“Because as the saying goes: ‘IF YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY, SAY IT TO MY FACE!’ ”
Emergency! We have one hundred days to make sure a Black woman prevents fascist dictatorship. (There’s a lot more reasons why to vote FOR, but let’s just strip it down to the most basic basic reason why to struggle hard.)
I’m good at reading and writing and I teach many classes on propaganda. When you learn about it in detail, you of course learn how to make some yourself. You can identify it. You can resist it. And you can also make it.
What I’m posting here in this ongoing essay will with any luck be something you can clip and memorize.
The big picture: the left spends much too much time talking to the front of the brain. This is the mistake the Communist Party made with Hitler. They were baffled why workers would support him, and didn’t even team up with the social democrats and centrists to defeat him.
The right wastes no time talking to the back of the brain. Just think of an ad. Those things stick in your head. Even if you hate them. Even if you despise all ads. Even if you eschew all products. Adbusters is a journal uncannily made of ads against ads by people who oppose the very idea of ads. This is what we call irony in the trade.
The front of the brain processes 50 bits of information per second.
The back of the brain processes 50 billion bits of information per second.
So we just have to make ads that are five times better than theirs, right? And this would be easy because our ideas are good and true and based on thought.
But many on the left have decided that talking sexy to the back of the brain is implicitly right wing. So on we plod. And look where we’ve ended up.
Listen up and listen good: you can understand and make PR. It’s not even hard.
To do so, you will need not just ideas, but you’ll need to understand rhythm, rhyme, syntax. Just a little bit. The basic texture of language. Imagery: how sentences evoke sensual things. You can do it. Listen to one of my classes on my blog or on my Patreon. I’m good at it. No I am. Talking to the back of the brain involves talking to the part of you that moves, dances, walks, chews.
I’m so into the fact that Kamala dances, a lot, in public, and that she really gets music. We aren’t very musical here on the left. If we are white. A little bit. Stereolab were cool. But I’m talking about getting it. Vibing to it.
All right, Punk is an exception. And Acid House. Oh, forget it.
What you are going to learn is a psychic technique I call “return to sender.” You return the aggression of the message to the addressee of that message. You are signaling this message doesn’t really hurt you. You are also slightly or a lot blowing their mind. They were expecting bluster. They were expecting your head to explode. They were expecting you to waste your time debating.
What we are up to here is what in psychoanalysis is called paradoxical joining. You’re not attacking. You’re returning the energy. With a big smile that might be a menacing grin. How can they know? You’ve just posted a little riff in quotation marks. Don’t return ever with a scowl or a frown. Notice how Kamala’s big smile also suggests a smirk? That is also a great sign. Someone who can dance and who can smirk (a dancing smile, doing the twist)? Yeah.
I’m going to prove I’m good at this and educate you about Kamala’s impeccable musical taste at the same time. She loves this tune: Roy Ayers’s masterpiece, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” Actually this is the benchmark best piece of environmental art ever, but more on that later.
The entire tune, from the notes to the instruments to the lyrics to the singing, is about something that is so powerfully ambiguous you almost can't see it, like a really tight moire pattern. Through this technique, Ayers implants a thought deep, deep in the back of your brain.
While the front of your brain is trying to sort out the deep ambiguity, the song goes to work.
“Everybody Loves the Sunshine” pulls off something incredibly special. It manages not only to be double-sided, but double-sided AND totally unitary at the same time. It’s just about hanging out in the lovely sunshine (“Just bees and things and flowers”), relaxed as anything, you don’t even need to name the “things.” It’s just one riff, not a complex melody with an arc. The riff is repeated like a mantra, with some supporting structures. One thing, like the sun. Think of how the sun is such a powerful image of one God. One note, high on the string synth all the way through. Like really slow motion disco.
And yet.
Ayers plays the vibraphone. But where is it?
Everywhere. Everywhere and nowhere.
Listen to the little riff that absolutely makes this tune. It’s that uncanny little pair of three notes the piano plays: many versions use vibes there and I’m sure this was intentional. They’re there, but they’re not there. Ubiquitous one might say, in their very absence. The cool swimming pool of the vibraphone is everywhere in its absence…the uncanniness is bathed in the (absent) vibe sound…
The vibraphone is the wettest of all the mallet instruments. It’s a progression from clavichord through harpsichord through piano … xylophone … kalimba … glockenspiel… vibraphone. Each note is practically a huge oblong swimming pool of sound on a scorching day. Each note is a splash.
But the vibraphone isn’t there.
Ayers replaces the vibes with a very dry piano. Uncanny, no? The sound of the bone, the ivory indeed…in a way this song is an encounter with DEATH, smirking at you at 45 degrees to the picture plane on the cover.
Listen to those piano triads. They play notes that aren’t quite in the main key of the song. This is called bitonality. Spirituality is easy to evoke when you do this. Many an Acid House tune was accidentally of deliberately bitonal to similar effect. Notice how the bitonality suggests an incredible, mystical COOLNESS inside of the relentless heat of the static tune about the heat.
This all makes you go, “There MUST be something I’m missing. This song COULDN’T be that simple…could it?” Genius.
Notice how Roy Ayers’s smile on the album art is rotated 45 degrees to the picture plane to become a smirk. And he’s looking into another dimension than the ones you can see. At what?
It’s a Holbein death’s head smirk, isn’t it (below), when you rotate it 45 degrees to the picture plane. Looking into another dimension than you can see. From the realm of death. Sunshine and death.
The singing line of the main phrase reproduces the “but it’s plain to see” emphasis, as if saying "what could be wrong with a lovely bit of sunshine?" What could be wrong? There’s a little lemony bit of negativity in there like the lemon-squeezy keyboard sound…something sharp and acidic. What could you possibly have against sunshine? The little dip at the end of the line almost perfectly captures the innocence…but is it insistence…The menacing grin of punk at dub speed ...
Indeed. What's not to like about a vast silent torrent of antiracism...Set the controls for the heart of the Enlightenment…
I think you’ll find “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is a devastating, because remorselessly, relentlessly gentle, demolition of whiteness. With a huge smile…I mean, everybody loves the sunshine. What’s not to like? So devastating that Google has to censor the lyrics. “Folks get ’round” my ass.
This is going to be fun.
Okay, I’m going to let you figure out the rest of the tune by yourself.
For whom are you doing this counter-magic? Not the right wingers per se. For the audience. For the voters. We are the voters. We the people. You’re making absolutely sure that everyone behaves nicely in public.
It’s about time the left blew people’s minds. About time we used menacing grins. About time we talked to the back of the brain.
Play some relaxing music while you’re doing it. Oh I don’t know, how about this (Kamala: “one of my favorite albums of all time”)…
Part 1: Counter-Phrases
It’s overwhelming isn’t it? Yet another “DEI hire” comment in your feed. You need a boost. And you need to support Kamala. What to do? This.
You need to translate, in public, every time you hear or read a racist or misogynist or etc sentence. You need to create a sentence at least as pithy as the one that sucks. Even pithier. More punchy. Sassier.
Reinsert the implicit meaning. And return the aggressive format, unopened.
Don't argue. Don't comment. Just return to sender. Use quotation marks. Ideally find every instance you can. Set yourself a goal. Ten a day?
Let's start with
"DEI Hire":
"Every non-white hire is suspect."
See what you’re doing there? You’re saying their quiet bit out loud and returning it back to them, but as a quotation so that you’re not having to engage or argue or express anything at all.
If they reply you can always up the ante:
"Only white people should have good jobs."
2. "Never vote for a cop":
"Being left wing is criminal."
3. "They're just the same":
"I think it's okay if Trump wins."
“Kamala isn’t (really) Black.”
“I don’t want a Black person running the country.”
Part 2: Responding
Let’s start with whataboutism: “You’re not talking about x”
“I change the subject when I feel weak.”
But here’s the main point. You may have been having an argument/pseudo-argument/whatever up until this point. The point at which you bring out the quotation marks approach.
Once you’ve done it, disengage.
The point is not to be right. The point is to HAUNT THEM.
I did it twice today. Twice I got responses, “no, I disagree, this and that and you’re wrong.”
I won.
Whatever they say next, even if correct, is in your game space. You’ve taken over.
It’s what Kamala herself did. “Because as the saying goes [notice the quotation marks frame]: ‘IF YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY, SAY IT TO MY FACE!’ ” [massive grin]
Genius. Follow the leader.
Part 3: Frames
Seriously. Take it from a scholar of Romantic poetry. Always, ALWAYS put the message in the frame. Jedi mind trick.
No one has yet commented (correct me if I’m wrong) on how a lot of the power of Kamala’s statement comes from the fact that she’s NOT saying it, she’s QUOTING it.
You’ve volunteered for a psych experiment about perception and darkness or something. You’re in the waiting room hanging out. Someone passes and spills their coffee on you. You react.
THAT was the real experiment. They do it all the time. The frame is the “waiting room.” The quotation marks put what you say in that room.
Part of being “weird” and uncool is that you’re not very happy with being in a frame.
Cool is all about being … cool to be in a frame. It’s recursive that way.
Consider the cliche, wearing shades indoors. Well there’s a great historical reason for it in the story of cool: Black refusal to give an inch about the past (trauma, enslavement) to the dominators.
Dark glasses means you’re not looking. You’re the GAZE. The gaze and the look are too often confused.
You’re the sparkle on the teeth in the toothpaste ad. You’re the menacing grin.
You’re from the future. You’re showing your essence not your appearance. You’re withdrawn. You’re mystery.
YOU ARE THE FRAME. You’re wearing things that frame your eyes and blank them out. The content has become irrelevant. You’re FRAMING your eyes in the most radical way.
The onlooker IS IN YOUR FRAME.
The Stanford Prison experiment reduced psych evaluated grad students to Abu Ghraib torturers in three days, in part because the students being the guards wore mirror shades.
Don’t worry I’m going to come back here a lot and tell you some more.
The fun thing is, in this game, if you tell the enemy what you’re doing, it won’t spoil it. This essay for example. Survivor-of-sexual-abuse-and-more me is having fun with this, in the manner of James Bond:
“So, James…why did you come?” “I came here to kill you.”
See? Doesn’t spoil it. Quite the reverse. Meta makes it better.
So to all my nasty little future addressees out there, hi! I’m Tim. I’m your worst nightmare. I’m a woke white man working ever so hard for Kamala Harris, and I can’t wait to irritate you in public, without remorse and unrelentingly, until Election Day.
I’m really really good at reading and writing.
I might be lying about how long I’m gonna be doing this to you. Just telling you what I’m going to do is bugging you isn’t it? Don’t comment or I’ll be proved right.
Whatever you learn about this technique will be of no use to you whatsoever. That’s mostly because not-you are not-pod-people who just hit retweet: the banality of evil is that banality as such is where the evil lives. So go ahead and make nasty little counter-statements about our ideas. Oh wait, you’re just doing that already. That’s all you ever do. Fascism is made out of nasty little broken bits of the past.
And I just explained to everyone how to create and administer the antidote.
All I’m asking is for you to explain yourself nicely and politely. Until then I will keep on popping your tires in public. Oh, you mean to say that you can’t do that?
Be extremely careful how you comment on this.
I like your approach! Concise, to the point and with total disdain for the opponent, pulling their hidden messages out of the shadow of their double-speak.
this is sharp. is it too sharp for our already threadbare social fabric? in my limited experience, calling people out for hypocrisy is best at shutting them shut up, forcing a retreat to their echo chamber for the validation and post-justification of their intolerance. it rarely rattles any deep seated beliefs or ignorance… unless the criticism is coming from a trusted person, it might as well be praise, since the ignorant person will use a hostile reaction to validate their position: „i hate this person because of their abstract beliefs and they just made me look bad, that’s a concrete reason to hate them and everything they stand for…“
i like the strategy’s candidness, but how does it look in the trenches? it’s a innovative starting point, but could use some fine tuning, lest we further entrench social division… or am i missing something?