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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 04, 2004
Alpha Male Ad
I was reading Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising last night, which is a compelling argument for the existence of various psychological circuits imprinted upon our subconscious brains: the bio-survival circuit, the territorial circuit, the semantic circuit, and so on. All very familiar to Freudians and Jungians, but Wilson runs with the idea like an intellectual sprinter. Politics, he says, is a game of domination by and over the vast majority of us who are strongly hard-wired to see reality as a territorial, hierarchical, patriotic affair:
Why did Adlai Stevenson lose to Eisenhower, George McGovern to Nixon? Stevenson, McGovern and other darlings of the intelligentsia were speaking to the third [semantic] circuit, which is not very highly developed in most domesticated primates just yet. Eisenhower in his fatherly way and Nixon in his bullying Big Brother way knew just how to push the right second circuit emotional-territorial buttons to get a mob of primates to follow them. They were genetically-programmed alpha males, in ethological terms.
So this was uppermost in my mind this morning, when I read about Bush's first big TV ad of the campaign. It features images from 9/11 merging with pictures of children. The voice-over drones inanely about "freedom, faith, families and sacrifice." From a semantic perspective, it's a mess. The New York Times dissected the ad under its usual headings, and under "accuracy", it wrote – and it was the first time I've ever seen this – "this ad makes no verifiable claims." From a media perspective, it's a liability – drawing fire from the firefighters and families of 9/11 victims, who are outraged that Bush would wrap himself in those pictures so shamelessly.
It would take an idiot not to predict such a reaction, and I have no doubt Karl Rove expected it. The ad went out regardless because of its supposed psychological impact on the masses who rarely pay close attention to the news. We got hurt, it says, and Bush protected us. He's the alpha male of this tribe. You could hardly make a more base appeal to the emotional-territorial circuit if you tried.
But even if we look at the ad as pure subconscious emotional propaganda, does it work? I don't feel it does. This is 3/4/04, not 9/11/01. The shock of the attacks has faded, and you can't get it back for 30 seconds of wishing. Even for the masses who don't pay attention to the news, Bush has a cloud of unresolved emotional questions hanging over him. Is he really such a safe pair of hands? Were his war priorities skewed the wrong way? Is he ruled by neocons? Is the Constitution under attack? What about our jobs disappearing overseas?
True alpha males don't simply ignore the questions. Then they appear aloof, out of touch (as Bush is, given the fact that he only gets news from his advisers). If they simply harp on the same theme they've been singing for two and a half years, they begin to look desperate. The second-circuit subconscious starts to cast around for other larger-than-life alpha males. A tall, rich war hero would fit the territorial bill very nicely – just as long as he engages our emotions and not just our semantic circuits.
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