There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s powerful and haunting antiwar film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), in which Ron Kovic’s mother is bending down before the television (this is B.R.—before the remote) and wincing.  It is the Fourth of July, 1969, and long-haired antiwar protesters are surging through the capital with angry placards.  Despairingly, she flicks the channel to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, featuring guest host Sammy Davis, Jr..  Her face lights up, and she calls to her husband, who is just finishing the dishes: “Honey, it’s starting, and Sammy Davis is on tonight!”  All is now happy in the world.  Mrs. Kovic has been mediated.

What makes the scene so damning is that her son Ron, her “Yankee Doodle boy,” is just home from a combat tour in South Vietnam and a stay in the Bronx veterans’ hospital; he is in the back yard drinking beer with a friend—paralyzed from the waist down.  He remembers his mother’s words before he went overseas: “Ronnie, you’re doing the right thing.  Communism has to be stopped.  It’s God’s will that you go.”  So, for an hour at least, Mrs. Kovic has been rescued from a harsh reality—including all moral responsibility for her son’s condition—by Rowan and Martin.

If media could perform that magic when there were only five or six channels, what is it capable of today, with five or six hundred?  Add to that the internet, inexpensive DVD’s and CD’s, and so much else.  Contemplate that, and you are ready for Zengotita’s study of optional realities, self-deluding fantasy, and fragmented consciousness that is our mental condition today.

Perhaps the least that can be said by way of praise for Zengotita’s startling and perceptive journey through the postmodern world is how well written it is and how enjoyable to read; yet the book’s greatest strength—its genius, really—is how much of what seems inexplicable about the way Americans are today is rendered perfectly, if frighteningly, understandable here.  Why did Abu Ghraib not matter?  (It’s not just the myth of American innocence; it’s relentless mediation.)  How can George W. get away with his ongoing con job?  (It’s mediation, stupid.)  You see, in an “ocean of representation,” “everyone has their [sic] own reality.”  And politics is now mostly about “expressing your identity.”  Who wants to identify with torture?  That’s so un-American.

Have you ever wondered how American evangelicals can support a President who maintains a close financial, diplomatic, and strategic relationship with the Islamic dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, a kingdom as closed to the Gospel and hostile to Christianity as any on earth?  How they can overlook Bush’s carelessness with the truth?  His distortions of language?  The heinous practice of rendition?  His nomination of a torture advocate to be attorney general?  Is it that he and they are not really Christian?  Perhaps, but there is more to it than that.  The truth is that evangelicals (and many Catholics, too) are as mediated as any other group in our expanding collectivity.  They have their own books and radio and television stations, their own leaders, their own reality; and, since Christians don’t do the things Bush and his people do, then they don’t happen, and that’s that.  Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul has remarked on the total disappearance of logic from public discourse, education, etc.  Zengotita has the explanation.  The “flattered self” enjoying inexhaustible optionality in a “mediated world” sees no reason to accept any limits on thought or action.  Why should he?

Gore Vidal has nicknamed our country “the United States of Amnesia” for the consistent forgetfulness that begins for most Americans the moment a story vanishes from the screen.  Manifest incompetence by government officials, shifting and inconsistent rationales for policy, saying one thing and doing another, predictions that turn out wrong—all are readily accepted by the American public.  References to even the most recent past incur such retorts as “Can’t we just move on?” or variations on “That was then, this is now.”  The President and his defenders constantly speak this way, as did Clinton before them.  In the age of remote control and satellite TV, the past ceases to be; in an age of public performance and spectacle, no powerful figure is responsible for what he said or did before now.

“Only when there’s crisis and scandal can politics compete with sports and entertainment,” observes Zengotita.  This explains why Rumsfeld and Cheney lost no time in exploiting the traumatic footage of the Twin Towers to unveil their new foreign policy of regime change, preventive war, and global dominion.  And it worked, because “the grievance, instantly iconic, gave Americans permission to ignore the history of our involvement in the Arab and Islamic worlds.”  “Systematically conditioned by media to avoid anything they couldn’t understand in a minute,” the American public was ready to accept the most simplistic and reassuring explanation offered.  And so the political script from which the President and his people read, post-September 11, was that of the “revenge movie.”  You know how it goes: The movie opens with the hero minding his own business when he (or those under his protection) is rudely assailed by “evil” men bent on robbery and rapine.  The hero then has license to engage in systematic and satisfying carnage for the rest of the film.  (The audience can’t get enough.)

According to Zengotita, the phenomenon of Princess Di

brought into high relief the way successful politicians must address the identities of their constituents, how they must reflect back upon the flattered selves of spectators the attention they are giving the celebrated.

That explains President Bush’s hold on the electorate: He has managed to convince them that he is one of them; that “their indifference and ignorance,” which he shares, is really a sign of virtue; that their “antipathy to all things intellectual and refined,” which he also shares, is an exhibition of common sense; and that their desire for overseas mayhem is justified.

Recall “Bush the Bold,” decked out in a flight suit, landing on that aircraft carrier; remember how he dared the insurgents to “bring it on”; think of how he “sneers and gloats” whenever they catch a terrorist; notice how he exhibits his “bratty temper” whenever he is asked a challenging question (which is rare).  Zengotita explains that we are witnessing Bush the “method actor” trying to “perform who he is, or thinks he is,” and to fulfill the role of righteous gunfighter whom the American people expect to ride out of American fantasy lore.  Here, a reference to Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1992) would be appropriate, as it could explain why the Red State voters rejected a Vietnam combat veteran for a draft-exempt poseur who dons flight suits and pontificates in front of a wall of uniforms and flags.  Laptop bombardiers, popcorn-crunching warriors, football-stadium louts, NASCAR-fanatics, Left Behind millenarians—they all recognize in Dubya one of their own.

Zengotita also discusses child-rearing in an age of mediation; the fate of nature in such a world (it becomes a shrinking and besieged refuge); and how frantic work schedules, lives of “perpetual motion,” and “immersion in a numbing routine” provide relief for most people from the tension created by the unattainable visions of affluence, adventure, and euphoria with which they are tormented unceasingly.  (Business functions as a kind of defense mechanism.)

Reading Zengotita leaves little doubt: The mouse, the remote control, and the cell phone have transformed our lives and minds even more radically than did the printing press five centuries ago.  This transformation, however, seems to be leading not to the flowering of thought and culture but to its extinction.

 

[Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, by Thomas De Zengotita (New York: Bloomsbury) 291 pp., $22.95]