A dropped call becomes an omen: last week’s recording cut off at the 45-minute mark just as the reading reached the crowd’s cry to “Undo 45,” which Cameron takes as a McLuhanite “feed forward.” Finishing the tech-body dialogue from Bob’s Trump book, the two turn Bob’s closing instruction — “make this quote about Catch-22 more famous than the medium is the message” — into a whole program for reading the late McLuhan. From there the session opens into memoir and exposition: figure and ground merging into a “monster,” inflation as physics, and Bob’s own decades around the Coach House and the radio.
Key Topics
- Re-reading the book’s “perfect example,” Bob glosses the limit iON set for him — “you’ve overcome the Android Meme… but you can’t pass the Android Meme” — even as “the irony is Trump does get elected.”
- iON’s forecasting is shown surviving its own misses: when the predicted “49 to 1” failed to arrive electorally, the answer was “we didn’t say electoral votes. We said states,” pointing to a coming Constitutional Convention.
- The book’s terminal quote, from McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt’s Take Today (p.211), gets its full text — “when war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood” — the economic McLuhan Bob wants readers to carry.
- Cameron reads the Gutenberg Galaxy as no longer merely eclipsed by electricity but feeding on it — it “eats electricity and becomes a world monster that is basically threatening not only our survival, but all the poor creatures that depend upon our sanity.”
- Bob renders McLuhan’s economics as physics: “you move a dollar at the speed of light, it’ll become inflationary… his practical application of E equals MC squared.”
- The Canadian-history turn sorts out the western parties — Tommy Douglas built the CCF and won “greatest Canadian” for socialized medicine, distinct from the social-credit movements of Aberhart and Bennett.
Notable Quotes
"when war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."
"People got numbed when they had to leave the land."
"Everything has been hijacked."
Outline
- 0:00:06 — Finishing the Tech Body dialogue: “Undo 45”
- 0:04:54 — The perfect example: the digital body and the Android Meme
- 0:14:02 — iON’s election prophecy and the “49 to 1”
- 0:25:12 — Chicanery, Vestal Goodman, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive
- 0:32:12 — Updating McLuhan: Catch-22 and Take Today
- 0:34:25 — Global village versus Global Theater
- 0:38:54 — Figure and ground merging into a monster
- 0:45:33 — The Tetrad, etherealization, and E=mc² inflation
- 0:48:38 — McLuhan trying to get people to focus; the disco
- 0:52:24 — Bob’s McLuhan years: Wyndham Lewis and the Coach House
- 01:08:53 — The radio years: CKLN, Mae Brussell, the SubGenius
- 01:13:04 — Phatic Communion
- 01:19:46 — Numbness, leaving the land, money as public property
- 01:21:16 — Tommy Douglas, social credit, and Canadian history
- 01:33:18 — Trump as a figure for our time; the syndicate and the hijacker
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- Take Today (1972, with Barrington Nevitt) — p.211’s Catch-22 passage, the “drip blood” line Bob wants memorized
- Counterblast (1954) — its sketches of Canadian provincial character
- “A Media Approach to Inflation” (1974 New York Times op-ed) — the dollar-inflation point
- “The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets” (1971, Varsity Graduate) — cited for the syndicate and “solar government”
- Understanding Media (1964) — the book Nevitt got from his wife at Christmas 1964
Other Works
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 — source of McLuhan’s black-market-and-war monster
- Vestal Goodman, “I Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now” — the gospel number read as readiness for death
- Bachman-Turner Overdrive, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” — reassigned to the Tech Body’s boast
- Bob Dobbs, Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs — his self-published souvenir book of show transcriptions and quotes
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Barrington Nevitt (McLuhan’s collaborator on Take Today)
- Vestal Goodman (the Southern gospel singer quoted at the book’s close)
- Tommy Douglas (the CCF premier and father of Canadian socialized medicine)
- Buckminster Fuller (credited, with Toynbee, for “the law of etherealization”)
- Frank Zappa (who named a son after the monster Rodan)
- Mae Brussell (the researcher whose broadcasts Bob carried on CKLN)
- Michael Blake Read (the channel for the Evergreens material)
- William Irwin Thompson and Arthur Kroker (quoted in Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs)
- Pierre Schaeffer and Derrick de Kerckhove (the “esoteric observer” exchange)
- Tom Easterbrook (McLuhan’s friend who taught at Brandon)
Closing
Finishing the tech-body reading turns Bob’s plea to “update McLuhan” into the dialogue’s real subject: recovering the economic, monster-haunted McLuhan — figure and ground fused, money that bleeds, a world hijacked — from behind the worn slogan everyone already knows.
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