A McLuhan letter from May 1959 — written out of a Winnipeg talk, sent to a Maclean-Hunter executive who “didn’t understand it” — turns out to carry the earliest “global village” Cameron knows of, five years before Understanding Media . From its “do-it-yourself world” the twentieth session builds a single frame for reading Bob’s Trump text: McLuhan’s early-1950s split between two schools of art, the moral-cathartic and the cognitive, and Trump as the cognitive artist to whom ethical judgment simply cannot stick . The pair follow it out through Nietzsche, the Innis line about “the signer of a forged check,” and Joyce’s “cultic toilette,” before turning to Trump as the “dropout” who, by holding the presidency, exposes its nullity — and agreeing to read the book backwards next week, “like the detective story,” starting from the Tech Body .
Key Topics
- Cameron redates the “global village” to the 1959 letter , which Maclean’s — Canada’s most popular magazine — ignored until Peter Newman took it up a decade later, “when nobody was interested in McLuhan anymore” .
- McLuhan’s two schools of art frame the whole reading: the cathartic-ethical view “did not have an interest in popular art,” while the cognitive artist engages the whole of society — so putting a value judgment on Trump misses what he does ; the critique of the moral view runs back to Nietzsche and forward into social engineering .
- Cameron unpacks the Innis line — “the artist is not a reader of radiant signatures… but the signer of a forged check” — as the romantic who freezes a moment into false significance, against the cognitive view that relates everything to a wider context ; Joyce’s “cultic toilette” names a present where “everything is collectively conscious and exposed” .
- Trump is read as a shaman-of-industry and a “dropout” , the “Schoeck” or “hijacker of reality” in a world where “everybody’s the executive of reality” , who by occupying the office “exposes the nullity of the presidency” and refracts HCE into “panic, hysteria, schizophrenia, paranoia, and ecstasy” .
- Bob enlists Unshackled: The Dustbin of Donald Trump — an Innis-style inventory of pop-culture eccentrics from the 60s on — in which Trump is “the completion of all these attempts,” an afterimage of a culture already obsolete .
- The session closes on living Finnegans Wake “literally,” down to Joyce’s coinage “emailia” , and on Lévi-Strauss’s split between the historian’s intrinsic meaning and the anthropologist’s universal placement as the method of the dialogue itself .
Notable Quotes
"And instead of being Twilight, it's Toilet."
"What he exposes is the nullity of the presidency."
"We live Finnegans Wake now, literally."
Outline
- 0:00:02 — The 20th session and the McLuhan kit
- 0:02:28 — The May 1959 letter and the global village
- 0:07:03 — Late McLuhan: three processes
- 0:08:58 — Do-it-yourself and the center that won’t hold
- 0:10:28 — Trump as shaman; the two schools of art
- 0:17:14 — The signer of a forged check
- 0:20:02 — The cultic toilette
- 0:23:14 — Shamans of industry; Trump the trickster
- 0:29:47 — Conscious or unconscious? Intuitive man
- 0:34:50 — Presidents appropriate to their time
- 0:41:55 — HCE, the nullity of the presidency, and the prism
- 0:42:37 — The dustbin of Donald Trump
- 0:50:11 — Twitter, the Android Meme, and doing nothing
- 0:53:00 — The ancient quarrel and the warm rejoinder
- 0:58:14 — TV, tactility, and connecting the dots
- 1:02:35 — The beach and the greeting line
- 1:08:56 — Biden as nothing
- 1:16:29 — Laugh or cry; the interview by the daughter
- 1:21:41 — Living Finnegans Wake
- 1:24:21 — The historian and the anthropologist: Lévi-Strauss
- 1:27:19 — Beginning at the end; the detective story
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Letter to Maclean-Hunter (May 1959) — out of a Winnipeg talk; the earliest “global village” Cameron knows of
- “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America” (1946) — the last essay in The Interior Landscape; debate as “hasty accusation… met with a warm rejoinder”
- War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) — p.190, on media outbreeding and human inbreeding
- Review of William Burroughs (1964) — “we’re all becoming Egyptian or pharaonic”
- “Shall we laugh or cry?” — a TV Guide piece naming “our dilemma”
Other Works
- Scott Woods et al., Unshackled: The Dustbin of Donald Trump — the pop-culture inventory Trump completes
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake — the book we now “live literally”
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology — the historian/anthropologist distinction
- George Orwell, 1984 — its world already present “way back in the 30s”
- Bob Roberts — one of the films the Unshackled inventory ransacks
People
- Bob Dobbs (co-host; author of the Trump text under discussion)
- Cameron McEwen (co-host; McLuhan scholar)
- Marshall McLuhan (media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Donald Trump (read as the cognitive artist and the “dropout”)
- Joe Biden (the “nothing” that lives what Trump exposed)
- Harold Innis (economic historian; source of “the signer of a forged check”)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (origin of the critique of the moral view of the world)
- James Joyce (author of Finnegans Wake and the “cultic toilette” pun)
- W.B. Yeats (the “center doesn’t hold”; champion of the Irish “twilight”)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropologist; the historian/anthropologist distinction)
- Peter Newman (journalist who took up McLuhan in the 1970s)
- Robert Fulford (who called McLuhan “an Eskimo”)
- Jacques Maritain (the satire tradition responding to new anti-environments)
- Eric McLuhan (thesis that satire changes with each anti-environment)
- Frank Zappa (on the “plateau of great artists and scientists”)
- Mae Brussell (research broadcaster on the same plateau)
- Carolyn Dean (Bob’s partner; “I stuck in my bride”)
- Scott Woods (co-author of Unshackled, a CKLN figure Bob knew)
- Dave Newfeld (Bob’s associate, credited in Unshackled)
- Joe Scarborough (Morning Joe host, with Mika Brzezinski)
- William Burroughs (subject of McLuhan’s 1964 review)
- Larry David (whose “meet-and-greet” critique Cameron invokes)
Closing
Read this way, the twentieth session turns a forgotten 1959 letter and a pair of 1950s art-schools into a working method — a way to see Trump not as a character to be judged but as the cognitive artist and afterimage the age required, and to start reading the whole story from its end.
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