The Theatre of Outrage

Picking up on E.D.’s expressed concern about the impact that baleful, or at least hyperbolic, talk radio has on the political process, I thought that Reihan Salam’s parsing of the now infamous Auto-Tune the News 2 video was spot on. If you haven’t seen the video yet you really ought to, so here it is embedded below,

As Reihan points out, the absurdity of Auto-Tune the news, when juxtaposed against the sound and fury of Sean Hannity, does an excellent job of drawing out just how much Hannity and his ilk are in the business of “performing outrage”. Such is the subtle (sometimes less so) art of theatre of the absurd, it’s disparaging of traditional convetnions allow it to point out the gaudy and hollow scarecrows of our culture. So opines E.D.,

Beck’s little faux crying episode during the intro for his 912 project illustrates the fact that he’s all maudlin, all pretend outrage. He’s more like Jack Lucas than David Duke, but that doesn’t make him less dangerous. If anything it makes him more of a threat, because his forum lends him much greater legitimacy. To most critical thinkers it’s obvious that he’s either crazy or pretending, and probably just in it for the ratings, filling a niche – but to the Edwin’s and Poplawski’s of the world, he’s the real deal. His outrage is real. His fears aren’t bogeymen, they’re flesh and bone.

While I share E.D.’s concern about the impact that this theatre of outrage has on our political process, my focus is less on the potential incitement that such pantomiming potentially generates and more about what I take to be a dulling sensation on political discourse generally.

The theatrical component of politics is admittedly as old as the practice of politics itself, so it is perhaps a bit disingenuous to go off on a rant about how fake it all seems to have become in recent time. So too, has there been the division of belief feeding into a kind of partisanship that one would be a bit naive to attribute wholly to some manner of contemporary dynamic. But what does occur to me is how much the theatrical component of politics has settled into a theatre of outrage as the acceptable norm of expression and discourse, especially as marked by the rise of “high opinion” journalism as people’s primary means of information consumption and analysis. To expand the critique a bit further, I think it is important to note that while E.D. has chosen to focus on Glenn Beck and the potential tea parties powder kegs, the predominance of extremely biased, high opinion analysis that relies on a constant stream of outrage as its means for generating and over time bolstering its own success is a trend that exists on both sides of the American political divide.

That means of entertainment is fine so far as it goes, but I think that E.D. is on to something when he questions how many of its participants take it to be just straight up and down humour. Which is not, I should note, to impute some kind of gullible misunderstanding on the part of the participants. I don’t think it is quite the case that there is a big unspoken joke that the Becks and Olbermans of the world are perpetuating, which their viewers just don’t get or aren’t in on. Rather, I think its the case that whether people like Anne Coulter or Ed Schultz really feel as outraged as they do, their viewers most certainly do feel that kind of outrage and anger about the substance of their collective tirades. So, as E.D. says, for many participants of the political process, this turgid acidity is the “real deal”. And to some extent, I’m inclined to say that if that is the case, then so be it.

But, what concerns me is the degree to which the normative avenue for the expression of those differences has become a semi-permanent sense of outrage about anything and everything that goes on in the political process. This shock and awe undercurrent makes me pensive because I think that it has a tendency to undermine instances where sincere and genuine outrage at an occurrence or decision is the appropriate response. I mean, listen, some segment of the population is going to disagree with ninety-nine percent of the decisions that are made by the various components of government no matter how good or bad things are and no matter how popular or unpopular that component of government happens to be at that point in time. So there will always be mini-rows occurring throughout the democratic process. However, there are moments where the ugly truth of absolutely horrendous decisions is revealed and the impacts of that decision are realized not just in some far off sense, but within the lives of friends, families, neighbours, or the collective well-being of the nation itself and the truly appropriate response is revulsion and incensed outrage.

Those moments are vitally important in the political process because they are wake up calls to a citizenry that might have slipped into a comfortable sense of complacency about their role within the process and the trustworthiness of their elected representatives. In those moments people become reengaged and democracy can become revitalized in meaningful ways; nothing focuses the mind quite like the impending urgency of necessary course correction. The final confirmation of the Bush administration’s use of torture techniques is a good example of such a moment.

But what the torture memo scandal is also perfectly demonstrative of is the dulling effect that our constant state of outrage has resulted in. In no uncertain terms has there been outrage expressed over the idea of waterboarding detainees 183 times and the repeated use of other psychologically and physically harmful means of coercing individuals to provide their interrogators with information. But that outrage is set against a general backdrop of outrage, and so it’s impacts are drastically muted, I would argue. Those of us who are abhorred by the suggested use of such techniques, cheer when Shep Smith rails against them on Fox News. But let’s face it, Shep is just one yelling guy in a sea of yelling guys, the impact of his very genuine expressed disgust is diffused through the observance of such behaviour every week on any variety of television and radio shows, be they genuine or counterfeit.

And so while it is true that the torture memos dominated the news cycle for an entire week and caused pundits from all corners of the media arena to articulate either a condemnatory or apologist position on the issue, does one really get the sense that the country as a whole has been subject to the kind of outraged upheaval that this issue ought to involve? As passionate as many of the outcries on both sides have been, I can’t shake the feeling that for most people, the issue of the Bush administration’s use of torture has become one more piece of detritus floating down the river of the twenty-four hour news cycle. And so as emblazoned as those who feel the urgency of the issue are with their entreaties, the damage has already been done — the boy has already cried wolf every week (if not every day) for the past couple of years and one more cry simply fails to elicit the appropriate response. You can only pull the fire alarm so many times before people start ignoring it.

It is in this regard that I see the Glenn Becks and Keith Olbermans of the world damaging America’s political discourse, and I wonder just how much desensitization will set in before the word democracy becomes merely a gesture in the direction of an idea that used to mean something vital.

Tagged as: Auto-Tune the News 2, democracy, desensitization, glenn beck, Keith Olderman, Reihan Salam, theatre of outrage, torture memos