D’uhccuse…!
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He’s just saying there’s nothing wrong with that.
Well, they look like a white crowd to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it is pretty monochromatic up here. No surprise in terms of the ethnic nature of the people showing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a fact. I think there’s a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, whites versus other people. I think [Sarah Palin]’s very smart about this.
–Chris Matthews, television journalist
Chris Matthews’ self-awareness is notoriously suspect. His analyses of the national psyche, to the extent they are coherent, typically reveal more about him than to him, and often. His random digressions branch off one after another, shedding the pungent, overripe fruit of his personal Tree of Knowledge. Around him his fellows navigate with care, watching where they step, casting nervous glances upward at the slightest sound.
Perhaps they feel some embarrassment at one of their own speaking too freely in front of the help; what’s revealed is not just one man’s coarse intellect, but the prejudices and delusions of an entire class. Chris Matthews can’t maintain the ruse because he doesn’t know it’s a ruse. Still, he perpetuates it. Chris Matthews has managed to dupe himself, if no one else. Chris Matthews lacks situational awareness.
Not long ago, his undisciplined emotionalism would have been discouraged as a feminine preference for impulse over reserve; it would have been deemed unmanly. In that light Matthews’ notorious masculinity fetish is neither homoerotic nor misogynist, but an honest fascination with a foreign point of view. His sexual boorishness is a failed interpretation of masculinity, lapsing into caricature. His visceral reaction to Hillary Clinton, catty.
But no one deliberately sets out to make himself a fool–unless he does it on television. Of these there are two kinds, the actor who plays the fool for our amusement and the fool who is lured before the camera, for our amusement. The most common form of the latter is the reality show participant.
Reality television democratized, ergo de-mythologized, celebrity. Distinctions are blurred in the ensuing chaos. In the post-revolutionary order professionals have ceded some local narrative control to the audience. Indeed, the spontaneous narrative that Reality television, and now “viral” Internet material, attempts is not a foreign product introduced to the people, but is generated from within them, performed by them and consumed by them. The author is the hive. Production is superfluous.
The viewer has grown used to (if not the reality, the conceit of) providing his own narrative. He is increasingly adept and accustomed to this. This is one tough crowd.
Thus the industry of television is confronted with a transfer of expertise to the audience, a sort of purchasing power; “media personalities” have less control over their media personalities. Television journalists used to be the gatekeepers of the information flow, now they are deluged along with everyone else in the flood. They have lost their monopoly on reality.
Its individuals must adapt to the new evolutionary environment; “redefine” themselves, in euphemism. The desperate scramble produces new, grotesque hybrids; shape shifters alternating between, and sometimes straddling, traditional and Reality television. No one yet understands what is happening. Reality TV aspires to surveillance of the individual by the mass; multiple raw feeds strategically located. It’s a medium-specific tyranny of the majority. Professionals, once mystical creatures, have lost their former privilege. Everyone is fair game.
Matthews, like Tyra Banks or any other regular on The Soup, is a media personality less sophisticated than his audience and less aware of the nature of his performance. Chris Matthews is reality television.
The audience is no longer helpless and docile. It rebels against kitsch and manipulation. Anything introduced into the veg-o-matic of popular culture is now broken down, sampled and pilfered, recombined. The artist loses control over his work once it’s released into this wild. Television’s non-fictional performers are subject to this as well. The audience crafts additional or alternative narratives; unearths unintended subtexts; improvises parody of inferior work. These are defensive strategies. If we’re not to be rid of them we are obliged by a sense of decency to ridicule a Tyra Banks or a Chris Matthews. One must marvel. One must not take some people seriously.
But he must consider them seriously, as symptoms of the human condition. After all, the joke is ultimately on us.
Reality television is the gallows humor of a culture self-slated for execution. The greater part of its appeal is not, as first glance suggests, the sugar-rush ridicule of one’s inferiors; it’s the bitter acknowledgement they are, after all, our fellows, countrymen, kin even. They are us.
You complain: Reality television shows a perversely select group. Yes; but it does not necessarily follow they’re a meaner lot than the whole. After all, some are too wretched even to make it past first cut at For the Love of Ray J. How great is their number?
We may yet know. Commerce ensures new contrivances for luring their basest natures into the electronic square are even now being worked up by some of our sharpest young minds. Decent kids every one, no doubt.
Reality television has only begun charting the depths of human greed. By “greed” I mean also greed for love, status, attention. Like it or not, reality television is a valuable artifact of the present. But the ever-shifting lineup of “reality’s” global community theater all manage to delude themselves in the end into thinking they are stars.
Reality TV is a living document of our decadent end. It was, after all, the poet-cum-charlatan-cum-”satanist” Aleister Crowley who declared
Every man and woman is a star
and began his “Book of the Law” with
Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law
(commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this perfectly concise, all-encompassing statement of principle).
Reality television has never been more succinctly defined. You’re the star; do what you will. Here it is prefigured before television. It just as neatly sums up current popular convention. “Reality”, a long time latent, has been released into the atmosphere we all share. Its intrusive nature interrogates high and low. Its endless iterations are unforeseeable. The confused persona we know as “Chris Matthews” is one measure of its progress.
Filed under: Culture, Religion, media
Everyone is fair game. Chris Matthews is reality television. One must not take some people seriously. (commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this perfectly concise, all-encompassing statement of principle).
Preee-cisely!
One must not take some people seriously. (commerce, I presume, necessitated a book-length addendum to this endless Sarah Palin freakshow.)
We get more of what we subsidize. Television, since it’s a free, advertising-supported product, is subsidized solely by our attention to it. When I see something I don’t like (eg: the recent AMA gay-sex-routine disguised as musical performance), I turn it off, and rather than grousing about it to other likeminded folks, just act as though I hadn’t seen it. That way, I do my small part in helping to prevent it from creating “buzz”, which apparently is the only metric of success these twits engage with.
Mr Swartz, I agree. According to my grandmother, there was a time in this town when unacceptable behavior was ignored, and therefore diminished. This practice along with scorn for the sin apparently oppressed people. Giving formerly unacceptable behavior attention– especially in art (and also TV) — is a moral good to progressives, because attention begets boredom which begets acceptance.
this is one of the most verbose and entirely pointless blog posts i’ve ever read. chris matthews makes an utterly banal and incontestable observation (sarah palin appeals to the economically and socially marginalized, and therefore resentful, white lumpen proletariat) and you go off on a thousand-word meandering post about reality television. what?
what should matthews have said, that sarah palin’s fanbase is made up entirely of MENSA members who work in high-paying professional fields? or should he just have magically invented heaps of minority voters that adore sarah palin?
sounds like you’ve been reading too much of the new criterion, this post reads like a crudely constructed parody of an “intellectual” conservative like roger kimball.
Pat Buchanan once cracked to Matthews that he had forgotten to take his Ritalin. This is all we need to know about Matthews. It is possible to over think this. He has no frontal lobe. He has no filter. He thinks it. He says it. Personally, I think it makes for good TV. Matthews ADD addled persona is good shtick. He may embellish it some for effect, but I have no doubt this is how he is.
Re. the substance of what he said. He says “not that there is anything wrong with it,” but he really does think there is something wrong with it. He, like all the MSM commentators, has swallowed the Cultural Marxist story hook, line and sinker. According to CM minority solidarity and diversity are unmitigated goods. White solidarity or self-awareness is an unmitigated bad and dangerous. The fact that the crowds were all white makes them sinister and up to no good by definition. This is the mindset we must challenge.
“The audience is no longer helpless and docile. It rebels against kitsch and manipulation.”
If this statement is true, who, then, watches Glenn Beck?
Well played, Tracy Parker and Neuyawker.
Not so much for WTHAYTA. Ditch the all-small caps; it’s so Early 00’s. There are only two impressions you can convey with this method: either you don’t know capitalization, or you are too lazy for it. Some may give you a free pass (I allow it only under two circumstances: your “shift” key is inoperable, or, you are missing two or more fingers from one or more hands; if this is the case, forgive me*) but no one ever thinks, “Gee, this would read so much better without all that capitalization and punctuation!”
And if you are calling someone verbose, it’s crucial you not be verbose.
Easy fixes both.
As for the literal-mindedness, well, go with God, friend.
*and if you’re dashing off angry missives on your hand-held, I recommend you seek out the appropriate support group
I seem to almost always enjoy Dennis Dale, and while I observe the same creativity and intelligence, and ability to write, I find myself crediting him with a capacity for honesty that so many at TAC seem to still be searching for.
If we put on the same glasses and look first at Chris Matthews, then later look at Hannity/Rush/Beck/O’Reilly entertainment, the same rules apply. While snarky libs are hampered by their need to label the conservative icons as “leaders”, a taste of honesty lets us see that it is simply one more product that someone is selling, and we can learn more examining who is buying, and why, than from examining the product too closely.
And speaking for probably a large group of like-minded “neocons”, it is fascinating to watch the spectacle of the libs mud-wrestling with this lady (Palin) who has ceased to be relevant to most of us. Yet because she represents an interesting potential, and a possible rallying point for Conservative Inc., so many of the libs are drawn out of hiding to scream pain and insults in her direction.
But rather than wait to see if this is a product that Conservative Inc. will buy, Chicago Politics Style is to premptively remove possible future opposition. While the silent majority tries to decide how to unseat the corruption inherent in both major parties, look for lib partisans to reveal themselves by spewing unnecessary snark, not at the ideas of the targets of their scorn, but at the persons and their families and their target audience.
Aleister Crowley was a sad and frightened “vampire-wannabe”, who took a piece of wisdom, and left out important parts. The original was, “Do what thou wilt, in the name of God. And where possible, make yourselves subject to the law of the land.”
Or more accurately, “As followers of Christ, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.” And, “Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s.”
One of the challenges of conservatism, will be to take the words, “…All men are created equal, endowed by their creator…”, and make this relevant to legitimate Atheists and Muslems and peoples of all belief-systems.
One of the challenges for liberalism, will be to cast off the “method” of dishonesty, and still dream the dreams of nobility, morality, and equality.
Get the tea baggers of both stripes to meet these challenges, and we’ll be ready to take back our country.