Fox News as genre fiction
Today some ratfucker turned on Fox News at work. Psychically, I feel like I've been beaten with a frying pan. Not because it's uniquely awful, but because it's perhaps uniquely brazen, uniquely shiny, uniquely showmanlike.
For example, a big part of the program's visual identity today was that Trump's big plan is called "Operation Epic Fury". Do I lose the game if I say that this sounds like a Power Rangers series, or a movie you'd find in the big bin at Walmart? I think so. Fox News turns toward Iran: "It's stupid at this point to believe in the sanctity of life; you are atoms and dust as is everyone you know; you know as well as I do that this was arbitrary; conduct yourself accordingly, because we sure will, we sure will, we sure will, we sure will." Fox News turns to us: "This is actually called the Super Cool Warrior's Rage."
I had a joke book once that asked "Are you aware that you're stupid? Answer yes or no only". This is the same kind of logical fork. What is Operation Epic Fury? Answer "noble" or "cringe" only.
It's strange imagining someone enjoy this. Like, if you shipped the same formal factors with something politically palatable to me, I think I'd still be overcome with a sense of manure being shoveled into my stomach. Maybe that's wishful thinking, but here's the thing: in addition to the disgust response, I have a strong sense of secondhand emasculation for the intended audience. I think that comes from the strange repetitions, the awful timbre, the obnoxious style guide ("shah" becomes "Supreme Leader", for example). And what really blossomed the seed of misanthropy was the ad breaks.
There was an ad for Health Supplements For Men. This is a subtle nod that the audience constructs intricate rituals to allow themselves to fear death.
There was an ad for gold. This is a subtle nod that the audience craves stability, that even paper money is too fickle, not abstracted enough from barter and therefore barbarism.
There was an ad for pills promising to enhance one's brain. I'm not going to take the low-hanging fruit (especially because those pills were probably a scam).
My favorite was an ad for collared shirts. The spokesperson was wearing blue. He was, literally, selling the feeling of having a blue collar.
Again, I hear awful bullshit all the time; what's distressing me here is the glossiness of it all, the clearheadedness. They had an interstitial graphic ready to go with "THE US AND ISRAEL VS IRAN", complete with oversaturated flags. It was animated, but also stock-feeling. This gave me the sense that the engine that produced this sheer quantity of propaganda was visible, that its face was hovering over the waters. Given that everybody wants to back the winning side, perhaps that's part of the appeal.
But by "engine" I don't mean "conspiracy". Fox News presumably did not highlight the possibility of retaliation specifically to warm up my amygdala for the home security commercial. The flies simply congregate around the ice cream machine that drips the fastest. I get the sense that before I was born, this sort of scandal felt more like a slow burn, more clandestine, but obviously the world's flattened or whatever and the pipeline got more efficient.
In What Is A World?, rhetorician Pheng Cheah writes that the purpose of literary genre is to accelerate the pipeline from brainstorm to being taken off the bookshelf. That word "accelerate" isn't a metaphor; he literally means that the rate of creation is getting faster. For example, if everyone knows what a "vampire story" is, that kind of artifact is easier to write, easier to get on a shelf, and easier to pick up off a shelf.
Undeniably, Fox News is making genre fiction. And now, it feels like seconds between flattening a building and the headline "USA and Israel pound Iran". (I remember the exact words because that word "pound", with its connotations of sexual assault, is an insane pull.) There is no shortage of technologies (mechanical and social) that will no doubt make this process even faster; we could list them, dear reader, for a long time. If the widgets were good, accelerating widgets would be a good thing. But they're not— and the machine, crucially, needs mass death as an input. And this machine just keeps humming along, every night, even when I'm not watching.