Word: mcluhanized
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...collision of George Bush and Dan Rather. The two hurled angry clumps of words, and their clumps broke and powdered against each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking off the set of the CBS Evening News, the anchorman looked...
...other celebrities, recited in three seconds of network time in September. (In deference to his dignity, Nixon was spared the customary dousing with a bucket of water.) The Rolling Stones snarled about the Street Fighting Man. Never before had an annus mirabilis transpired before the television cameras in Marshall McLuhan's global village: the drama played to a capacity house, the audience of mankind...
...Chicago policemen as big as beer trucks thundering through tear-gas- poisoned air and clubbing with nightsticks. The answering, taunting obscenities and rage, and after that the McLuhan-wise chorus from those being clubbed: "The whole world is watching!" Then, through the death stench of the Chicago stockyards, inside the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff on the podium denouncing the "gestapo tactics" of the police, and down on the floor, in the Illinois delegation, Mayor Richard Daley, face contorted, screaming at Ribicoff. TV's nation of lip-readers & thought they saw Daley emit the words...
...transfixed, yet ashamed, as personal dignity gives way to political desperation and hard-won respect is replaced by ribald laughter. It is an ugly spectacle, part Greek tragedy and part game-show television. Character becomes fate as hubris is defined anew. Yet the rituals of humiliation are straight Marshall McLuhan; the medium is the message as the cornered politician endures the prescribed sequence of televised statements, beginning with a tight-lipped acknowledgment of errors in judgment and ending with defiant surrender. So the political process is purified yet again, another heretic is hounded from public life. Some...
...Reagan know on that teary night last November when, with old friends, he toasted "the last campaign" that the big one still lay ahead. That is so because the Soviet Union in its clumsy but inexorable way found that it was living in the "global village." That is Marshall McLuhan's term for a world so saturated with media that any significant act by anyone, anywhere, good or bad, is seen, reported and gossiped about. The Soviets stumbled from behind the Iron Curtain to face the cameras when they were clobbered on the world's tubes after bombing Afghan villages...