Hatching Monsters - Lapham’s Quarterly: In a world in which every truth is fungible, advertising begins to substitute for the news. One of Barnum’s brilliant, almost genius-level aperçus, was that you could create news through advertising, and the advertising itself becomes newsworthy. If you advertise forcefully, the advertised object, even if perfectly vacant and without qualities (think: Paris Hilton), becomes a topic of conversation. Truth value is always trumped by hype, and hype in turn is fueled by controversy. Any news is good news. Barnum discovered that if your show generates angry letters to the editor, so much the better: people will be compelled to see the spectacle for themselves “to determine whether or not they had been deceived.”
Television, of course, is the playground of present-day Barnum freaks, where plain citizens can be snatched out of the crowd, put in the spotlight, and cued up to sing or dance, as in American Idol. Self-destructive “superstars” in the Andy Warhol sense litter the pages of our weekly magazines addicted to celebrity. But political advertisements, in particular, seem to be the new repository of magical thinking. Candidates with little or no administrative experience and no knowledge of facts on the ground (and who therefore avoid “mainstream” news conferences) are presented as brilliant problem solvers or as saviors. You have to have nerves of steel, along with steely Zen detachment, to avoid expectations aroused by contemporary omnipresent, hyperinflated rhetoric. What are our political figures if not openly show-business personalities? Who looks better on TV, Harry Reid or Sarah Palin?