The Age of Spectacle, part 25
Chapter 6: “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, part 1
No introductory foreplay this time save for one minor erratum note: In the two-part essay “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?” from October 2, in a footnote I attributed authorship of a key line in the 1948 prayer for the State of Israel to Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Kook inspired that line, no doubt, in the prayer itself written by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog with a little help, apparently, from Shai Agnon. Whether Herzog lifted the key line from an earlier source written or spoken by Rav Kook, who died in September 1935, I’m still trying to determine. Either way, it’s not germane to The Raspberry Patch’s main interest looking ahead, which is The Age of Spectacle project.
Now on to Part II, “Emerging Picture,” of The Age of Spectacle (see the expanded outline at the end of the post for reference as to where we are amid the whole project):
Chapter 6: “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, part 1
“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays. . .of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship, and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.”
--Simon Sebag Montefiore
Three underturtles, one deeper underturtle, and what taken all together they suggest about regression to mythic consciousness have supplied what we need to know in preparation to grasp the rise of an Age of Spectacle. But we need to be precise about spectacle as a cognitive phenomenon in order for the full import of the argument being made here to come clear.[1] Chapter 6 offers definitions and examples from the social and political worlds, and delves a bit into the biochemical basis for those definitions and examples; chapter 7 then provides a deeper neuroscience context for what we observe in those worlds.
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events
We mean spectacle not as relatively rare splotches of escapist magic in otherwise workaday lives, as has been its niche for millennia. We mean it as a cognitive default setting that has become so ubiquitous as to have become a habituated mental frame for a great many of us.
For the purpose at hand, a spectacle is best defined as an attention-arresting display that depends for achieving its intended effect on the sudden perception of the improbable in the target. To work it must evoke what some cognitive psychologists have called an astounding complex. We do not mean by that special effects that induce perceptions we know are fabricated, but rather what used to make circus freak shows so captivating: displays that induce a “wow, you don’t see that every day” reaction. Does that calf really have two heads, or this is a fabricated illusion of some sort?
This is the difference between the Death Star exploding on the one hand and some of the fare on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens on the other. We know there is no Death Star and it cannot explode because it doesn’t exist. But the latter sometimes qualifies as a high-technified version of the old two-headed cow carnival attraction. Typical fare in Ripley’s Believe It or Not copy in the comics held an historical position between the cow directly witnessed at the carnival fair and Ancient Aliens presented as a series of mediated images on a screen; you didn’t just see Ripley’s fare, despite the abundance of drawn illustrations, but you had copy, modest as it was, to read as well.
The key to all kinds of astounding complexes is that they structure uncertainty in such a way that only two possibilities are perceived in the moment of our arrested attention: It’s either entirely A or it is entirely not-A, and no third or in-between possibility can exist. The longer the uncertainty dilemma lasts, the more engrossing and alluring the astonishment, so the less clear any extant contextual evidence necessary to resolve the uncertainty quickly is, the better from the perspective of the circus master who wishes to entertain for the sake of future ticket sales……or the political manipulator who plots to exploit and manipulate the momentarily stunned viewer.
The stark “A” or “not-A” nature of spectacle also defines several other well-known phenomena. Indeed, a list is much easier to start than it is to stop. The categories include all sports with an active defense, where skill in play, both individually and as a team, is based on getting the opposition to think that “A” is about to happen with the ball when “not-A” is in fact in store. Similarly, it includes an old Wham-O toy called a Superball, whose ingredients enabled the bouncy little thing to counterspin and go where you didn’t think it could. It was astounding; kids bought it by the millions. President Johnson gave Superballs away as gifts.
Spectacle as we define it also inhabits all artistic realms where presentational strategies include preplanned “wow” moments for the viewer, whether in music, theater, or dance. It is at the base of all tall-tale humor, as well, when the punchline forces a wholesale reevaluation of what has been going on, creating a momentary astounding complex. It includes selective kinds of fantasy fiction whether presented orally in face-to-face settings, in books, over the radio, or via screens. One must become engrossed in any fictive scripting to fully enjoy it, so we use cognitive framing brackets to suspend disbelief for the duration of the drama. But some kinds of fiction display such verisimilitude to the lebenswelt that they dwell in limbo between the obviously unreal and the perhaps, possibly, real but just weird. Those boundary dwellers produce the astounding complexes of which we speak. They are aided in that ambition because spectacle shows up even in realms beyond culture, such as when nature supplies the raw material for an astounding “you don’t see that everyday” complex: tsunamis, major earthquakes and cyclones, and massive lightening-ignited wildfires; but also double rainbows, staggering sunrises and sunsets, and glistening snowscapes.
Above all for our purposes, astounding complexes inhere in technical events of the sort we near ceaselessly see on our screens large, medium, and small. Rapid scene cuts when the video takes our senses places our unaided bodies cannot go are the main form of technical events on screen. When we watch television, for example, our senses can take us from the street to the roof of a building across the street in less than a second; we cannot do that literally, and we did not evolve being able to do that except in dreamworlds and the childlike magical-efficacy worlds of free imagination. When we experience cognitive astounding complexes via reality-mimicking mediated images endorphin squirts spit from our endocrine systems despite the experience having become so common that we no longer even notice, let alone remark about it.[2]
Few of these realms seem directly relevant to politics, because they aren’t. But thanks to the cyberlution they are becoming relevant. These developments are not so slowly but surely conditioning us to expect and to want ever more thrilling “wow” experiences in our daily lives. It is worth our while to examine some of these cultural sets, moving from the seemingly anodyne and apolitical toward the political. Key patterns become clear in so doing.
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Probably the most obvious of these cultural sets are magic tricks and shows. From the great Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss was his birth name) to David Copperfield and thousands more masters of the trade, magic “works” on the target viewer for essentially the same reason the two-headed carnival cow worked before modern magic show performances were devised: It astounds. This stuff can’t be real, the viewer knows; this is “not-A.” But damn, it sure looks like “A.” The longer the uncertainly puts and keeps the viewer in cognitive limbo the better it works as entertainment spectacle.
Thousands of books in dozens of language exist on magic, most of them trash trying to persuade a gullible reader that magic is real. In this respect the lesser literature on magic has a lot in common with tarot readings, which work the same way, to wit: Wow, did that lightly mustached gypsy-looking lady really know all these things about my past and my dreams and mental state, or did I exude “tells” that clued her in so she could trick me? The same went for parlor séances popular in years past. More useful for our purposes, some literature on magic comes from magicians who became credentialed cognitive psychologists and, about as often, from cognitive psychologists who designed magic acts as a hobby or second job. Their observations on how astounding complexes work is valuable as well as often entertaining.
Alluring magic tricks have assumed several hybrid forms. For example, based on the observation that the “assessment games” at the heart of espionage, counter-espionage, and counter-counter-espionage also work in a binary A/not-A mode, some intelligence-related professions have been attracted to magic.[3] My one-time SAIS colleague John E. McLaughlin, a former CIA Deputy Director and Acting Director between George Tenet and Porter Goss, became a very talented magician. Another hybrid magic form captured on YouTube from the 2007 Montreal Comedy Festival, very different in nature, records a nightclub act, titled “Hanky Panky,” featuring Ursula Martinez performing sleights-of-hand with a disappearing and reappearing red handkerchief while doing a striptease. There seems to be no limit to human creativity, and marketing savvy.
Another phenomenon that fits the description, also very different in nature but in a way even more revealingly foundational (as we will soon see), concerns manufactured optical illusions. Some famous and readily recognizable ones ones include the Necker Cube, the Spinning Dancer, the Hermann Grid, and the Kanisza Triangle. These designs work as illusions because they create the same either/or, “A” or “not-A,” experience. It’s either a woman’s face or a vase but it can’t be both in any known real world, to cite perhaps the best-known example.
Most experts insist that the true reason optical illusions work remains unclear, but in at least one respect the cause is obvious. Optical illusions invariably involve sharply drawn symmetrical images laid on starkly contrasting black-and-white homogeneous two-dimensional planes. Nothing in nature matches those conditions, and the human brain evolved in nature. Optical illusions’ contrived perfect ambiguity strands the brain between interpretive possibilities without enough information for it to decide one way or the other. This is what evokes the “A”/not-A” phenomenon. The real mystery is why so few cognitive psychologists who study optical illusions recognize this.
Optical illusions, having taught us the critical importance of context for interpreting sensory input, suggest that the burgeoning reliance of most Americans on screen-borne mediated images rather than on direct experience in either the natural or social worlds has broadly undermined interpretive competence. We cannot so readily make up our minds between “it’s A” or “it’s not-A” because the cues from context have been flattened by a prior application of discounted reality. Whatever else they are, screens are two-dimensional, but reality is three-dimensional. Heavy reliance on mediated images and experience floods our sensory apparata with ersatz once-, twice-, or thrice-removed inputs. No wonder people have more trouble these days figuring out which way reality went.
A related cultural genre with an astounding complex at its core has to do with the more spectacular kind of con artist. Whether we invoke Victor Lustig, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Frank Abagnale, David Hampton or, more recently, Anna Delvey (Sorotkin), people are fascinated by such capers. They form the basis for books, films, and more. The key to the attraction lies within the very core of the psychological essence of spectacle: How did the con artist attract victims despite the unusual aspects of the story, and how did he or she keep evidence for resolving rising suspicions ambiguous enough to keep victims long on the leash despite their doubts? How did the con artist finally stumble and get caught? How did the victims feel and what did they say when the con fell through?
Aside from real con artists the same phenomenon is a popular subject as modeled for fiction. Joanna Harris’s The Lollipop Shoes, the 2007 sequel to her successful 1999 novel Chocolat, features an enigmatic character named Zozie who could have been the model for Anna Delvey. If Zozie was the model then “Inventing Anna,” a fictive dramady based on the Anna Delvey episode, is fiction based on reality based on fiction. There is more. So determined on fictive entertainment are some people that they write their own stories about others’ fictional characters for the internet, and sometimes write themselves into the action. A neologism had to be invented for this: fanfic, and it is already ensconced in several dictionaries. There is already fanfic based on “Inventing Anna,” so we are now deep into layers of regression.
Another example of the fictive con-artist genre is the 2003 film The Matchstick Men, based on a 2002 novel of the same name by Eric Garcia. Maybe fanfic exists on the character played by Nicholas Cage in the movie. The list of artistic renditions on the basic theme is very long because of the evident fascination so many people have with the real thing, including the real political thing, to which we will soon arrive.
Another real-life example, but one perfectly fit for a screenwriter to embellish and sell for the movie or television serial rights, is the Evans’ family extortion of $4.2 million in stolen money from a man, a chief financial officer for a Washington, D.C. construction company, whose lover fell for the cunning lies of an illiterate “psychic” named Gina Russell, who had (common-law) married into the Evans family at the age of 16. Evans’ family matriarch Candy Evans manipulated Russell as well as her husband and three sons, who in turn manipulated a clueless 25-year old named Hollie Nadel, who in turn manipulated a married man who fell for her named Daniel Zancan, who in turn stole from his company. “Whistle Down the Wind Extortion” seems like a good name for the film.
The con and the cunning continued, doubling over itself, when the “psychic” was later tagged in court as the mastermind of the plot, drawing ten years in Federal prison, when in fact Evans’ family matriarch Candy Evans was behind it all, as clearly demonstrated by the FBI investigation and copious Justice Department documentation.[4] Consider: Russell, who never attended school and can neither read not write, was forced by her parents to marry her third cousin Robert Evans when she was 16 years old, after which she bore four children in quick succession. Not likely raw material for a mastermind. Mrs. Evans, meanwhile, made Russell and Hollie Nadel, her mark turned prostitute and con-artist herself, get married in a New York civil ceremony so they could not testify against once another. With the FBI on her trail, Evans also made the two write out, sign, and notarize a letter claiming that Evans, her husband, and her three sons were innocent of any wrongdoing. Evans coached Russell and Nadel on how to lie to the FBI.
It gets even weirder. As Gina Russell began her 10-year sentence, it looked like Mrs. Evans might at most be jailed for a year and a day, her lawyer having somehow convinced enough people that she was hardly more than a by-stander in all this. Moreover, her sentencing happened more than two years ago, but the original judge in the case, Emmet Sullivan, allowed her to walk around free all this time for no obvious reason. Did Sullivan take a bribe, perhaps, and collude with Evans to throw Gina under the bus? Was he yet another manipulated victim of the sly Ms. Evans?
Nadel, meanwhile, has subsequently passed herself off as a victim of human trafficking, founded an organization based on her experience, raised money for it, testified before Congress, and also launched a career as a fashion and set-design expert. While Nadel was re-inventing herself, Russell was not. In the interim between closing down the extortion scam in 2017 and sentencing in 2022, Russell went to Los Angeles where she played psychic again and scammed nearly $200,000 off victims. Not one indictment related to any of that has been issued, and the money is not accounted for. Also during the interim period, according to the July 27, 2024 Washington Post account of the story, the Evans family raised $925,000 from “friends,” not named and the sum not explained.
Everything about this caper is bizarre, and at least half a dozen major data points remain unexplained. Save for very good looks, Anna Delvey Sorokin has got nothing on Candy Evans, Gina Russell, and Hollie Nadel. It really is perfect for a contemporary American television series. It still has more mysteries attached to it than a pregnant sow has teats. I can’t wait to see it; that’s how alluring cons can be.
Fakers, Frauds with Halos, and Magnificos
We come at last to politics, or at least to its shallower edge. The evanescent fascination with George Santos—remember him?—fanned to blue flames by the clickbait media, turned on the same dynamic. Politics and political journalism know their share of fakers and frauds, both in office and around it. Household names from Joe Biden to Martin Luther King, Jr. committed plagiarism and perhaps worse in their climbing days. The 2007 Stephen Glass scandal at The New Republic is another such episode that still vibrates in many memories. But George Santos, or whoever the lying turd claiming that name really is, established a contemporary class of its own: He emerged on the scene as living, breathing spectacle, the perfect con artist for an Age of Spectacle. Rather like Donald Trump, he is “such a liar that not even the opposite of what he says is true”—as Ferenc Molnár put it many years ago.[5]
Santos did not merely pad or exaggerate his resume; he conjured it in its entirety out of thin air. He was entirely “not-A” that looked like “A” to way too many people. As described below, Santos “did a Ripley” on the Republican Party, such as it is, and on the electorate of New York’s 3rd congressional district. No one has ever quite so brazenly bullshat his way into a congressional seat. He was far and away the best two-headed carnival cow of the political moment when the 118th Congress tried to find its seats, but of course no previous carnival cow made it to Congress. Why now does a thing like that happen? Perhaps because the cyberlution’s deranging of so many Americans’ grip on reality has eroded the capacity of many to parse the difference between fact and fantasy?
No doubt fictive scripts are now being imagined and written about Santos. We should expect a full-fledged documentary before long, complete with reports from the national loony bin that Santos is really Elvis’s son, or maybe the new Dallas Cowboys placekicker. It has become challenging to be a National Enquirer writer these days because it’s so hard to say anything newly outlandish that the MAGAts have not already pulled out of one orifice or another.
Then there are the celebrity political trolls of our time, who manufacture uncertainty of the “A/not-A” type to gain fame and fortune, and on the side to peddle their political biases. This is fraud with a halo, at least in the eyes of the fraudster. Where would Oliver Stone, with his wild adversary-culture tales about the JFK assassination, be without the allure of spectacle and the technology of film to make the implausible seem evidently true to the clueless?
Even closer to politics are the aforementioned assessment games integral to intelligence work espionage and counterespionage—trickster agents and double agents—and of course to military tactics, as with making the Nazis think the Allied invasion would take place at someplace other than Normandy. In both great advantage lies in getting an adversary off balance by convincing him, in these cases, that “not-A” is “A.”
Whatever the medium, from con artists to optical illusions back to carnival fare, the evocation of uncertainty, not certainty one way or the other, is the payoff point. Something similar applies, not coincidentally, to the reality-TV genre, which in turn seems to have taken a cue from World Wrestling Federation (WWF) fakery. Both are fake but less than fully scripted, so both can seem real because they are speckled with incidental spontaneity. This intermediate structure of fakery, too, is designed to evoke uncertainty about its ontological status; that’s the trick and the draw, and the appeal is one ultimately of spectacle.
It is no coincidence that, with American politics coming to resemble any given episode of the “Jerry Springer Show,” a reality-TV personality like Donald Trump should be able to do well politically. He was and remains just another in a long line of magnificos stretching all the way back to Renaissance Italy: wealthy eccentrics exuding oversized confidence and displaying conspicuous consumption in order to mesmerize, and then gull for the sake of profit and power, the astonished.[6]
Magnificos have always been about spectacle production, and the deceptions and manipulations that go with it. For Trump it showed early on with his engagements in WWF antics. Trump is a member of the WWF Hall of Fame thanks to his playing opposite “ringmaster” Vince McMahon, and participating in the “kayfabe” charade where the wrestling actors stayed in character outside the ring to embellish the fakery that WWF fare is at its core.[7] Abraham Riesman has speculated that Trump seems not only to have admired McMahon’s imaginative boldness in the production of spectacle, but may have been influenced by McMahon’s stealthy technique all the way to the White House, and since beyond. Jonathan Last agrees, interpreting Trump’s supposed meltdown before the National Association of Black Journalists conference on July 31, 2024 as very deliberate “cheap heat,” a WWF term of art that, in this case, worked as a way for Trump to regain mastery of the newscycle from Kamala Harris by saying the most attention-grabbing things he could think of about her, so as to steal her sudden thunder jujitsu-like.[8]
Riesman and Last have a point, albeit perhaps a bit exaggerated in Riesman’s locution: “There is no art form more intrinsically and blatantly American—in its casual violence, its bombastic braggadocio, its virulent jingoism, its populist defiance of respectability, and its intermittently awe-inspiring beauty—than professional wrestling.”[9] Awe-inspiring beauty? Well, maybe not; but WWF technique is truly one continuous two-headed carnival calf manufacturing device. It is the faux-sports mother of all Ripleys.
Wrestling is of course an old American pastime, as it was an English and Irish one reaching back into the mists of history. Even Abe Lincoln’s early fame was bound up with public fighting matches.[10] More to the point, we have all have heard the names of some of the magnificos in our national history: Huey Long above all, but also “Big Jim” Folsom in state politics; William Randolph Hearst and J.P. Morgan in media and banking, respectively; Col. Tom Parker as music impresario[11]; Al Sharpton in the sub-genre of Afro-American politics; and of course P.T. Barnum himself in entertainment. But at a time when wanting to be entertained towers over all other desires for most Americans, it is hardly any wonder that a bull market for magnificos has arisen. David Blankenhorn put it in historical perspective almost nine months before the November 2016 election,
We revere magnificoes because they entertain us with their grand pretensions and larger-than-life ways. They make big deals. They gamble daringly. They are permissive. They spend freely and consume lavishly. Viewing the builder’s code of self-restraint as dour and boring, magnificoes prefer to strut and swagger, brag and charm, display and self-promote. Often enough they are criminals or at least friendly with criminals—the mobsters who invented Las Vegas in the 1930s and 1940s and extended the concept to Havana in the 1950s and Atlantic City in the 1980s are possibly the most influential magnificoes in U.S. history.[12]
To Blankenhorn, Trump was just another case—a 21st-century mediaized case—of life, and political life, imitating bad art. So was Robert Maxwell in Britain and so lately, in a minor key punctuated with a lot of drugs, is Elon Musk. The magnifico parade never ends; could it be that the current technological environment aids and abets the lengthening of that parade? You think, maybe?
Projectionist Fraud and Contrafiction as a Way of Life
We come now to the contemporary political payoff point: The MAGA elite’s spectacalization of American politics is a formula very well described as “Doing a Ripley”—namely, as creating an “A” or “not-A” astounding complex for the purposes of tricking and exploiting others. George Santos aside, who after all was only parroting Trump’s successful modus operandi, let us now review some major and familiar examples of “Doing a Ripley” MAGA-style in recent years.
Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election and no massive fraud was responsible for Joe Biden’s victory. Not a shred of credible evidence exists to show otherwise, and Trump’s own Attorney General, the Senate Minority leader at the time, numerous judges some of whom were Trump appointees, and even more numerous state election officials have all testified, over and over again, to Trump’s willful mendacity turned in due course, it seems, to stubborn delusion. We even know from first-hand testimony quoting Trump’s own words that he knew “the steal” was a lie and proceeded with it anyway, as he proceeded with countless other supportive lies despite knowing that they, too, were lies.[13]
Note that this may differ from probably the majority of Trump’s voluminous falsehoods while in office: Delusion can turn falsehoods into truths in the head of the deluded, and that is not lying as any dictionary defines the term. To lie the liar must know that the falsehood is false and assert it anyway. It has never been entirely clear, however, the extent to which Trump’s lying has morphed into delusion. The lying, in its standard projectile form, would constitute an almost pure example of Nietzsche’s will to power—the total instrumentalization of truth for the sake of power. It would, except for the always-accompanying petty grifting that Trump seems unable to forego. It is hard to know what Nietzsche would have made of his will to power concept in the hands of a adult resembling a fulminating nine-year old brat.
More important than the mendacity itself is the basic structure that enables “Doing a Ripley” to succeed. The structure is best described as recursive, coming in two types: pre-emptive recursivity and post hoc recursivity.[14]
[1] I am aware of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, but little overlap exists between my definition and use of spectacle as a concept and Debord’s.
[2] We return to technical events in Chapter 9 for the purpose of projecting future technological impacts, notably artificial intelligence, on the human sensory apparatus.
[3] On the structure of an “assessment game” see Erving Goffman’s too-neglected book Strategic Interaction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).
[4] See Tom Jackman, “’Psychic,’ family of extortionists scam Md. Man out of $4.2M,” Washington Post, July 27, 2024, p. B1. For more detail see “New York Couple Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges in $4 Million Extortion Scheme,” Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, September 23, 2020.
[5] Molnár quoted in Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 232. Molnár may have acquired his quip from Naftali of Rotchitz, who said: “Not only is what he says untrue but even the opposite of what he says is untrue.” Quote translated from the Hebrew original in Shmuel Avigdor Ha-Cohen, Touching Heaven, Touching Earth (Sadan, 1976), p. 78.
[6] The literarily inclined will note that the “star,” so to speak, of Ben Jonson’s 1606 play “Volpone” is described as a Venetian magnifico. It is clear from Jonson’s use of the term “magnifico” that it was already familiar to the audience; when it first showed up in English as a character type is a mystery—to me, at least.
[7] A personal aside: Back in the 1950s my father used to take me a few times a year to Capitol Arena in Washington to see live “professional wrestling.” I was young but through the smoke-filled room I could see that while some spectators believed that what they were seeing was real, most appreciated it as a mash-up of vaudeville, carnival, burlesque, and kid-play silliness. I remember once seeing a small plastic viol that had been used to hold simulated blood spilled in the ring come flying over the ropes in our direction. My father pointed it out, told me what it was, and laughed uproariously. The audience was usually about 75-80 percent male. The whole business taught me what happens to the average male IQ when collected in a crowd.
[8] Last, “Donald Trumps’ Cheap Heat,” The Bulwark, August 1, 2024.
[9] For details see Abraham Riesman, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America (Atria, 2023).
[10] See Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (Simon & Shuster, 1957), pp. 278-79.
[11] Played by Tom Hanks in the 2022 film “Elvis.” So that would be an example of art imitating reality imitating art. No wonder some people think they need to be on drugs to see the world as it really is.
[12] Blankenhorn, “Trumps’ America,” The American Interest, February 10, 2016.
[13] We knew this long before Jack Smith let loose his 165-page cannon on October 2, 2024, but now we know it even better.
[14] I started out calling the general methodology of pre-emptive and post hoc recursivity the “I know you are but what am I?” ploy, named after the classic schoolyard come-back in a typical episode of competitive teen and pre-teen taunting. I did this partly because it fits the nine-year old mental age of Donald Trump. The actual reason, however, will be immediately apparent to those familiar with it: That single snarky question stunts via the artifice of inversion any conversation that the taunted cannot win just by blowing the inverted dust of nonsense into the air. It’s a cheap and quick way to “get even” with the taunter so that one can walk away and do something else. The taunter can only continue his dominance by escalating the encounter to fisticuffs, which is relatively rare—or used to be. The “I know you are but what am I?” defensive taunt, however, is narrowly American and it has aged, so many readers will not be familiar with it. Having laid out the nature of designed astounding complexes using the Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’ metaphor, to “Do a Ripley” seems a preferable shorthand.
***
The Age of Spectacle: How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
The Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
A Spectocracy, If We Can Keep It
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
The Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and the Changing Image of Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story, a First Telling
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Word Magic Redux
Progress as Dirty Word, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Fakery Cubed: Chat Crap
4. Cyber-Orality Rising: Underturtle III, Continued
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Democracy as Drama
Where Did the News Go?
Optimists No More
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy: An Under-Underturtle
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Immaturity, Myth, and Magic
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers, Frauds With Halos, and Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Trump: Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle
Glancing
Seeing the Light
Eye-to-Eye
Surfing Your Brainwaves
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
Structural Shadows
Surfing a New Wave
Toward Some Informed Speculations
Suffer the Children
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
Racialized Cognitive Gluttony
Ripleys on the Left
From Left to Right and Back Again
Saints and Cynics: The Root Commonalities of Illiberalism
Gratuitous Harm in Black and White
The Touching of the Extremes
Spectacle Gluttony
The Wrongness of the Right
The Root Beer Syndrome
And Now More Sex
Beyond Feminism
The Irony of Leveling
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
The Imperfect Perfect
Vive la Difference?
Human Nature
9. Spectacle and the American Future
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Astounding Complexes from TV to Smartphones
Up from the Television Age
The Crux
Cognitive Illusions
Another Shadow Effect
Myth as Model
The AI Spectre
A Sobering Coda
10: Epilogue: What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
A Few National Security Implications
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?
Acknowledgments