We are not far from a future where the military as technological force will be regarded as the Entertainer whereas in days of glory past, figures such as Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, George Washington, General Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Patton, Rommel, Hitler, Stalin, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Schwarzkopf, Powell, and most recently Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were presented to the public as the Stars of War. During the Gulf War of 1991 between the U.S. and Iraq, it could be seen by the privy that a shift was inevitable because of the expansive presentational format of cable news channels in the beginnings of acquiring global reach, that the delivery mechanism would determine, as it always has, who or what was good and who or what was bad. At the time, humans were still en vogue as having a meaning within the cultural context of celebrity. Thus, torsos and faces behind podiums, such as Schwarzkopf and Powell in press conferences during the Gulf War, became the symbols of the war.
The war itself did not exist as a war. The war existed as a presentation televised by press conferences in which the cameras of television news corporations focused attention on the forces of the war, Powell and Schwarzkopf. These two men represented the United States in the war. Conversely, Saddam Hussein represented Iraq in the war. Iraqi soldiers did not exist anymore than U.S. soldiers did. The television coverage of Saddam Hussein, however, consisted of photographs and short snippets of emotional diatribes delivered in a language no one outside of the Middle East could understand. Saddam was presented as a cardboard cutout most often, though.
On television, the war between the sophisticated, confident, and authoritative strategic lectures of Powell and Schwarzkopf and the cardboard cutout of the incoherent child-man was easily won by the United States. It was difficult to imagine how two confident masculine men of war could lose to a cartoon who bragged about his toy rockets. He was such a weak man that his identity was created for him by news editors and media personalities. If he had been a real man he would not have been able to be defined by rather wimpy looking men and women in news studios. But he was. That was why Iraq lost the war to the United States. While he was not captured, he was left to live in a broken country as an insane child-man so scared of being hurt that he hired actors to impersonate him in public. Did Schwarzkopf or Powell do this? No. Because, as the news media presented them, they were real men.
What became evident throughout the war was how good Schwarzkopf and Powell were at playing video games. The images of smart bombs blowing up buildings demonstrated the acumen they had in using the controllers of their Sega Genesis consoles (Playstations hadn’t been developed yet). Saddam, meanwhile, never landed a single blow against American forces; there were no screen images of his bombs or troops successfully attacking U.S. forces. It was as if he never picked up a controller to fight back. The television show of the video game battle between Saddam and Powell/Schwarzkopf was a blowout. It was boring as far as building drama, but it led to supreme public confidence in the might of American military leaders, great as they were at speaking confidently on camera and playing video games.
By 2001, though, technology had shifted significantly. The 9/11 attacks on the Twiin Towers played over and over for weeks if not months. It appeared that thousands of World Trade Centers had been annihilated by a tiny band of sophisticated terrorists who knew how to play the new generation of video games incredibly well. There was a face to go with these attacks, one far mightier and more sinister than the cartoonish Saddam had been: Osama bin Laden. He had single-handedly engineered attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center using commercial airplanes which had been hijacked by Arab men armed with box cutters. Talk about incredible! This guy obviously knew how to kick ass with modern technology. Manipulating his game console to hijack commercial planes using terrorist characters with box cutters who flew the planes as missiles into the Mightiest Buildings of the World?!
As presented on television, the hysteria of newscasters demonstrated how dire the threat was to the identity of America. Suddenly, America was vulnerable in a way it had never been before in its history. The Civil War and World War II were obviously minor hiccups compared to what the United States now faced. The attack on Pearl Harbor was relatively insignificant considering that the Twin Towers were destroyed thousands of times on television in a matter of weeks, possibly hundreds of thousands of times on the World Wide Web. Catastrophic. The death toll was around 3000 people, but clearly this number was far larger than the 60,000 American deaths from the Vietnam War and the hundreds of thousands of American deaths in World War II. The shocked and terrified reactions of frightened men and women on every channel on television was proof enough of that.
For some time Osama bin Laden and the gang he led called al Qaeda were dominating this new terrorist war. George W. Bush looked like an amateur out of his league. But soon enough he began dominating the air waves, talking tough and appearing stern. He rhetorically championed the greatness of America and there was a slight shift in the battle as George W. Bush named the new conflict the War on Terror. By naming the war on television and spreading the name of the new war around the world via television and the Internet, Bush had suddenly seized upper hand over Osama. Osama was now on the run as Bush was repeatedly televised saying grandiose things. Everyone on television agreed that Americans and the world had to support the president. With the support of faces all over the news as well as tremendously colorful and eye-popping graphics, it was evident that Bush had come to play. It wasn’t clear how the game would be played but there was little doubt that Bush would win.
Still, there were many on television who worried about future terrorist attacks. This war was not going to be a slam dunk. It was going to be a long slog because Osama knew how to hide and he knew how to hide his ghost-like video game characters. The television punditry assured viewers that more attacks would undoubtedly come. It was conceded that Osama was not a one-trick pony, that he knew how to play the War on Terror game really well. Had Bush adopted the wrong format for game play? Ideas such as that were roundly dismissed and those doubting the president were labeled terrorist sympathizers by angry white men on television and radio news talk shows.
Bush introduced others on his team. They strode to podiums to speak and they were steely-eyed, determined, confident, and angry. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were the two major players behind Bush. They each had a different approach. Cheney displayed a cool-headed confidence in himself and gave the air of knowing much more than any of his interviewers or the faceless question-askers in the White House press room. No one dared challenge him after watching how the few who did fared; they were intellectually pummeled by Cheney’s superior mind and Darth Vader-like presence. He appeared to have evil within him but, as pundits patriotically conceded, he was on America’s side and maybe America needed such a cunning and manipulative mind to outwit the clearly dastardly bin Laden, the bin Laden who was increasingly invisible on television but talked about much as a being of pure evil.
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, stood at the podium with fury behind his eyes, a raging hatred for everything and all emanated from him. He would give statements that were dripping with condescension and when asked questions he would lean toward the questioners and aggressively bark at them for their insolence in doubting him on any level at all; to ask a question was to express doubt. It was evident from his body language and words that there was no room for anything but blind obedience; anything less warranted his wrath. His voice, demeanor, and movements all suggested he was a man filled with hatred. Pundits assured everyone that his hatred was directed only at bin Laden and his band of terrorist characters.
Something strange began to happen, though. By 2003, Osama, while still not captured, was no longer in the public eye. His name was still mentioned now and then, but the characters within the video game, the anonymous terrorists known as al Qaeda, had become a more newsworthy commodity. The word al Qaeda was becoming the real enemy. The invisibility of the threat was frightening to Americans. Having a face like Osama meant that the source of the threat was known; absent a face, though, and absent a location like a country, the figment of al Qaeda became ominous, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Like being trapped in a room with no light sources at all, it was impossible for the television to know where “it” was and, thus, viewers didn’t know, either. “Will they hit Toledo next? What about Little Rock, Arkansas? My God, what if they attack Tupelo, Mississippi?!” Al Qaeda could be anywhere at any time.
Bush, though, brilliantly changed tactics. Realizing the television War on Terror was struggling against the invisible enemy, he went on television to redefine the enemy and gave the country (and the world) a specific location where the enemy could be found: The enemy was Saddam Hussein and he was in Iraq. Bush and other figures in his administration, strode to podiums to tell the television that Saddam was a supplier of weapons to al Qaeda and was hiding them in Iraq. Bush also said on television that Saddam had acquired weapons of mass destruction, a new video game weapon that quickly was known by its acronym “WMD.” The weapons were “nucular,” as Bush said it. Bush, brilliantly defining Saddam without giving Saddam a chance to define himself, said that Saddam had acquired enriched uranium from Nigeria. The news the next several weeks went balls out to tell the story of WMDs and enriched uranium. Experts with undisclosed backgrounds told news interviewers (and, thus, viewers) all about WMDs and enriched uranium. Previously boring subjects were now incredibly entertaining as the country was abuzz over these two topics.
The way Bush described Saddam hiding the mythic al Qaeda gang, supplying them with weapons, and acquiring WMDs made it seem as if Saddam himself had done each of these things rather than hundreds or even thousands of individuals in various positions within his government. No, it was Saddam; Bush said Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction. It seemed almost plausible that Saddam had flown to Nigeria himself and loaded a shipment onto the plane with a forklift. During the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam was presented as a cartoon, a weakling, a pitiful wretch. But, through the words of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration, Saddam was a rugged and dangerous threat, far more dangerous than Osama bin Laden who was increasingly falling out of the spotlight as an evil villain. He’d been upstaged by Saddam, but only because television decided to let Bush tell the story of both Osama and Saddam.
Bush and his team of wonder doers were creating a rich narrative on television, building a salacious plot by setting up Saddam as a badass who needed to be taken down by the only force in the world tough enough to do it: The Bush Blitz! When Bush and his gang weren’t exuding machismo, news pundits and other entertainers were spreading the story of the Bush administration’s hyper-masculinity. They were John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all rolled into one. They weren’t just tough, they were mean and you were glad they were fighting for you because as tough as you were—as Bush and television pundits said—the Bush Gang was the toughest in the world, the toughest who had ever lived throughout the entirety of history. Men this tough had never been seen before and might never be seen again. The television show was getting huge ratings and the culture of America had been dynamically transformed as narcissistic machismo became the identity all real men aspired to adopt.
When the war first began on television it was a stunning onslaught, a rapid victory. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and told the television cameras that America was Victorious! A huge banner hung behind him declaring what he had said. If his words weren’t enough proof, the visual banner provided more concrete evidence. But as time passed, the War in Iraq continued as told by pundits, news folk, and other television entertainers. The television voices said no WMDs had been found. Saddam was captured and it resulted in a brief television celebration, but images of torture at Abu Ghraib and other disturbing claims about the actions U.S. troops and private contractors such as Blackwater surfaced. Television and other media told of scandals in the Bush administration, names like Scooter Libby were announced as “bad men.” Nefarious characters such as John Yoo proclaimed that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply to the Iraq War because of legal technicalities and, thus, torture was okay. Clandestine CIA prisons scattered throughout the world were said to exist. The indefinite imprisonment of captives of Guantanamo Bay raised human rights questions on some television shows.
Overall, the Grand Narrative of the Bush administration was eroding, being undercut by a shift in the tone of television and other media presentations. It was becoming more and more evident that it wasn’t Bush and company who had run the show, but television producers and those who controlled other media outlets. While this had always been the case it was becoming clearer to eyes and ears paying attention that distribution is far more important than any given message.
This new show, though, the new show about Bush and Gang being the bad guys didn’t play as well on television. Ratings went down as divisiveness went up. New technologies pulled attention away from television as the dominant source of entertainment. Faces were becoming less important than cool graphics. Cutting edge software graphics were increasingly used to capture attention. Avatars replaced humans as storytellers. Not entirely, no, but the trend was growing into a movement, a future.
What had been modern, the Grand Narrative as presented by Important Faces, was being replaced by postmodern technological magic: graphics, avatars, social media, etc. Once complete, the postmodern techno presentation will become the modern. The modern ends up in conflict with itself and what was postmodern becomes the new modern. How postmodern arises from the modern is made clearer by considering the Latin origin of modern, modo, which means “just now"; postmodern, therefore, literally means “after just now.” “Just now” negates the previous “just now” so what was postmodern always becomes modern once the moment of the previous modern passes. Lyotard said it well:
What, then, is the postmodern? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday … must be suspected. What space does Cézanne challenge? The Impressionists’. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cézanne’s. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it Cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched in the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and this state is constant. (The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard).
Lyotard was reviewing art through the lens of the modern and postmodern, but the concepts translate well to technology and media-created culture. As of now the Grand Narrative as presented by the human face is still modern. Obama saved the country from hating itself, gave television a face that could be celebrated after the debacle of the late Bush administration’s public image and the advent of the narrative of the economic crisis. The narrative of the first black president demonstrates on television and other media imagery that racism has been overcome; the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama tells Americans and the world that, no, America is not the real evil in the world, which is what the late-Bush era narrative was shaping up to be on television and in other media. Obama and his universal health care issue allowed media to shift focus from America as the world’s bully to America in the beginning stages of a new utopia. War ended under Obama as news media coverage rarely considered Iraq or Afghanistan after 2008. Bubbles of terrorism rise up in the form ISIS and other “terrifying” threats are presented such as ebola, but none of these mini-narratives have the oomph of a Grand Narrative. The stories are now dispersed, there is too much to draw attention in every direction.
Grand Narratives create unity … not unity of belief or value, but unity of attention. As the modern age transforms into the next modern age that is now still (barely) the postmodern, Grand Narratives may become an impossibility. Even now, the Obama Grand Narrative is old news: it's no shock to see a black man in the Oval Office any more. A woman becoming president could sustain the Grand Narrative of Important Faces for a short stretch, but beyond that it may become impossible for media-driven outlets to direct mass attention toward a single story, a necessary condition for building a Grand Narrative. In a sense, this is neither good nor bad; it is just what’s next.
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