http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEDDYYoTiQ0&feature=related
With the recent centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, it’s worth noting his presence in popular culture, a sustained example of which is David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Brian O’Blivion, the film’s mad guru of physical transformation by way of electronic media, was inspired by McLuhan.
The McLuhan centenary has just passed, so I’m putting together a comprehensive collection of Frye quotes on McLuhan. It’ll be up very soon.
We are on the brink of global economic crisis because the Republicans are now morally insane. If you want to understand why this is happening, check out the eight second clip above of Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) articulating the Republicans’ underlying agenda. This is not a slip of the tongue. He’s said it a number of times, as recently as last week.
Andrew Sullivan offers an endgame scenario, whose goal may be impeachment:
They did the last Democratic president; and they feel even more strongly that this one is illegitimate, depite his thumping majority in the last election. Here’s the scenario. The House GOP pushes for completely unserious Boehner plan (including a balanced budget amendment) that they know will be vetoed; they then filibuster the Reid plan in the Senate, forcing Obama to invoke a 14th Amendment executive prerogative, which they will then turn around and impeach him for.
Far-fetched? I hope so. But every time you think you have reached the end of Republican extremism, they manage to move further out of the solar system. But it will take a huge effort by the propaganda machine on the right to make Obama’s decision not to default his fault, rather than the GOP’s. At this point, if the Reid plan cannot make it through the Senate on time or through the House at all, I’m beginning to believe that Obama should invoke this controversial power, given the extreme danger the stalemate is creating for both the US and the global economy, and challenge the courts to reverse it.
I suspect it would be popular among Independents. And allow Obama to regain the initiative over events dictated by a single faction in one party in one chamber whose fanaticism is only matched by their irresponsibility.
I asked Canadian Press reporter Jim Bronskill about how he discovered the RCMP’s Frye file. His response:
I cover security and intelligence issues for the Canadian Press, and take special interest in the historical dimensions of the beat. As a result, I examine old RCMP security files to see what names crop up. In some cases, there are entirely separate files on those individuals. The dossiers — if kept for posterity and transferred to Library and Archives Canada — can be obtained through the Access to Information Act twenty years after a person’s death. It is a bit of a guessing game to determine which people the Mountie spies kept files on. But when you zero in on one, it can provide telling glimpses of state security practices and the tenor of the times.
That’s certainly true in this instance. Despite the distressing twenty percent of Canadians who think it was acceptable for the RCMP to spy on Frye, the commentators at the Globe & Mail‘s website do not share that view by a pretty considerable margin.
Some examples:
What sort of country spies on its best and brightest?
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Tommy Douglas – now Northrop Frye?
Is that what we pay taxes for? – spying on Canadian leaders who openly and democraticaly oppose the economic and political elties?
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And soon all Canadian’s will be spied on starting this fall – when the Cons bring in legislation requiring your Internet company to keep a record of all your online activity
… which will be accessible to the police WITHOUT warrant.
Scary stuff.
(Don’t criticize anyone too much!)
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Here are a couple of people who are clearly twenty percenters:
Intelligence organizations can’t leave people off the radar just because they are intelligent. Many intelligent people are complete lunatics. The Norwegian sniper is a good example.
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Never heard of him and I’m guessing the majority of Canadians haven’t either.
“The whole appeal of Sherlock Holmes,” Frye writes, “was connected with his ability to notice ordinary details. Here again is the dialectic between the all-seeing eye of God & of the spy of the state with his ‘telescreen.’” In Anatomy of Criticism Frye links the telescreen with the “humiliation of being watched by a hostile or derisive eye,” a theme in the tragedies of such figures as Prometheus and Milton’s Samson.
I’m reminded of two stories from Frye’s early life, one more or less innocent, the other malicious.
When he was a student circuit rider on the Saskatchewan prairies, he reported that whenever his horse Katy “broke into a trot you had to stand straight up in the stirrups and let the saddle come up and caress your backside at intervals. I remember something that I found later in a Canadian critic, I think it was Elizabeth Waterson, who spoke of the prairies as the sense of immense space with no privacy. And I found that on top of Katy, who naturally stimulated one’s bladder very considerably. I realized that I couldn’t get off in that vast stretch of prairie because everybody was out with opera glasses, you see, watching the preacher on top of Katy. That was what people did. They all had spy glasses. They weren’t doing it with any malicious sense. It was just that their lives were rather devoid of incident, and naturally they liked to see who was going along. It wasn’t their fault.”
And now the sinister tale, recorded by Frye in one of his diaries:
“I often wonder about intuitive racial-stereotype thinking: a lot of it’s balls. For instance, there’s a big good-natured German in Moncton called Lichtenberg who had been a peaceful, thrifty, industrious contractor there for thirty years. For two wars the local Gestapo have cut their teeth on him: when the news is bad or they get tired of reading spy stories they’d go up and practise on him. Recently the Gestapo combed his whole house over, in response to some silly anonymous ‘tip,’ & one of them found two large knobs in a dark closet. ‘Aha!’ he said, stepped into the closet & gave one a twist, thinking of course it was a private transmitter set. It was an extra shower he’d installed. Incidentally, he’s a naturalized Canadian citizen, but married before that, so his wife, who belongs to one of the oldest Maritime families, is an enemy alien. Well, Dad’s friendship for Lichtenberg has come in for much unfavorable comment in that stinking little kraal Moncton, & the stinkers point out gleefully that ‘Frye’ is really a German name, & that I look just like a German. It’s a beautiful theory, only it just happens to be wrong.”
