McLuhan-- All of the Candidates are Asleep (part 1) 1968

Saturday Evening Post          (August 10, 1968)    p. 34-36

Marshall McLuhan discusses the effects of television on politics and explains why the current candidates are irrelevant.

All of the Candidates are Asleep

By: Marshall McLuhan

“Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42)

An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present elections is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.

A tragic hero has no goal. He has to find out who he is when the foundations of his world have fled. His “irrational violence” is a probing of the unknown. Like our own TV generation, he cannot “fit in” to a world that has changed radically. His tragic agon, or struggle, is a process of making, not matching. He cannot “represent” people until he has invented or discovered them anew.

The Vietnam war has taught Americans that they cannot have a hot war in a cool, or involved, age. When electric immediacy has got everybody involved in everybody, mechanized violence is no more tolerable than mechanized education or mechanized politics or mechanized charity.

The ballot box is a “hot box” that is hard to cool in an election year. An old-fashioned hot campaign is hard to accommodate to a TV public engaged in the “first world war fought on American soil.”

All wars are world wars, under electric conditions. TV brings them into our homes, and some American parents have seen their own sons killed on TV news programs. Seeing them on TV, moreover, we experience all sons as our own.

From all the present candidates for the Presidency, the TV viewer gets the impression that it would be possible to have an intelligent conversation with any one of them under conditions of privacy and solitude, during which that candidate could be allowed to learn some of the central events in the contemporary world.

The simple fact is that no such possibility of intelligent conversation exists. If any one of them were to become aware of the actual dynamics of the 20^th century, he would at once dissociate himself from political lie. The compliance and submission needed in “practical politics,” or for any cooperation with any political machine excluded the possibility of any serious character appearing on the scene.

Now that Bob Kennedy has left the scene it is easier to see how much bigger he was than the mere candidate role he undertook to perform. His many hidden dimensions appeared less on the rostrum than in his spontaneous excursions into the ghettos and in his easy rapport with the surging generosity of young hearts. He strove to do good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. It was this (reluctant hero) quality that gave integrity and power to his TV image.

None of the candidates understands TV, either in its effect on him or on society.  If Canada’s Pierre Trudeau is a great TV image in politics, it is because he is indifferent to political power. Anyone who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.

Sen. Eugene McCarthy could have come out of any Hollywood casting bureau as a small-town philosopher. His yokel quality provides a very pleasing feeling of TV involvement, which gives him a nice, modest rapport with the young.

TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national mage-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s have a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.

But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological.

The question is whether we are to “go to bed” and “take our slumber” for the next four years with Humphrey’s “platform of happiness” and bubbly ebullience, or with Nixon’s “serene certainty” to “jog along” with Senator McCarthy, or to fix our gaze on loner Reagan. This question has all the immediacy and involvement of the choice between listening for four years to the same theme songs. Are we to endure four years of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Humphrey), I Love You Truly (Nixon), Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (McCarthy) or As Time Goes By (Reagan)?

In merely media terms, a Negro in the White House would have the most soothing and cooling effect on both national and international politics. Negroes make enormously better color-TV images than whites, because the contour of this image does not depend upon light and shade.

In media terms, a glance at presidential candidates, past and present, reveals that “running for office” only became possible when transportation reached a high degree of development. Until the telegraph and the railway, the office had to chase after the candidate. He sat home, writing letters to the local press. Slogans were basic. Cartoons and photography began to play a large political function even before railways made it possible for candidate to enter the age of caboose and whistle-stop oratory.

The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.