks like he’s ready to do what the quote says.

However, it’s not the Civil Rights Act of 1866 the MAGite-in-chief wants to enforce, it’s his own Executive Orders.

To me, if an 8th grade student can understand all of this, so can an adult.

But a large portion of America’s population is being fooled by it instead. People have been coerced into paying their own tax dollars to send American military to war all over the world to support an oil economy. We attack Venezuela for their oil and American oil companies don’t even want it. Meanwhile, Ford shut down its electric truck production because people aren’t buying.

The list goes on.

My 8th graders knew this too. That’s why they voted this MEME as the top project for an assignment on the Electoral Count Act of 1887 in January 2019.

The students understood the importance of political power in America and how it is used. They had something to say about it. MEMEs can be effective messages that communicate sophisticated ideas. Some present facts and the coal trains are fake.

THE END OF WARS FOR OIL

This brings me back to electric vehicles. To me, the most important issue for us to consider is the cost of all of this.

People who think we still burn coal to make electricity here in California should be looking at ways to eliminate burning coal where they live.

In Marin County, Marin Clean Energy provides 100% renewable electricity. In Sacramento I pay the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District an extra monthly fee to support SMUD efforts to be 100% renewable.

I also paid full price for my Ford F-150 Lightning because I believed it was a good vehicle that met my needs and I wanted to support an American car manufacturer making the effort to transition its sales to a newer and superior product.

I’m paying full price now for a more sustainable product that will be far less expensive over time.

People who think you should be able to pay $30,000.00 for any car, gas or electric, today need to understand that this price for a gasoline powered vehicle is highly subsidized by our military efforts around the globe to maintain oil supplies.

The electric vehicle has no such costs. It has costs, but not those.

The benefits, beyond a cleaner and more sustainable world, would actually include the end of wars for oil.

“This will make it impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide all the answers.” —Jerry Mander 1977

Read about how and why “America puts its Electric Vehicle future on a pile of trash.”

Read more about why we are at war for oil with Iran: SHE . . . and the war for oil in the future.

Read more