Before I get into my theme, just a heads-up that I am planning a podcast on “Magic and Imagination” (or something like that) with my esteemed friends Laura McCormack, author of Magic and Melancholia and Sebastian Morello, author of Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries. I’m not sure when it will happen, but it should be soonish. Stay tuned for this and more exciting developments!
Over recent days, I have been ruminating over Joe Jackson’s 1979 hit “I’m the Man.” As one does. First of all, it’s about as outstanding a representative example of pure power pop perfection as one might find (note the alliteration, for I am a medievalist). Secondly, the lyrics are brilliant and touch on the magical environments that all of us have been immersed in since birth. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, all of us are steeping in a concoction of propaganda and messaging from the womb to the tomb. And not only that, but the mechanisms of this propaganda are so sophisticated that those running the program can pull a lever and make us adopt an attitude that only minutes ago we found abhorrent.
For example, take the case of Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner, whose campaign comes with a certain amount of, shall we say, “baggage.” But never mind that. Sure he has a Nazi tattoo. Sure he’s exhibited some dreadful treatment of women. But even though the media and the DNC have been going full-metal propaganda that everyone they hate (primarily Donald Trump) is a Nazi and and a misogynist, suddenly, when it comes to Platner, what we have is “a redemption arc.” I am not making this up. And people have swallowed and digested this without blinking. As Joe Jackson sings, “Pretty soon now, you know I'm gonna make a comeback / And like the birds and the bees in the trees / It's a sure-fire smash.” Advertising is destiny. Stay on message and everything will be fine.
To be sure, Jackson’s song is not about politics so much as it is about the power of advertising and the creation of fads that convince people to buy, basically, junk —the yo-yos and hula-hoops mentioned in the song to which we could add a litany of other products (mood rings, Chia Pets, Sabrina Carpenter, etc). Not that Jackson didn’t also write about politics, as he does in the haunting “Right and Wrong.”
“The Pied Piper of the TV screen is gonna make it simple.”
There really is no difference in the mechanisms for marketing a Frisbee or a politician, a fact first turned into a science by Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who used psychological theory in the selling of… well, everything. You’ve no doubt heard the slogan (note the metaphor) “Sex sells.” That all started with Bernays.
Here’s an ad from 1977 that makes me laugh out loud—and, yes, I had the legendary Farrah Fawcett (the OG cougar) poster hanging in my bedroom when I was a teenager. My mom bought it for me on my fifteenth birthday. LOL. “I'll speak to the masses through the media / And if you got anything to say to me /You can say it with cash.”
Bernays was no dummy. He knew that literacy was the key to propaganda. Indeed, my first serious scholarly interest in propaganda began when I was studying the English Reformation in graduate school. How did England, the most Catholic country of Europe, and whose sovereign, King Henry VIII, was named “Defensor Fidei” (“Defender of the Faith”) by Pope Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici) become so rapidly transformed into a Protestant nation? It was, of course, a multi-pronged approach, that, in addition to propaganda, included coercion and bribery (much like we saw during Covid)—but it wasn’t primarily aimed at the peasantry, who were mostly illiterate. It was aimed at the nobility, the literate and educated class. And, having served some of my Purgatory in higher education, let me tell you something: those guys are not only easily bought, but, because of their pride, are easily propagandized. The same tools used by the the English crown in the 1500s were later employed by gangsters running the Covid scam—and they’re still trying to run the game all across the West. Just because you can read, just because you’re “educated”—that doesn’t mean you’re above contamination by propaganda or vice (the one capitalizes on the other). In fact, being “educated” makes you even more susceptible to propaganda. As Bernays writes in his book Propaganda (1928!):
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all received identical imprints.”
So what are our hallowed halls of higher learning (not to mention K-12 education—also: check out that subtle alliteration!) but propaganda mills? Oh, and happy Pride Month (another genius propaganda campaign).
Most academics when you accuse them of being propagandists:
The thing with propaganda in education is that it works like a virus (note the metaphor). It infects a few people (the teachers and professors) but then it spreads to those who come in contact with them. Counter-intuitively to real disease, those who don’t get infected are routinely quarantined—by ostracization, shaming, punishment, denying tenure. Stuff like that. Then suddenly, as if by magic, everyone thinks gender is on a spectrum and begins every conversation with a land acknowledgement. FFS.
As I have said many times before, this kind of propaganda is nothing but a form of dark magic—the operation of the subtle on the gross. I write about this at length in the first chapter of Surely Some Revelation Is at Hand, which you can get here for the low, low price of $19.95 (paperback) or $32.00 (hardcover)! And just so you know: Only highly intelligent people buy my books. You really don’t want to miss out.
As the great Philly band The Hooters sang so long ago
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All you zombies show your faces All you people in the street All you sittin' in high places The pieces gonna fall on you
How will you break the spell?
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