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there's a way to link up the recurrence of the old conservative myths about poverty and the content of mccain's adverts--they speak to a desire for simplified images of a simplified world at the center of how conservative ideology operates. the desire for simplicity apparently overwhelms the need to data---it's about a kind of intuitive resonance, the appeal, and not about an actual description of the world--and this resonance seems to me to be about producing an illusion of controllability (on social questions) and its reverse in victimization (on matters like taxation). if you put these together and think about the image that is produced, it is of the impotent authoritarian martyr----this is of a piece with market ideology to the extent that "free markets" are understood to be guided by some invisible hand, which is apparently a moral agent, such that the economically dominant are possessed of more inward virtue than are the less dominant---which loops back into the stereotypes concerning poverty.
all fine tuned through demographic research on radio and television audiences.
there's an assumption of spectatorship in all this as well, so that the impotent authoritarian/martyr is explicitly a projection that enables the other projections, with the projector sitting in a chair somewhere, listening to the radio like the old days of the 40s, making up faces for the shadow, or watching shit blow up on television while the voice over informs of the "real meaning"....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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