I’m so sick of TV pundits trying to tell me what’s gonna happen next. What Obama’s gonna do if. What McCain has to do when. How the market is going to react if.
They even try to tell me future news about myself: “You won’t believe what an unnamed top adviser to John McCain said about Sarah Palin.”
Sheesh, I remember when the news used to be about things that had actually already happened. I guess it’s the stress of the 24/7 news cycle that’s caused this big flip- flop. At least that’s what Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan might say.
In Laws Of Media, published posthumously in 1988, he advanced four propositions. One of these held that any medium when pushed to its extreme begins to work in reverse.
These are extreme times, and reverse mobility is everywhere. Perhaps that was what Newsweek was implying when a recent cover featured the back of Barack Obama’s head.
Welcome to Bizarro World, where the single-mother-raised working-class black guy is decried as an “elitist,” while the lock-step well-branded military man is a “maverick.”
Indeed, no one embodies the backward zeitgeist so much as the erratic McCain. He’s so bedevilled by the spirit of constant reversal, he can’t go in one direction more than a minute or two. Hence, those wandering zigzags in the debates. And then there’s Sarah Palin.
A less extreme country like our own tends to be a little behind the curve on the new backwardness. But Harper shows every sign of catching up. In true backwards style I predict his minority government will rule as though it were a majority. Moonwalking, anyone?
The arena where reversal is most evident is the new backlash economy. The Dow Jones plummets, rebounds and plummets again like a bi-polar moth torn between two flames.
Suddenly, almost every government in the global free market system is buying its way into a new socialism, virtually nationalizing its banks and other assets.
Debts once acquired through borrowing are now bought and sold like gold itself.
Behold those arch neo-cons scrambling to get the government to guarantee mortgages for the poor while top Wall Street CEOs beam out from Anderson Cooper’s most-wanted list like culprits already in the stocks.
But reversal doesn’t have to be all negative. Some things, like climate change or world poverty, for instance, could use a bit of a turnaround.
I mean, for 200 years the U.S. has been led by an unbroken stream of white males. The inspiration of an Obama presidency might be extremely well timed. Sometimes reversing a course of action just means finally going forward.
Robert Priest’s new book of poems, Reading The Bible Backwards (misFit), is in stores.
news@nowtoronto.com
