Archetypal Image Representing The Hipster Concept of Politics
~Okay, I do find this amusing, but it also stuck me as exactly what the title says; the need for the modern leader to be mythic superhero and to manifestly be so within the context of Modern Corporate Marketing Culture. And it is that construct that stopped me dead in my tracks at the Polls last November.
I'm not a 'convicted felon', nor to I do I have Social Anxiety Disorder or Agoraphobia. If anything I'm too bloody extroverted, so it was not any of that specious nonsense that drove me from the polling place.
What did leave me shaking and confused was the realization that I, who had voted in every single Presidential election since I was legally able to do so, that all the things I had said about The Oligarchy choosing the candidate who was clearly about to win and by a wide margin, all the things I'd said and cited about Marketing and the cynical mass manipulation of public opinion, that if I really believed in all those things I had said - and I very much did and do - then for me to cast a ballot at all would be the height of hypocrisy.
Even though I did not ask anyone else to take that stand - Le-Le voted and I had no problem with that - nor did I claim that voting itself as a mechanism must end, I was attacked and by some who I thought friends. You see, my act of political apostasy was in and of itself an attack upon the psycho-emotional construct epitomized in the above image.
I was committing a form of Cultural and Civic Heresy which struck into the core of that cynical mass manipulation and the sense of personal political identity it had created.
I had to be attacked. To even consider that my act was justified would be to question not only the Marketing of That One, but potentially the very natural the identities of millions of his supporters. If your entire sense of Self is based upon a series of Marketing Paradigms, then who are you? Hell, what are you?
Fortunately, I had already been through your basic Existential Identity of Self Crisis and come out the other side largely intact. But I also did not grow up with Modern Corporate Marketing Culture as it is a development of my own generation, the Hippies who turned into Yuppies.
I will not go into a whole history here. I'll simply relate that it begins with the original Woodstock in 1969, when Korporate Amerika discovered how much money could really be made Marketing Youth Culture. The thing has now grown into a God-like monster; Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent, a monster that has consumed their children. I suspect I too would be in It's thrall if I was twenty/thirty years younger.
Yes, I can see that That One is in fact a Superior Product and has a good chance of performing well. But he is a Product, make no mistakes about that, and, for me at least, that was a Deal Breaker, albeit 'only' a philosophical one.
Of course, I also believe that Mass Democracy has failed, so I suppose the point is moot...