Celebrating the UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of 50 years of right wing elite levelling : 1964-2014

 Goldwater Affect

Starting at the 1964 San Francisco Republican National Convention, right wingers world wide have wage an unrelenting almost 50 year long  war to 'level' left wing elites, as they understand them.

Time perhaps, to see what has been achieved..... and at what cost to the right wing itself.

1945 Annus Mirabilis

It is fair to say that in early 1945, the right wing globally was Hegemonic ; we saw the world through their ideological eyes and we were basically respectful to all elites - and the right, of course, occupied most of the seats at the table of the elect.

So we respected them above all.

But the rapidly post-hegemonic world that emerged at the end of 1945 troubled the previously hegemonic Right most of all.

 Reds Under The Bed

At first, their response was to blame it on hardline communists at home and abroad, but by 1964 they began to see that their real enemy was social-cultural not military-political and was coming from softline left-liberals.

Clinton vs Kennedy

Right wingers threw off centuries of deference to elites , even to elites not of their own tastes and vociferously exposed the post-1964 sex life of President Clinton in a way they never did for the pre-1964 President Kennedy ---- though Kennedy was probably more sexually active outside marriage than Clinton.

But a rising tide of elite levelling - intended only for left-liberal elites - levels all elites.

Ironic "Backfire",  50 Years Later

Ironically we can credit today's sexual, ethnic and religious liberations to the hard righters of the Goldwater Convention.

The Right would not be so beleaguered today, if its attack dogs hadn't given permission for all sorts of levellers to attack elites.

In the cultural chaos of our post-hegemonic world, media forces , once unleashed, wander as they will.

When most of the world's elites are right wingers, any sort of levelling talk is like speaking of rope in a house of a man about to be hung...

Brian McNair's world of "Cultural Chaos" : amateur nova scotia whale blowing rainbow out-virals Canada's official slicks

Over half a million sets of eyeballs and still going strong.

Sean Rowley's 22 seconds of amateur video of a Digby Neck , NovaScotia whale gaily blowing a rainbow at a passing boat of tourists was viewed by more people in the world than any of the expensive "slicks" put up by Official Canada on Canada Day 2012.

Canada's right wing prime minister Harper (and the government he runs with an iron fist) is all about total control of the message.

But even Stephen Harper with all the power, prestige and money behind him couldn't control the message that actual people on an actual globe took away about Canada on July 1st, Canada's national holiday.

Harper would prefer that when the world thought about Canada, it thought first and foremost about Tar - MegaTar Projects in Alberta, his home province.

In BC, another strand of Official Canada - the powerful right wing Fraser Institute, voted one of the top thirty think tanks ( out of over 6500) in the world, also puts out slick videos and runs its own mini tv network.

But its slick pro-megaproject videos can not draw flies anytime - let alone on Canada Day.

Another part of Official Canada is the NDP, the Official Opposition federally and a strong presence provincially, where it runs several provinces.

The Dexter NDP government in Nova Scotia , which proudly bills itself as "democratic socialist", is most proud of its many, many megaprojects: it will gladly give taxpayers money to almost anything ---- just as long as the proposal is big enough.

In the language of media theory, the Nova Scotia NDP can't handle a news story about "slow continuous murder" or "slow continuous growth".

But promise it hundreds or thousands of jobs, in the very short term , all in one location and it will take that over any alternative plan that might produce more jobs, jobs that last forever, but developing over a longer time span and spread geographically over a much larger area.

Official Canada - from Official Left to Official Right, can be summed up in one word: Megaprojects.

Rowley's amateur video by contrast is all about modesty.

Short, unedited, shakey, not promoted at all (to my personal despair !) : a small whale and a smaller rainbow.

So why did the rest of the world like it so much ( and how did they ever find it in the first place, when it was so un-promoted ?)

Perhaps because the world chooses to see past the Official Canada Bluster produced by the PR firm of Harper-Fraser-Dexter.

They have met Canadians and Americans and Britons and Australians and they find Canucks, overall, more low key than their other fellow Anglos.

This is the sort of thing that Brian McNair's 2006 book, Cultural Theory, predicted would happen --- the elites' Official Version would no longer be able to control the message, in part due to alternative media sites like YouTube and the blog-o-sphere.

Coming at it a trifle differently, I think it would have happened anyway, with or without the rise of the internet : the lost of faith in anything and everything elites hand us, I believe, came as a result of the collapse of Modern Hegemony since the events of 1945.

But I feel we can agree that a post-hegemonic world is a chaotic world, messaging-wise ....

Global media technology pointless - without truly global CONTENT

Brian McNair ( Cultural Chaos : journalism, news and power in a globalised world), Routledge 2006, has a powerful new theory to explain what is happening to traditional media and traditional "sources" in the 21st century ,under the impact of new media technology.

But is new globalizing technology enough, in and of itself, to dramatically change the way we find out about what is new - and from whom ?

A forest fire burns a hectare of woods in southernmost Argentina, one of 10,000 forest fires that break out every day, year around, in the world.

Thanks to new media technology, an Argentine blogger in a small village in this remote province of the country posts a story and her photos and videos, online, for the whole world to see.

Potentially. Or maybe not - should we care - can we care - can we handle one million new breaking stories a day,every day, and still find time for work, sleep and family ?

Definitely not.

But lets do back almost 60 years, to the old days of pre-Brian McNair media technology.

Our stodgy old local daily, after a delay of about a day, splashes a headline on top of Page One and you definitely do read it.

Its from a place even more remote than the forested tip of southern Argentina - some uninhabited tiny atoll somewhere in the vastness of the mid Pacific.

But the content grabs you right where it really hurts, in your heart:

"Deadly H-Bomb Test Fallout will soon Poison the Food of Every Child in the World"

The headline could have been a little different, maybe from a time period 10 years later:

" BOAC 707 jet carried Highly Infectious Plague to World Capitols, before Alerted Authorities sealed off Hong Kong from rest of World "

Starting in the years after 1945, our world changed fundamentally, as it became apparent that events in one remote corner of the world could almost instantly destroy our own little corner of the world.

ICBMs and H-Bombs did that for traditional warfare, while the mass use of jet travel did the same for traditional plagues.

Destruction may not have changed in its absolute quantity but in terms of its effective quantity, it definitely had.

 For while modern (media) technology allows us to reduce the impact of hurricanes thanks to prompt warnings, modern (transportation) technology has increased the virulence of war and plague - leaving us no time to seek shelter or prepare quarantines.

Stories of Nuclear War and jet-borne plagues are still with us and are still excellent examples of news stories that are global in their content, because they discuss events that are truly global in impact.

I - naturally - wish to add a third : the biggest single news story of this century. We call it global warming or global climate change, but that is the tip of the iceberg  in thinking of it as a newspeg, for the following unique reason.

A plague that originates only in Hong Kong but affects us all is a smaller story than a story that affects us all (in terms of living or dying) but is caused by the individual decisions of all 6.7 billion of us.

We have had stories before that affected all the world ---- what is truly new is that this story's newsmaker is ALSO all of us.

We need a new post-McNair theory to handle this one....