Why the Left still doesn't get Trump?

Donald Trump is the name that never leaves our lips. It’s so intimate in a way. Trump in our head. Trump in our words. Trump in our frustrations. 

The Left rejects Trump for so many good reasons. 

Trump is:

·     Narcissistic

·     Greedy

·     Lacks empathy

·     Ignores climate degradation

·     Enriches the wealthy

All these are valid, but do not explain Trumps incredible ability to control the conversation. The pundits predicted he would lose hugely to Hillary Clinton. The pundits then told Trump to stop using Twitter. Of course he uses Twitter brilliantly.

The Left keeps insisting, on MSNBC, that his base is limited in number. At this point Trump supporters far outweigh any presidential candidiate emerging from the Democratic party. That could change quickly but time will tell. 

The Democrats need to understand Trump better if they intend to win in 2020.

The key to Trump—he’s not a literary man. We know he doesn’t like to read or ponder documents presented by his security analysts, etc.. What does Trump do that is so effective?

Let’s turn to the master media guru Marshall McLuhan to understand Trump better. Trump is a master of TV—the power of its images and the all-at-once nature of digital communications. 

Marshall McLuhan wrote in the 60s and 70s but understood the Internet before it existed. He pointed out that the “literary man” would be baffled by the speed and intimacy of our communications and the non-linear characteristics of our present day media environment. 

Communication now has more in common with villagers sitting around the campfire than with a NY Times article. The conversation is full of emotion and immediacy, and seems to be quite a bit of lying and propagandizing involved as well. This is McLuhan’s global village and Marshall did not promise it would be peaceful or pleasant. 

McLuhan had grave misgivings about the future of our electronic technology. Seems like many now recognize the downside of all this connectivity. But we must live with it and study it to maintain any sense of personal control.

Here is what Marshall McLuhan wrote in the Saturday Evening Post (August 10, 1968):

“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 ov view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

“… 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 by any earnest regard for any them. The new changes are not moral but technological.”

Hope that helps! Go Dems! Remember this is not moral war—but a communications battle. Better learn the new technology!

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Tom Wolfe: writer "got" McLuhan

Tom Wolfe, pioneer of New Journalism, "got" Marshall McLuhan in a way few other writers, thinkers, pundits and fellow travelers ever did. Wolfe wrote an article for the New York Herald Tribune in 1965, asking "what if he is right?" in its title and we now know that McLuhan anticipated the electronic environment a remarkable achievement for a man who died in 1980.

 Tom Wolfe, pioneer of New Journalism, "got" Marshall McLuhan in a way few other writers, thinkers, pundits and fellow travelers ever did. Tom Wolfe died last week at 88 years of age. The news anchors highlighted Wolfe as a pioneer of the New Journalism and as a novelist with a keen eye for societal structures and strictures. None mentioned Wolfe and his interest in Marshall McLuhan.

Wolfe entered the world of Sixties and a Ken Kesey led group of acid-dropping hippies in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”You were either “on the bus”with the acid droppers or otherwise “off the bus.”Wolfe never dropped acid but managed to stay on the bus to tell the story.

Wolfe captured the excitement of the Apollo space program with“The Right Stuff”.  He helped make test pilot Chuck Yeager a household name with his evocative stories of cool cucumber pilots breaking the sound-barrier and moving us closer to the heavens.

In the “The Bonfire of the Vanities”Wolfe explored Wall Street greed back in the Eighties and the high rolling Masters of the Universe with their big ambitions and financial clout. 

McLuhan, probably a sociologist at heart, loved society and its paradoxes—the“human carnival,”he always stated, was going stronger than ever and provided a great palette for the writer observer, the student of human foibles.

None of the news broadcasts or Tom Wolfe obituaries mentioned his interest in the theories of Marshall McLuhan. As far back as 1965, Wolfe wrote an article on McLuhan where he asked in the title—“what if he is right?”

McLuhan correctly perceived McLuhan had unlocked the cuckoo clock of technology and the profound effect the new electric environment would have on us all. Wolfe, a quick study, explains the shift in sensory balance as Electronic Man moves from the printed word with its emphasis on the eye and the visual to the acoustic, multi-sensory electic world. McLuhan brilliantly predicted a return to a kind of tribalism, the rise of a global village where we all sit around an electron-powered campfire.

Wolfe mentions McLuhan's book "Understanding Media" as an underground best-seller at the time of this article. He points out McLuhan as the master of the epigrammatic statement with "global village" and "the medium is the message." 

What you say on the cellphone is much less important than the fact that you are using a cellphone.”

The new electronic man becomes more emotional as he leaves the visual logic of the printed page. The tribesman in the jungle gets his information around a campfire. The process is intimate and emotional. Our social media world rocks with out-of-control emotions as information travels at the speed of light and everybody knows the business of everybody else.

Follow the link here to read the New York Herald Tribune article from 1965.

http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/course/spring96/wolfe.html

The full title of the piece:

suppose he is what he sounds like,
the most important thinker since
newton, darwin, freud, einstein,
and Pavlov what if he is right?

-TOM WOLFE

Turns out--  McLuhan was right!

Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village, 1960

CBC TV—Explorations (Program)—The World is a Global Village 1960 

Marshall McLuhan can be seen on a YouTube clip from a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) television program entitled Explorations aired on May 18, 1960.

Any dedicated student of Marshall McLuhan will be richly rewarded for watching  patiently through the extended introduction by Canadian TV hosts. Stay with the video through the 3:00 minute mark. Marshall McLuhan himself arrives on the set and accurately predicts the world that you and I have come to occupy in 2017.

Here’s the link-- 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7WXagEHFFI

McLuhan enters the frame and deconstructs an idiomatic phrase, the slang term “with it.” McLuhan begins with the phrase “with it” to elucidate his main point—the connectedness of post-literate, electronic man.He asserts the meaning as “we’ve understood completely, we’ve got the message as it were in every way possible.”  As for the print era man “they were not with it, they were away from it, by themselves with their own private point of view.”

McLuhan’s predicts the re-tribalization of mankind over the next 5 minutes of his interview by Alan Millar, CBC TV host. 

“Tribal man," McLuhan expounds, is "the man created by the new electronic media.”

McLuhan presents the revolutionary notions cheerfully as a high school teacher providing an algebra lesson. The clip reveals McLuhan as firmly and precisely in command of his revolutionary principles well in advance of the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

The YouTube clip extends just over 8 minutes (8:43) and is a small portion of a what was originally a half-hour show devoted to the subject of teenagers, a few years before the arrival of the Beatles and the youth revolution of the hippies. McLuhan comments on teenagers at the end of the clip, distinguishing adolescents from teenagers. Adolescents, he says, have an individualist print culture perspective, always searching for personal identity while teenagers, a product of electronic culture, seek identification with the group.

McLuhan’s provocative language captures the all-at-onceness of life in the 21^st century: 

“The new media has made everything into a single unit…like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the same message all the time… a princess gets married in England, an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk… I use the word tribal. It’s probably the key word of this whole half-hour.” 

McLuhan has circled back to the concept of the global village with the image of the tribal drum.

Alan Millar, host for the program, asks “Aren’t media, as I think most of us feel, on the edges of our life?”

McLuhan responds, “Media is at the heart of our life because the media work through our senses.”

McLuhan Google Doodle: a vision of four distinct eras (Human History)

https://www.google.com/doodles/marshall-mcluhans-106th-birthday

Paste the link above into your browser to see McLuhan's Google Doodle, illustrating these concepts:

•  Acoustic Age
• Written Age
• Mass Production (Fordism)
• McLuhan television appearance
•  Global Village/Electronic Age

·       McLuhan Google Doodle

·      Long before we started looking to our screens for all the answers, Marshall McLuhan saw the internet coming — and predicted just how much impact it would have. A Canadian philosopher and professor who specialized in media theory, McLuhan came to prominence in the 1960s, just as TV was becoming part of everyday life. At the center of his thinking was the idea that society is shaped by technology and the way information is shared.

·      Today’s Doodle, which celebrates the visionary’s 106th birthday, illustrates this theory by showing how McLuhan viewed human history. He saw it through the lens of 4 distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age. His first major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), popularized the term “global village” — the idea that technology brings people together and allows everyone the same access to information. 

·      In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan further examined the transformative effects of technology and coined his famous phrase “The medium is the message.” He believed that the way in which someone receives information is more influential than the information itself. Throughout the '60s and '70s, McLuhan made frequent TV appearances to share his theories with both followers and skeptics.

·      Decades later, we honor the man whose prophetic vision of the “computer as a research and communication instrument” has undeniably become a reality.