Three Wishes (Part Two) Circus Maximus-That's Entertainment
Circuses in ancient Rome were staged mainly to keep the public from turning nasty. But as fans of the various "Gladiator" productions will know, showbusiness can be hard and cruel. Having taken the occasional turn in the spotlight myself, I can sympathise with Spartacus & co. I never had to ride half-naked into the arena and take on a 300 pound Sumerian lion armed with nothing but a bow and arrow. The worst I ever faced was a hundred leather-clad pogo-spastics gobbing phlegm at me in 1977. But WTF - it's kind of all the same in the end. That's entertainment.
Ever since the dawn of civilisation -and let's pin this one on the Greeks- elite philosophy has assumed that the public must consume sport as a substitute for the thrills of war. So the olympics were inaugurated as a major societal good. A major whiff of testosteronophobia is central to this theory, with men viewed as creatures of violent impulse in constant search of outlets for aggression and opportunities for conquest. In peacetime, therefore, robbed of the chance to kill, rape and loot, we required regular exhibitions of extreme physicality just to stop us attacking the family next door with sharpened machetes and butcher knives.
Although this may be true for diverse inner-city communities, is it a fair summary of men in general? In post-industrial but pre-television europe, a vast amount of male energy went into personal participation in competitive sport, as opposed to the passive consumption enjoyed by screen-fixated slobs. And couch potatoes are not, lets be honest, prone to murderous street-fighting. 21st century man leans towards the sofa, not the boxing ring.
It could be argued that the average western male is now the least threatening specimen yet to grace the world with its presence. His list of must-have distractions has expanded to include gallons of cheap booze, strong drugs, loud music, video games, 200 channels of TV, hand-held (no pun intended) all-day pornography and twelve-hour binges on the eternally-expanding endless swirling void that is the internet.
 |
| ACTOR OR PRESIDENT? |
WAR STORY
Allow me, then, to stand the original philosophy on its head, and observe that public entertainment was never just a convenient distraction with the add-on benefit of 'defusing male aggression' by reducing war to a symbolic competition. Public entertainment is politics, propaganda and persuasion -and always was. In fact, in the end, entertainment both invites and excuses the business of war, and is a central plank of its existence. Let me tell you a true story.
Zelensky, a famous comic actor, is playing the part of Ukraine's president in a TV series. As the third series begins, he is elected Ukraine President in the "real" world. But Russia invades Ukraine. Then Ukraine wins the Eurovision song contest. President Zelensky makes a Zoom-style live video appearance at the Grammys. Then Bono and The Edge fly to Ukraine to sing to Zelensky in a bomb-shelter. Where does the entertainment stop and the war start?
Just as a pawn is not a king, there is a whole world of difference between the entertainer and the entertained. The act of live performance is sacrificial, a trade in which the performer abandons comfort, anonymity, privacy and dignity, in return for attention and (hopefully) admiration, applause and tangible rewards. This is the eternal trade, every bit as true for a court jester or Mozart, a plate-spinner or Robbie Williams. Nothing is so vulnerable as a performer -or so fickle, because whoever who pays the piper calls the tune. In which context, the US government just sent Zelensky 40 billion dollars.
TWAS EVER THUS
We still don't know who Shakespeare really was; it's often alleged that only a collective group of playwrights and poets could have been responsible for the titanic output attributed to the Bard. But what we can say is, he definitely had a thing about monarchs. That such blood-soaked royal dramas were not only performed but repeatedly, and for centuries, tells us that the ruling class were more than happy to have their machinations, plots and murderous schemes kept firmly in the public mind. Shakespeare, I'll wager, was more of a throne-polisher than a revolutionary.
The works of Shakespeare emerged from the pre-democratic world, remember -an England where a nobleman's head could be severed with an axe or a village of peasants starved to death, if the monarch felt that way inclined. But in life as in theatre, every now and then there was a royal head on the block when the blade fell, and this was most definitely a problem. Gradually, the ruling elite came to see that some kind of buffer might be required to protect them from the inevitable rise of an avenging -or competing- mob.
Oliver Cromwell agreed, as did his army, and the solution turned out to be Parliament. By assembling Parliament, a layer of protection now separated the lowly public from the supreme parasites, and the illusion of democracy was created. Lucky for him, Cromwell wasn't to know that the illusion of democracy would lead, with unavoidable logic, to the illusory universes of Coronation Street, Eastenders, Neighbours and Friends. (And thousands more equally sorry dramas). The fact remains all these very public entertainments were -from the very first episode- calculated tools of politics, propaganda and persuasion. In the beginning there was government, and government gave birth to television.
The terrible power of soap-operas should not be underestimated. It's impossible to measure the damage inflicted by these and similar long-running series on the television-obsessed populations of the English-speaking world. The amount of subliminal social-engineering packed into these productions is wondrous to behold. One has to admire the creators of this very western paradigm; only in a capitalist regime would the underclass pay an effectively voluntary fee for their own brainwashing. How many billions of hours of precious human life have been and still are squandered on the cartoonish antics of fictional nonentities tailored to government design?
But they worked. Eastenders was the most insidious, least credible and by a long way the craftiest exercise in mind-control ever to emerge from the BBC propaganda spout. I don't know how many episodes passed during the transformation of London from the beating heart of British culture into the lawless archipelago of ghetto ganglands over which Sadiq Khan presides. But the soundtrack to that transformation was the familiar tones of cockneys, jocks and northerners being silenced one by one, as Albert Square began echoing to the accents of Jamaica, Pakistan and beyond.
THE OLD BULL AND BUSH
I watched Eastenders in the beginning -almost every London inhabitant seemed to. We couldn't resist the urge to draw comparisons between the TV Londoners and ourselves. The Square didn't seem too distant from the real streets of the east end, which I knew very well. The Old Vic was a convincing facsimile of dozens of well-known pubs. But as the years passed it became clear that Eastenders was running demographically ahead of its real-world model. By the nineties the BBC's fictional community was evolving at warp speed, and inviting lowbrow viewers to embrace its false but very political reality.
I gave up on soap-operas around then, when the scriptwriters began putting shameless left-wing talking points into the mouths of characters too flimsy to be taken seriously. Also, the number of mixed-race couples shoe-horned in was downright silly. Looking back, we really had no idea how ludicrously far that particular fiction would be stretched. I gather from people who still watch television that in today's BBC universe, you'd need a telescope to find a white heterosexual couple in a prime-time programme. In 1997, the ascent of Tony Blair to power sealed London's fate, and I have no doubt Eastenders became Woke Hell long before Woke was even a thing.
ONLY A GAME
There's a few things wrong with the popular assumption that major team-sports -football in particular- supply a necessary outlet for the warlike tendencies blazing in the breast of knuckle-dragging men. Firstly, I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. In the 20th century at least, team sports -particularly football- were the arenas where young British males practised for war. Nobody who ever attended a Rangers v Celtic match in the nineteen-seventies witnessed anything less than the raw exposure of the warrior that lurks within each man and boy. He's just waiting to hear the whistle that signals OVER THE TOP! As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we can all find dangerous items in the toolkit of the soul.
My second objection to the 'team-sports defuse male aggression' theory is a practical one, drawn from painful experience. Defusion theory claims that team-sport compels players to value the group above the individual. Obedience-training, in other words. Yet the vast majority of males who play team-sports will tell you the reality is precisely the opposite.
Professionals, for sure, have no choice but to accept discipline, take orders, memorise tactics etc. They are the equivalent of 'career' soldiers, and will prioritise the team that pays their wages. But the pros are only a tiny handful of team-sport participants. The vast majority play for fun. Amateur football -at every level- is distinguished by rampant egotism, barely controlled aggression and self-centred attempts to achieve victory by displaying one's own individual brilliance and/or determination. These sporting chaps are the equivalent of 'cannon-fodder' whose bodies have historically been nothing but expendable accessories in the theatre of war.
Wars, for all the millions killed in them, are fought in the solitude of the mind. Soldiers must reach deep into their personal swag-bag of existence in search of the wherewithal to kill for some 'greater good'. In battle, the only successful conquest is the disavowal of our civilised selves. That is why elite warmongers are always reduced to forcing the public into uniform with threats and punshments. Educated, civilised people have no wish to extinguish the flame of individuality that burns within. They would much rather play football.
CELEBRITY DRONES
Throughout the two Covidian years, we saw the true, very ugly face of public entertainment. An endless procession of musicians, sportsmen, actors and celebrity comedians siezed the chance to bypass the public and endear themselves to the controlling elite. Predictable as it was, we were treated to a rare close-up look at the opportunistic nature of the spineless drones who wheedle and creep their way to the summit of the entertainment industry.
Whether it was the skeletal remains of Joanna Lumley pleading for endless jabbings or a squirm-inducing stay-safe at all costs homily from some low-IQ teleprompter queen, the level of simpering devotion to the Almighty Narrative was nauseating. I've written before at great length regarding the extent to which the pandemic was almost exclusively a televisual phenomenon. (HERE & HERE) But I only recently came to understand how well the story worked in terms of entertainment.
The invisible phantom (the virus) strikes at will, it is everywhere and nowhere. Nobody knows how to stop it but everyone has an idea. Will Xmas be cancelled? Yes, no, yes! One day there is hope -the jabs are coming- but next day hopes are dashed- there's a variant. Will the jabs triumph over the phantom? Has the NHS run out of nurses? Can two face-masks three jabs and four thousand quid guarantee you a weekend in Portugal? Tune in tomorrow for the next riveting episode of COVID-19, a tale for all the family (outside of nursing homes).
Perhaps there was a time when entertainment and war were truly separate things but the hypnotic nature of entertainment has me doubting. Entertainment is tethered to the line between reality and illusion, a division that is near-impossible to define in 2022. What is real and what is manufactured doesn't seem to matter that much in a world of total state-control and vanishing choices. Covid was a war between states and their subjects, and the entertainment industry supplied the bullets. Given enough bread, enough circuses, too many of us will choose the comfort of the democratic illusion.
In a matter of months an entertainment called The General Election Show will come to every town in the country. Despite the clearest possible evidence that nobody in government has the slightest interest in the indigenous people of Britain, tens of millions will, like goldfish, return to the dimly-framed idea that they can vote their way out of the bowl. Tens of millions will find a name, hear a slogan or see a face that glows with the right balance of promises and hope. They will dutifully trot into a shabby room in the high street and answer a multiple-choice question by making a mark with a pen.
The following day, victory for someone or other will be announced and parties will be held. Tens of millions will be delighted to hear their team won, a similar number angry and depressed to have lost. The New Area Manager will appear on every television and front page and the dash for global tyranny will crash back into top gear. It's hardly the Greatest Show On Earth but for some reason, it packs them in every time.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
―
Comments
Post a Comment