jared

This is not quite effigy politics, but something worse. In effigy politics, a real person or institution is dominated/humiliated/destroyed as a stand-in for something broader. The far-right obsession with advertising is, on the other hand, removed from reality altogether. The fascist imaginary is swamped with old advertising. Not even old film or TV—and certainly not old novels or music—come close to the total force that ads exert on their minds. They rage against modern “inclusive” advertisements; they yearn for the “based” advertisements of their youth, or of generations past. The fertilizer of advertising runs off from screens and glossy pages, suffocating their brains with sludgy green blooms of fascist fantasy. What do you do with people like this? People who openly dream of removing ~240 million of their neighbors in order to restore a landscape of desire that isn’t even and never was of their own making, but a landscape shaped decades ago by cynical hucksters working on Madison Avenue? How do you even begin to draw these people back into reality? They don’t want reality! They want a dream, and they’re violently angry at anyone who might disturb their sleep. They want to kill real people in order to restore a consumer fantasy. They would deport millions so that their Cheerios ads would again feature only Aryan families smiling back at them, promising the same wholesome recipes with a brand-new look. I don’t really know what to call it or what to do about it; it’s so alien to me, it’s so perverse, it’s so otherworldly. It feel like a kind of politics of suicide, of people who have left the real tangible world we all live in behind, and passed into some afterlife of delusion—like they can’t see us or themselves anymore, but only see the imaginary world that generations of salespeople and grifters have made for them. Their bodies remain behind, unfortunately still capable of doing harm to the rest of us, but their minds are gone. They’ve resigned from reality, and in a very real sense they don’t live here anymore, on Earth, with the rest of us. I wonder if it’s still possible to bring them back, but I find myself doubting.