Creating transient realities in a non-contemplative world: Has propaganda vanquished art?

It has become a cliché to speak of our ever fast, ever distractible world of tweets and Facebook posts, of video games and fast-cut visuals that make one dizzy, a world of instantaneous response, a world laconic and ‘to the point.’ A world where information must be digested immediately, and resupplied, and then forgotten as a new wave of observations, facts and slogans takes its place.

Yes, of course the Russians invaded the Ukraine in an attempt to squash democracy! Yes, Iraq had WMD! Yes, Afghanistan should be punished for 9/11! Yes, NATO was compelled to liberate Libya!

Yes, the Arab Spring . . . well, seasons change, don’t they? We are all ‘Charlie’ now, for a moment or two.

And then what?

Here’s where things get a bit tricky, and here’s where I’ll have to introduce my points with two anecdotes.

1) A well-known composer, left-leaning, attempted to educated his 21 year old son by suggesting a few good books about class struggle that he could read, books like Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” for example. The son replied: “Dad, we don’t read like that anymore.” So they went to a Michael Moore movie together instead.

2) I had a friend over for a coffee and, as usual, we discussed poetry and novels—she’s a poet—and I was trying to describe how, after finishing a recent four-volume Italian novel that had been praised to the skies, I had felt disappointed. I managed to make a few remarks about the author’s style, which was, with rare exceptions, “he said, she said,” throughout the thousands of pages: matter of fact, linearly descriptive, virtually devoid of metaphor. The tetralogy was compelling, in its way, and in its plot, but lacking any character one might call truly three-dimensional, as it finally dawned on me. So I read my friend a few bits, in the original and translation, and then on the spur of the moment decided to illustrate what I longed for by pulling down “War and Peace” and reading her two brief excerpts—famous ones—about Prince Andrew’s observation of an old oak in the forest. I realise that it’s hardly fair to compare any writer with Tolstoy—which wasn’t my point. What was my point was the rich deft style that allowed for a portal into the soul of Andrew, and his transformation. My friend’s response: “People don’t read stuff written like this anymore, it takes too much time.”

So I wondered whether indeed we were now nurturing a generation whose very act of reading would be curtailed: short, crisp, a concatenation of one-liners from a Twitter feed, quick to be enjoyed and just as quick to send away, literary bestsellers moved efficiently along by curiosity about a plot . . .

The narrative that results from a series of these fleeting contacts with thought becomes inherently and necessarily a simple one: World War II was the ‘good’ war, Saddam Hussein (or Gaddhafi or Putin, take your pick) is the new Hitler, and Hitler himself was the evil German with the funny moustache . . . and so on.

As an ahistorical marginalisation of complexity now becomes an ingrained mode of ‘knowing’ among our youth, the possibilities for effective propaganda have never been more potent. The creation of new ‘realities’ may be achieved more economically than ever. It renders the old-style Orwellian approach of rewriting history obsolete when history can be made up, simply, cleanly and unambiguously, as we go along.

Serious art, on the other hand, invites us to pause, to stop, to linger, to view from different facets, to explore. It tells us that nothing is particularly easy to understand at first glance. An acquaintance with such art becomes therefore the foundation for informed political citizenry. It is hardly the irrelevant indulgence we are led to believe by ‘practically-minded’ pedagogues: in fact, I argue that it is essential.

Perhaps it’s not the tweets or posts or attention span or the Internet that are themselves the problem, but perhaps it’s a dearth of exposure to genuine art and a surrender to the tsunami of mass-media confectionery: the tsunami on which propagandists now may get the biggest bang for a buck imaginable.

So here’s how I’ve advised my kids: go find a poem you like, memorise it, and then let’s talk about the world—and its reality.

Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born poet, novelist and physician who now resides in New Zealand. He may be contacted at emanuelegarcia@gmail.com.