Bob reopens his Trump book from the very front, and its opening essay turns out to run on a distinction he says almost no one knows — McLuhan’s two schools of the creative act. The cathartic, moral view - the reflex of journalism and the humanities - can only write “a forged check on our hopes and sympathies”; the cognitive view reads the world’s “radiant signatures,” and only it, Bob argues, can perceive a president like Trump. The reading keeps spilling into memoir and McLuhan exposition before landing on the answer — “the medium is the message” — that McLuhan reached by 1958 and could then never hand on.
Key Topics
- The work carries two titles — a spring-2017 introductory pamphlet (Part one) on Trump “put on the shamanic tradition” and a fall-2020 second part, the book “What We/You Didn’t Know About Trump” — and Bob insists the “putting on” was unconscious.
- Cameron extends the shaman figure: shamans act in “some kind of trance,” “auto mode,” not knowing what they do — which is exactly Trump, who “has no clue about the Tech Body.”
- Presidents are read as representatives “auditioning for a theater,” and where Reagan carefully managed his “many bodies” (Chemical, Astral, TV, Chip), Trump’s roles “no longer give a shit about each other.”
- Cameron runs Trump through pro wrestling — fans “know it’s fake” yet stay absorbed — so “along comes somebody - Trump - that is an illusionist”; “that’s what ‘You’re Fired’ is all about.”
- The dialogue’s spine is McLuhan’s contrast between “the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies” and the cognitive “reader of radiant signatures,” which Cameron maps straight onto “Trump’s TV show.”
- Closing on McLuhan’s roots, Cameron dates his 1949–55 wrestling with Innis’ “solipsism come nihilism” to its 1958 resolution in “the medium is the message” — the answer McLuhan “couldn’t hand on.”
Notable Quotes
"For that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison, art can never be regarded as a source of knowledge, but only as a moral discipline and a study of endurance."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 29 (8 Jul 2021), 57:37
"It's like Trump's TV show. That's exactly what it is."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 29 (8 Jul 2021), 59:16
"The objectivist stands naked before the world. The subjectivist puts on the world."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 29 (8 Jul 2021), 1:44:02
Outline
- 0:00:01 — The book’s two titles and “putting on” the shaman
- 0:04:28 — The shaman’s unconsciousness, iON, and the Tech Body
- 0:07:58 — Translating McLuhan; the Kuskis list
- 0:16:17 — Robert Fulford, the “Eskimo,” and Toronto snobbery
- 0:21:50 — The two schools: reading the 2017 pamphlet
- 0:28:24 — Reagan’s many bodies; Trump’s bodies that don’t care
- 0:30:30 — Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, and the “table talk”
- 0:36:59 — Pro wrestling and the illusionist
- 0:51:06 — McLuhan the Einstein; the fate of thinking
- 0:53:13 — Radiant signatures vs. the forged check
- 01:00:56 — Ted Carpenter and the de Menil art world
- 01:14:25 — Catharsis, Eleusis, and Matthew Arnold
- 01:22:43 — Toughness and “going out to be alone”
- 01:29:40 — E.A.T., the Pop artists, and McLuhan’s Kennedy line
- 01:39:17 — Trudeau the emperor-cum-clown; the US in the hot seat
- 01:41:39 — Quadrophrenia and the Tetrad
- 01:44:02 — Solipsism, nihilism, and “the medium is the message”
- 01:52:37 — Manitoba: Rupert Lodge and the three temperaments
Mentioned Resources
Works by McLuhan
- The Interior Landscape (1969) — the essay collection whose 1953 Joyce piece supplies the two schools of art, and whose McLuhan foreword carries the “mow down the Kennedys” line
- Take Today (1972) — cited for “Trudeau the first emperor-cum-clown”
- Laws of Media (with Eric McLuhan) — the 1930s-artists argument, which some judge “botched”
- Understanding Media (1964) — its account of the Art world’s “rearview mirrorism”
- “The Dos Passos article” — McLuhan on the leftist writer missing the cognitive school
- Playboy interview (March 1969) — the source an admirer used to show “Trump replayed McLuhan”
Other Works
- Matthew Arnold, “Preface to Poems” (1853) — the cathartic school’s emblem, read on its exact centenary
- G.R. Levy, The Gate of Horn — cited for catharsis as preparation for the lesser Greek mysteries
- Robert Fulford, Best Seat in the House — the memoir behind the “best seat in Canadian culture” quip
- Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design (1919) — an early bid to bring artistic sensibility to city-planning management
- Coleridge, Biographia Literaria — source of the “born a Platonist or an Aristotelian” tag in McLuhan’s master’s thesis
People
- Marshall McLuhan (the media theorist at the center of the dialogue)
- Donald Trump (read not as a politician but as a media phenomenon)
- Richard Kostelanetz (writer and anthologist of the Avant-garde, and McLuhan’s 1967 New York Times interlocutor)
- John Cage (the Avant-garde composer McLuhan ranked a “20th-Century artist,” here judged an unconscious one)
- Matthew Arnold (Victorian critic taken as the emblem of the cathartic school)
- Gertrude Levy (classical scholar whose Gate of Horn McLuhan read before anyone else)
- Ted Carpenter (McLuhan’s Explorations co-editor, here defecting into the de Menil Art world)
- Robert Fulford (the Toronto journalist who called McLuhan “an Eskimo”)
- Harold Innis (whose problem of solipsism sets up McLuhan’s whole early project)
- Rupert Lodge (McLuhan’s Manitoba philosophy teacher, source of the three temperaments)
- Henry Wilkes Wright (Lodge’s co-head of the Manitoba philosophy department)
- John Cage’s ranking-mate Buckminster Fuller (whom McLuhan called a “19th-Century artist”)
- The de Menil family the Schlumberger Art fortune Carpenter married into)
- Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale (the “many bodies” contrast at the heart of the President-as-theater reading)
Closing
Reading his Trump book, Bob turns the hour into a demonstration of McLuhan’s two schools — an argument that the moral eye can only forge a check on our hopes while the cognitive one alone actually sees.
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