Dialogue 19 — Transcript

[00:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: this is

[00:15] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron and Bob for our

[00:18] Bob Dobbs: 19th session discussing thoughts and patterns around my new pamphlet on

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: Donald Trump.

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: It came out a few months ago.

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: So Ewen Cameron,

[00:33] Bob Dobbs: you wanted to get into an article you did called The Technique of Flight.

[00:41] Bob Dobbs: before we finally tackle my book.

[00:44] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[00:45] Bob Dobbs: And that was written,

[00:46] Bob Dobbs: I look at the bottom,

[00:49] Bob Dobbs: February 15th.

[00:50] Cameron McEwen: February

[00:51] Bob Dobbs: 15th. Pretty recent.

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: what did you want to say about it?

[00:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[01:00] Cameron McEwen: in your book,

[01:03] Cameron McEwen: as an introduction to your take Trump,

[01:08] Cameron McEwen: what you do is discuss...

[01:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in a way that you think is not common,

[01:19] Cameron McEwen: and you think that,

[01:22] Cameron McEwen: or you put forward the idea that if McLuhan is read in a new way with attention to quotations that are generally not used in McLuhan research,

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: that that provides a kind of lens.

[01:41] Cameron McEwen: or a kind of foundation to get into your take Trump.

[01:47] Cameron McEwen: So in order to sort of set the table for that discussion,

[01:54] Cameron McEwen: I think that the technique of flight gives a good overview of my take on McLuhan,

[02:02] Cameron McEwen: and that will guide me in my discussion with you about your take on McLuhan.

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[02:12] Cameron McEwen: And I think what we might do is look at the bottom quotation from McLuhan in 1961.

[02:23] Cameron McEwen: We can see the heart of the matter.

[02:25] Cameron McEwen: Do you mind if I read a little bit of this quotation from McLuhan?

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: No,

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: no.

[02:32] Bob Dobbs: It's a very important article.

[02:34] Bob Dobbs: The Humanities in the Electronic Age.

[02:37] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[02:38] Cameron McEwen: One of...

[02:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan bulletins to Canada

[02:44] Cameron McEwen: I would call it this was first printed in the bulletin of the Humanities Association of Canada yeah and

[02:56] Cameron McEwen: I believe that

[02:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often took special care in his broadcasts to the Canadian nation you might say

[03:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[03:09] Bob Dobbs: you suggest that he,

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: any major announcement like the medium of the message,

[03:13] Bob Dobbs: he would first do in Canada.

[03:16] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.

[03:17] Cameron McEwen: The global village is another example.

[03:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: that's a good note.

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: Good noticing there.

[03:24] Cameron McEwen: So,

[03:26] Cameron McEwen: what he says here is that Bertrand Russell pointed to the great achievement of the 20th century as the technique of suspended judgment.

[03:36] Cameron McEwen: And,

[03:37] Cameron McEwen: of course...

[03:38] Cameron McEwen: he very often quotes

[03:41] Cameron McEwen: Russell's ABC of relativity.

[03:45] Cameron McEwen: So what he has in mind here is the physics of relativity,

[03:55] Cameron McEwen: the physics of the uncertainty principle.

[04:01] Cameron McEwen: So he says,

[04:02] Cameron McEwen: that is,

[04:03] Cameron McEwen: it made the discovery of the process of insight itself

[04:07] Cameron McEwen: The technique of avoiding automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes that so easily results from any given individual or cultural situation.

[04:21] Cameron McEwen: The discovery of the technique of open field perception,

[04:26] Cameron McEwen: the technique of insight itself.

[04:30] Cameron McEwen: And he goes on to say,

[04:31] Cameron McEwen: this is the means of abstracting oneself from the bias and consequence.

[04:37] Cameron McEwen: of one's own individual and social culture,

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: the technique of suspended judgment,

[04:43] Cameron McEwen: the technique of how not to have a point of view.

[04:49] Cameron McEwen: So the whole question is,

[04:52] Cameron McEwen: how is it possible for humans not to have a point of view?

[05:00] Cameron McEwen: The general way of thinking about how humans experience individually and collectively is to relate that experience to assumptions,

[05:17] Cameron McEwen: assumptions that are either conscious or unconscious.

[05:21] Cameron McEwen: And a huge amount of research has been done in that way.

[05:28] Cameron McEwen: But here's McLuhan saying,

[05:30] Cameron McEwen: that it's possible to exercise a technique of not to have a point of view.

[05:38] Cameron McEwen: That's very interesting.

[05:40] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[05:41] Cameron McEwen: down in the comments on footnote number seven,

[05:47] Cameron McEwen: I contrast

[05:49] Cameron McEwen: Caspar David Friedrich's

[05:51] Cameron McEwen: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,

[05:55] Cameron McEwen: which is an 1818 painting.

[05:58] Cameron McEwen: And in this painting,

[06:01] Cameron McEwen: Friedrich presents a wanderer who's at the tip of a mountain and the wanderer looks out over a sea of cloud and fog that

[06:17] Cameron McEwen: prevents any sort of view of what's below but gives a tremendous view of what's out in front of him and above him.

[06:31] Cameron McEwen: What we might see in this picture is how the wanderer has achieved a point of view that is not the point of view of the people that are down below,

[06:45] Cameron McEwen: the people that have no relation to him because of the fog and the clouds that are between the individual wanderer and all of the people below.

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: So the wanderer has achieved a point of view that is special and that needs to be marked.

[07:08] Cameron McEwen: And when

[07:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talks about the closure of experience,

[07:15] Cameron McEwen: what he's talking about is the romantic attempt to define moments of experience that are revelatory.

[07:29] Cameron McEwen: time is stopped,

[07:31] Cameron McEwen: space is stopped,

[07:33] Cameron McEwen: and the revelatory experience is framed by this stoppage.

[07:40] Cameron McEwen: So then the same footnote number seven goes on to talk about the portrait by Juan Gris in 1916.

[07:54] Cameron McEwen: So almost exactly 100 years later.

[07:57] Cameron McEwen: portrait of Josette,

[07:59] Cameron McEwen: who I believe was his niece.

[08:01] Cameron McEwen: But in the portrait of Josette,

[08:05] Cameron McEwen: which is a Cubist portrait,

[08:09] Cameron McEwen: both the person being painted and the painter have become destabilized.

[08:19] Cameron McEwen: And there is no point of view that is...

[08:27] Cameron McEwen: emphasized or valorized or stabilized.

[08:32] Cameron McEwen: It's a cubist picture where different angles on the face and body of Josette are set forth in a contemporary or

[08:47] Cameron McEwen: instantaneous view,

[08:51] Cameron McEwen: and that view or views,

[08:55] Cameron McEwen: properly plural,

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: not only destabilizes Josette,

[09:01] Cameron McEwen: it also destabilizes the painter.

[09:04] Cameron McEwen: And so the contrast between these two pictures shows what has happened to the privilege of the point of view over the hundred years between 1818 and 1916.

[09:24] Cameron McEwen: And even the First World War might...

[09:25] Cameron McEwen: be seen as the destruction and end of the individual point of view.

[09:32] Cameron McEwen: The war killed indiscriminately huge numbers of people from all the powers of Europe,

[09:41] Cameron McEwen: killed off the flower.

[09:43] Cameron McEwen: of

[09:44] Cameron McEwen: England and Scotland and

[09:47] Cameron McEwen: Germany and

[09:48] Cameron McEwen: France in a way that people just found staggering.

[09:55] Cameron McEwen: They were unable to come to grips with the Magic Johnson of the individual in the face of poisonous gas and in the face of tanks.

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: So what happens over that period,

[10:19] Cameron McEwen: as

[10:20] Cameron McEwen: Russell says,

[10:21] Cameron McEwen: is that judgment becomes suspended.

[10:25] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[10:26] Cameron McEwen: judgment no longer has an anchor in some frame that the individual is able to construct.

[10:39] Cameron McEwen: a new way of

[10:45] Cameron McEwen: Being a human and experiencing as a human had to be found,

[10:55] Cameron McEwen: and here we are 100 years after the

[11:02] Cameron McEwen: First World War and after the portrait by Juan Gris,

[11:08] Cameron McEwen: and we still don't have an answer to that.

[11:12] Cameron McEwen: In my view,

[11:12] Cameron McEwen: the great...

[11:14] Cameron McEwen: contribution of McLuhan is that he saw the problem and attempted to answer it.

[11:22] Cameron McEwen: And we,

[11:24] Cameron McEwen: so far,

[11:25] Cameron McEwen: have not been able to read him in that light.

[11:29] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's the great failing of

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan research,

[11:34] Cameron McEwen: that here was McLuhan attempting to make a world-altering suggestion,

[11:42] Cameron McEwen: a proposal.

[11:44] Cameron McEwen: And it's basically been ignored.

[11:49] Cameron McEwen: So what he says is what's needed to go from the romantic fixture on an object.

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: And notice when the romantic fixes on an object in a certain moment of time,

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: that fixes the experience of the individual.

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: It fixes the experience of the individual in the artwork.

[12:16] Cameron McEwen: It could be a poem,

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: a novel,

[12:20] Cameron McEwen: a painting,

[12:21] Cameron McEwen: whatever.

[12:23] Cameron McEwen: But it also fixes the personality of the artist.

[12:29] Cameron McEwen: So there's a kind of double fixation that goes on.

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: And then both of those become loosened in a way that is very interesting.

[12:43] Cameron McEwen: was dreadful for the history of the world,

[12:47] Cameron McEwen: and now begs for an answer.

[12:52] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: hold it.

[12:53] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[12:54] Bob Dobbs: What were the two things that became lucent or lucid?

[12:59] Cameron McEwen: No,

[12:59] Cameron McEwen: loosed.

[13:01] Bob Dobbs: Say the two again.

[13:03] Bob Dobbs: I missed that.

[13:06] Cameron McEwen: One is the experience within the painting.

[13:11] Cameron McEwen: or the poem or the novel,

[13:16] Cameron McEwen: that becomes loose.

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: And probably Finnegans Wake is a great example of that,

[13:22] Cameron McEwen: but even Ulysses.

[13:25] Cameron McEwen: And the second thing is the artist,

[13:30] Cameron McEwen: him or herself,

[13:32] Cameron McEwen: that does the painting,

[13:33] Cameron McEwen: does the poem,

[13:35] Cameron McEwen: does the novel.

[13:37] Cameron McEwen: Their personality in the romantic moment

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: is fixed,

[13:42] Cameron McEwen: just like what they're putting in the artwork.

[13:45] Cameron McEwen: And 100 years later,

[13:48] Cameron McEwen: both the personality within the artwork and the personality doing the artwork,

[13:55] Cameron McEwen: those both become exploded,

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: one could say.

[13:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[14:01] Bob Dobbs: Wouldn't that be Finnegans Wake,

[14:02] Bob Dobbs: too?

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[14:04] Cameron McEwen: That's what I was just saying.

[14:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[14:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[14:06] Bob Dobbs: the first part,

[14:07] Bob Dobbs: he said in the first case...

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: The subject of the work was...

[14:16] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: So in

[14:21] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake,

[14:22] Cameron McEwen: and here

[14:23] Cameron McEwen: I don't have anything like your expertise in it,

[14:26] Cameron McEwen: but not only is

[14:28] Cameron McEwen: HCE multiple,

[14:30] Cameron McEwen: as the very name says,

[14:32] Cameron McEwen: but then all of the characters blend into each other in various ways.

[14:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[14:39] Cameron McEwen: And.

[14:41] Cameron McEwen: The characters blend into one another and the geography.

[14:47] Cameron McEwen: blends in with the characters.

[14:49] Cameron McEwen: And so there's a kind of a multiple explosion and implosion going on.

[14:59] Cameron McEwen: And the artist in presenting this has to have experienced something like that internally in order to make the objective

[15:15] Cameron McEwen: correlative.

[15:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: I want to mention you don't have the explosion or the simultaneity or the multiple levels in Romantic painting,

[15:26] Bob Dobbs: but it's a bit of a retrieval of the primitives because they bring in discontinuity.

[15:34] Bob Dobbs: So the Romantics move out of the straightforward prose of the Pope,

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: Alexander Pope,

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that era,

[15:40] Bob Dobbs: and the couplet.

[15:42] Bob Dobbs: But now you have discontinuity.

[15:43] Bob Dobbs: So there's the beginning.

[15:45] Bob Dobbs: You could say of the electric,

[15:47] Bob Dobbs: if you say the movie is an electric technology,

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: I think McLuhan considered it a combination of mechanical and electric,

[15:53] Bob Dobbs: but he makes a big deal about these romantic poets anticipating the cinematic aesthetic,

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: well,

[16:01] Bob Dobbs: anticipating cinema with what he calls the aesthetic moment.

[16:05] Bob Dobbs: So that part of electricity,

[16:07] Bob Dobbs: different from print,

[16:09] Bob Dobbs: is discontinuity,

[16:10] Bob Dobbs: and so that's the beginning of the electric age,

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: sneaking in.

[16:14] Bob Dobbs: to the radical romantics.

[16:16] Bob Dobbs: So they're not just trying to retrieve nature,

[16:19] Bob Dobbs: which was a product of the book,

[16:22] Bob Dobbs: and the alphabet.

[16:23] Bob Dobbs: They are also intuiting something that's coming in the 19th century because they're at the beginning.

[16:29] Bob Dobbs: It's discontinuity.

[16:30] Bob Dobbs: So there's the difference.

[16:31] Cameron McEwen: Very good point.

[16:32] Cameron McEwen: So what you could do is you could think of a series of paintings by the romantics.

[16:41] Cameron McEwen: um

[16:42] Cameron McEwen: The discontinuity between them is something that they can't build into the picture,

[16:52] Cameron McEwen: but the pictures taken together are an example of that.

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: And not only are they an example of that,

[16:58] Cameron McEwen: but if you panned over this series of romantic pictures,

[17:05] Cameron McEwen: basically you'd have film.

[17:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[17:08] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[17:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[17:10] Cameron McEwen: and

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: You're exactly right that when humans do something,

[17:19] Cameron McEwen: there's always multiple levels of time and space going on,

[17:26] Cameron McEwen: regardless of whether they are aware of it.

[17:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:30] Bob Dobbs: there's always the past,

[17:31] Bob Dobbs: the present,

[17:31] Bob Dobbs: and the future.

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: But that's horizontal time.

[17:37] Cameron McEwen: There's also vertical time going on.

[17:40] Cameron McEwen: And when artists are producing their work and trying to decide what should I show and how should I show it,

[17:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says they are exemplary for feeling out these coming anti-environment.

[18:01] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[18:02] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[18:05] Bob Dobbs: Just thinking about the vertical.

[18:08] Bob Dobbs: So the

[18:09] Bob Dobbs: Romantics run to nature.

[18:11] Bob Dobbs: They're fed up with the industry and the beginning of cities or industrial cities.

[18:16] Bob Dobbs: So were they taking a vertical flight by plunging into the

[18:22] Bob Dobbs: Lake District or nature or revolution?

[18:27] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[18:27] Bob Dobbs: remember that

[18:30] Cameron McEwen: Wordsworth and Coleridge and those people are not too affected yet.

[18:39] Cameron McEwen: by industry.

[18:40] Cameron McEwen: Industry is certainly starting,

[18:43] Cameron McEwen: but it's going to be another

[18:45] Cameron McEwen: 30 or 40 years before it really explodes with the railways and with the development of the manufacturing cities in the Midlands.

[19:01] Cameron McEwen: But you're right to say that they intuit

[19:08] Cameron McEwen: that the ground beneath their feet is shifting.

[19:14] Cameron McEwen: And they're trying to find a way of dealing with that.

[19:19] Cameron McEwen: And

[19:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan can be seen,

[19:23] Cameron McEwen: as Joyce can be seen,

[19:24] Cameron McEwen: or Eliot can be seen,

[19:26] Cameron McEwen: as

[19:27] Cameron McEwen: 150 years after that,

[19:33] Cameron McEwen: radically experiencing these earthquakes.

[19:37] Cameron McEwen: and trying to find out if it's possible to have a posture anymore.

[19:43] Bob Dobbs: You're right.

[19:44] Bob Dobbs: And in that

[19:46] Bob Dobbs: 50 years coming up,

[19:48] Bob Dobbs: that'll be the beginning.

[19:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan likes to say 1830,

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: but maybe more 1850 with the telegraph.

[19:54] Bob Dobbs: You have the beginning of the hardware communist environment.

[19:59] Bob Dobbs: Hardware Communal Services,

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[20:02] Bob Dobbs: before Mark showed up.

[20:04] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[20:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[20:05] Cameron McEwen: that's very much related to the short conversation we had before we started recording,

[20:13] Cameron McEwen: and that is that the

[20:15] Cameron McEwen: Canadian Confederation was,

[20:19] Cameron McEwen: in large part,

[20:20] Cameron McEwen: a result of the need for social investment that the geography of Canada...

[20:28] Cameron McEwen: Canada made very difficult to achieve through individuals and therefore had to be made through some sort of social contribution to infrastructure.

[20:41] Cameron McEwen: And that's what

[20:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw Marx as kind of riding that social infrastructure wave into the future.

[20:53] Cameron McEwen: Who was going to control it and how would that work?

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[20:58] Bob Dobbs: and that would be a rupture to the sense of the literate individual,

[21:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[21:04] Bob Dobbs: the retrieved tribal starting to happen,

[21:07] Bob Dobbs: and that would threaten the values of

[21:10] Bob Dobbs: Wordsworth and the guys before them.

[21:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[21:13] Cameron McEwen: so what you're talking about there is exactly what I tried to describe in terms of the contrast between the

[21:23] Cameron McEwen: Friedrich painting and the Juan Gris painting.

[21:26] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[21:27] Cameron McEwen: But you have individuality that is kind of enforced,

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: right?

[21:35] Cameron McEwen: The romantic artist,

[21:36] Cameron McEwen: according to McLuhan,

[21:37] Cameron McEwen: can be seen as specifying the ascetic moment.

[21:42] Cameron McEwen: And there's a kind of force involved in that because that moment is divorced from other moments of the artist's life,

[21:54] Cameron McEwen: but also the moments of...

[21:56] Cameron McEwen: the experience of other people,

[21:59] Cameron McEwen: and then below that,

[22:01] Cameron McEwen: the total spectrum of possible experience.

[22:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:06] Cameron McEwen: And so the 20th century is going to represent a kind of continuing descent through those levels of experience.

[22:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[22:15] Bob Dobbs: the destabilizing of the subject in the

[22:19] Cameron McEwen: 20th century.

[22:21] Bob Dobbs: And the attempt to maintain the individual.

[22:26] Bob Dobbs: Fixed perspective,

[22:27] Bob Dobbs: the forcible attempt to ward off multiple instabilities is the romantic character.

[22:34] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[22:35] Cameron McEwen: And the really interesting thing in McLuhan is,

[22:41] Cameron McEwen: if it's possible to have what he calls the technique of how not to have a point of view,

[22:52] Cameron McEwen: the question is,

[22:53] Cameron McEwen: how can that not be?

[22:56] Cameron McEwen: the further violent imposition of the individual on experience,

[23:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[23:05] Cameron McEwen: How can it be that you have a technique that is not a romantic stabilization?

[23:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:15] Bob Dobbs: what is that?

[23:15] Cameron McEwen: That's a very interesting question.

[23:17] Cameron McEwen: Pardon me?

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: What is that?

[23:20] Bob Dobbs: How do you?

[23:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[23:20] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[23:21] Cameron McEwen: So,

[23:21] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[23:22] Cameron McEwen: that's one of the questions posed.

[23:25] Cameron McEwen: by

[23:26] Cameron McEwen: Joyce in his novels,

[23:29] Cameron McEwen: right?

[23:30] Cameron McEwen: How can you have a technique of not having a point of view that is not somehow a reflection of the individual?

[23:42] Cameron McEwen: How can the artist give up his or her individuality and yet still produce a work?

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: so that makes the...

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: Remember what McLuhan said about Mallarmé and the symbolist.

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: They took the language,

[23:58] Bob Dobbs: the means for expressing a point of view,

[24:00] Bob Dobbs: the language itself as an object.

[24:03] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[24:04] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[24:04] Cameron McEwen: Not only as an object,

[24:05] Cameron McEwen: as a subject.

[24:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: The subject,

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: right.

[24:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[24:09] Cameron McEwen: So,

[24:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[24:11] Cameron McEwen: And that is going to be the

[24:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answer to this question of the technique of how not to have a point of view,

[24:20] Cameron McEwen: is that if...

[24:23] Cameron McEwen: the artist or the theoretician,

[24:27] Cameron McEwen: the theoretician of media,

[24:29] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[24:31] Cameron McEwen: if they take their stance on the spectrum of possibilities,

[24:39] Cameron McEwen: then number one,

[24:41] Cameron McEwen: they admit that they are exercising one possibility,

[24:47] Cameron McEwen: but number two,

[24:49] Cameron McEwen: that possibility and

[24:52] Cameron McEwen: All of the experience that they're looking at.

[24:57] Cameron McEwen: in their either individual work or in their book or in their film,

[25:02] Cameron McEwen: all of that is also an expression of possibility.

[25:07] Cameron McEwen: And so what you have on both the subject and the object is attention to the inherent possibilities of every mode of experience.

[25:23] Bob Dobbs: And expression or the medium.

[25:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[25:26] Bob Dobbs: Mode of medium.

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[25:28] Cameron McEwen: right.

[25:29] Cameron McEwen: So the media has the spectrum of possibilities.

[25:34] Cameron McEwen: And what that means is you never can say anything without having regard to the possibilities of what you might have said instead.

[25:46] Cameron McEwen: And you can never say anything about other people that doesn't look at the possibilities.

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: of what they might have said instead.

[25:58] Cameron McEwen: So everything comes down to this and a spectrum of possibilities,

[26:02] Cameron McEwen: and

[26:04] Cameron McEwen: I liken it oftentimes in my blog to a kind of piano that gets played.

[26:13] Cameron McEwen: And the different notes constitute identity,

[26:20] Cameron McEwen: constitute the form of experience.

[26:24] Cameron McEwen: And the great question is,

[26:26] Cameron McEwen: who plays the piano?

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: And that's a kind of nobody.

[26:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[26:32] Cameron McEwen: So the nobody that plays the piano is kind of the answer that McLuhan and others in the 20th century come up with as

[26:47] Cameron McEwen: the answer to what is human identity.

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[26:51] Bob Dobbs: did you say they come up with the answer nobody?

[26:54] Bob Dobbs: Is the answer?

[26:55] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[26:56] Cameron McEwen: This nobody in the no man's land where the piano is played is the notion they have of human identity.

[27:13] Cameron McEwen: It's one that,

[27:14] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[27:15] Cameron McEwen: when

[27:15] Cameron McEwen: Eliot in his early essay on the individual talent,

[27:25] Cameron McEwen: talks about the complete change of the history of any field when a new meaningful work is put into it.

[27:38] Cameron McEwen: That's how human experience works,

[27:41] Cameron McEwen: that from note to note on the piano of experience,

[27:48] Cameron McEwen: everything changes,

[27:51] Cameron McEwen: all past,

[27:52] Cameron McEwen: all future.

[27:54] Cameron McEwen: And trying to understand how that works and what it means is the great task for the

[28:06] Cameron McEwen: 20th and 21st centuries.

[28:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:08] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking of that quote from Eliot where you talk about a new serious performance affects everything in the past,

[28:19] Bob Dobbs: back to Homer,

[28:20] Bob Dobbs: say,

[28:21] Bob Dobbs: if it's in writing.

[28:22] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you were thinking?

[28:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[28:25] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[28:26] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[28:26] Bob Dobbs: Two things on the nobody.

[28:29] Bob Dobbs: When Zappa had one of his first interviews in the New York Times in 1966,

[28:33] Bob Dobbs: they were playing in a New York club there and getting attention.

[28:38] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[28:40] Bob Dobbs: nobody knows who the drummer is in the band.

[28:44] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows which instrument is the drummer.

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[28:49] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know who was playing what.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: There was a drummer.

[28:52] Bob Dobbs: guitarist and that,

[28:53] Bob Dobbs: but in the end,

[28:54] Bob Dobbs: the rhythm,

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: they weren't sure if it was run by the drummer or if it was.

[28:58] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know which instrument was the drummer or playing the drummer role.

[29:01] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[29:03] Cameron McEwen: I like that a lot.

[29:04] Cameron McEwen: Because in the music that was developing back then,

[29:10] Cameron McEwen: the rhythm guitar played a very important role.

[29:17] Cameron McEwen: Was the rhythm coming from you

[29:19] Cameron McEwen: The drummer,

[29:20] Cameron McEwen: was it coming from a guitarist?

[29:22] Cameron McEwen: Was it coming from some other instrument?

[29:26] Cameron McEwen: And yeah,

[29:27] Cameron McEwen: that's excellent.

[29:30] Cameron McEwen: Contemporaneous with that,

[29:32] Cameron McEwen: Beckett was writing his plays about nobody.

[29:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:37] Bob Dobbs: In 1975,

[29:41] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan hit on a theme,

[29:43] Bob Dobbs: which you hear here and there for the next six months in

[29:46] Bob Dobbs: 75, was that

[29:48] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's a nobody at a ball game.

[29:52] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: Remember that one?

[29:54] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[29:54] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: Everybody becomes a nobody.

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[29:58] Bob Dobbs: the jumbotron comes in,

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: and then the camera can focus on people.

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: So that created Pamela Anderson,

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: the star,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: or,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: the TV star,

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: whatever she was,

[30:09] Bob Dobbs: because it focused on her,

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: and then the camera wanted to move,

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: and the audience said,

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: no,

[30:14] Bob Dobbs: keep it focused on that blonde girl there,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: just out of high school or something.

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: So that's a good example of how the romantic ideal

[30:27] Cameron McEwen: or the romantic need has not left humans.

[30:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[30:33] Cameron McEwen: The humans are desperate for some frame of reference.

[30:39] Cameron McEwen: And somebody like Pamela Anderson was able to kind of mock that.

[30:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[30:47] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[30:47] Cameron McEwen: you want to frame me?

[30:49] Cameron McEwen: Fine.

[30:50] Cameron McEwen: I'll do anything that you want to frame,

[30:52] Cameron McEwen: but I'm also going to be outside that frame.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to be still a nobody.

[30:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[30:58] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: So that happened the same time as the Internet started,

[31:05] Bob Dobbs: which allowed people to hijack broadcasting and start making their own spaces,

[31:11] Bob Dobbs: being their own publishers.

[31:13] Bob Dobbs: So that retrieves a virtual version of the Gutenberg meme.

[31:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting that Jumbotron was a parallel retrieval like the Internet was at the same time.

[31:23] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[31:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[31:24] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[31:26] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[31:27] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.

[31:27] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[31:28] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[31:30] Bob Dobbs: No,

[31:31] Bob Dobbs: I just,

[31:33] Bob Dobbs: you say,

[31:34] Bob Dobbs: you're still in this,

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: so let's keep talking.

[31:37] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[31:37] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[31:38] Cameron McEwen: I think having said that,

[31:40] Cameron McEwen: we can go on to your book.

[31:42] Bob Dobbs: No,

[31:42] Bob Dobbs: but let's talk about the technique of flight.

[31:44] Bob Dobbs: What is that?

[31:45] Bob Dobbs: What an odd title for what we're talking about.

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: So I think we need to talk about that.

[31:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[31:50] Cameron McEwen: that's a great quote from

[31:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[31:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah. He says that the romantics

[31:57] Cameron McEwen: could not discover the technique of flight.

[31:59] Cameron McEwen: What's that mean?

[32:01] Cameron McEwen: It means that between poems or between pictures painted by a romantic artist is a gap.

[32:12] Cameron McEwen: And that gap is actually the fundamental thing to what they're doing,

[32:17] Cameron McEwen: but they don't know that.

[32:19] Cameron McEwen: So they take flight,

[32:20] Cameron McEwen: but the flight is unconscious.

[32:24] Cameron McEwen: They don't understand.

[32:26] Cameron McEwen: how the human being kind of lives in the gap from moment to moment.

[32:33] Cameron McEwen: And it's by exploring that gap that electricity is going to be discovered and applied.

[32:47] Cameron McEwen: And the whole experience of the

[32:51] Cameron McEwen: 19th century is going to be an attempt to come to grips

[32:56] Cameron McEwen: with the instability implied by the gap.

[33:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[33:00] Bob Dobbs: And also in art,

[33:03] Bob Dobbs: the Cubist view is the first product of the flight?

[33:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[33:08] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say that.

[33:10] Cameron McEwen: The Cubism is sort of very early

[33:15] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: maybe a little bit in the

[33:19] Cameron McEwen: 1890s, but

[33:21] Cameron McEwen: French poetry,

[33:23] Cameron McEwen: Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

[33:26] Cameron McEwen: considerably ahead of that.

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[33:29] Bob Dobbs: So,

[33:30] Bob Dobbs: but I'm saying that's an example of becoming conscious of flying in the gap?

[33:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[33:37] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[33:38] Cameron McEwen: But it's not,

[33:40] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[33:41] Cameron McEwen: cubism is often more the question than the answer,

[33:45] Cameron McEwen: right?

[33:49] Cameron McEwen: And even in

[33:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, the late work like Take Two,

[33:56] Cameron McEwen: today constantly reverts to the nobody,

[34:01] Cameron McEwen: to the gap,

[34:02] Cameron McEwen: and to the no man's land.

[34:05] Cameron McEwen: But the technique of flight involved there is still unclear.

[34:14] Cameron McEwen: And personally,

[34:15] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that

[34:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan ever came up with a good answer to what is the medium.

[34:26] Cameron McEwen: He knew that the question of the medium was all important.

[34:31] Cameron McEwen: The medium is the message.

[34:33] Cameron McEwen: The medium is the question.

[34:35] Cameron McEwen: The medium is the demand that we need to make on ourselves.

[34:39] Cameron McEwen: But I don't think that he came up with a clear answer to that,

[34:44] Cameron McEwen: which would have resulted in a science of media.

[34:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[34:51] Bob Dobbs: So,

[34:51] Bob Dobbs: um,

[34:55] Bob Dobbs: You know the word,

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: you ever see the word mediums?

[34:58] Bob Dobbs: People talk about the plural of medium as mediums.

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[35:02] Bob Dobbs: I take the plural as media.

[35:04] Bob Dobbs: Is mediums accepted in some places?

[35:08] Bob Dobbs: Maybe Americans.

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: People who are nowhere near Toronto use the word mediums,

[35:12] Bob Dobbs: but

[35:13] Bob Dobbs: Torontonians know the word media.

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: What is the rule on that,

[35:17] Bob Dobbs: the grammatical?

[35:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[35:19] Cameron McEwen: I don't think there is a grammatical rule.

[35:23] Cameron McEwen: A whole bunch of words.

[35:24] Cameron McEwen: that are pure Latin,

[35:29] Cameron McEwen: when they come into the English language,

[35:32] Cameron McEwen: people really don't know how to make the plurals.

[35:35] Cameron McEwen: So,

[35:35] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[35:36] Cameron McEwen: stadium,

[35:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[35:38] Cameron McEwen: How many people say stadia?

[35:40] Cameron McEwen: Very,

[35:41] Cameron McEwen: very few,

[35:42] Cameron McEwen: right?

[35:43] Cameron McEwen: Stadiums is the usual word.

[35:45] Cameron McEwen: And there's many examples of that.

[35:50] Cameron McEwen: With media and medium and mediums,

[35:55] Cameron McEwen: The problem there is that the word medium has many different meanings,

[36:02] Cameron McEwen: and nobody is quite sure what the different plurals signify.

[36:09] Cameron McEwen: Usually when people talk about media,

[36:12] Cameron McEwen: they're taking the term to mean newspapers and film and all that sort of stuff,

[36:19] Cameron McEwen: and it really doesn't have a singular.

[36:22] Cameron McEwen: Very few people talk about...

[36:24] Cameron McEwen: the newspaper as a medium.

[36:28] Cameron McEwen: Lewis did,

[36:31] Cameron McEwen: and there are certainly examples of that,

[36:36] Cameron McEwen: but they're fairly rare.

[36:39] Bob Dobbs: Of talking,

[36:42] Bob Dobbs: of using the word medium,

[36:44] Bob Dobbs: they don't use the word medium?

[36:45] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you just said?

[36:46] Cameron McEwen: No,

[36:47] Cameron McEwen: what I'm saying is that the use of the singular medium to refer

[36:53] Cameron McEwen: refer,

[36:53] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[36:54] Cameron McEwen: to newspapers.

[36:56] Cameron McEwen: That's something that Lewis does in American Cosmic Man,

[37:00] Cameron McEwen: but it's not very common.

[37:03] Cameron McEwen: Usually,

[37:04] Cameron McEwen: when people think about media,

[37:07] Cameron McEwen: they don't think that there's a singular behind it,

[37:10] Cameron McEwen: medium.

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[37:13] Cameron McEwen: They think of media as itself being a sort of natural collective.

[37:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[37:18] Bob Dobbs: So if you look at the newspaper,

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: it's not a medium,

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: it's the media.

[37:22] Bob Dobbs: The media is the most pervasive new word of the 20th century,

[37:28] Bob Dobbs: other than slang,

[37:30] Bob Dobbs: different slangs,

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: but as a proper noun.

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: That's why there's confusion about it,

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: which is natural,

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: because Cubism,

[37:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used to say,

[37:40] Bob Dobbs: was originally called Munton art.

[37:44] Bob Dobbs: And Munton would be the effect of the telephone.

[37:52] Bob Dobbs: You'd be discarded.

[37:53] Cameron McEwen: You'd be in two places at once.

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: Probably the telegraph more than the telephone,

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[38:04] Cameron McEwen: The telegraph represented an extension of communication and of experience that was completely novel in

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: the history of the world.

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: but it was writing.

[38:22] Bob Dobbs: It had the eye factor.

[38:23] Bob Dobbs: The telephone has you talking intimately with someone,

[38:29] Bob Dobbs: so they might as well be in the room with you.

[38:33] Bob Dobbs: There's still a remoteness when you read a message in the telegraph.

[38:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[38:42] Cameron McEwen: I think that when you say that,

[38:46] Cameron McEwen: you're looking backwards.

[38:49] Cameron McEwen: If you look at it...

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: in 1835 when they telegraphed as new,

[38:56] Cameron McEwen: revolutionary,

[38:58] Cameron McEwen: never seen anything like this before in the history of the world.

[39:03] Cameron McEwen: It's startlingly destabilizing.

[39:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[39:09] Cameron McEwen: Or Munton,

[39:10] Cameron McEwen: as you were saying.

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[39:15] Bob Dobbs: so the flight.

[39:19] Bob Dobbs: The overview,

[39:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says that literate man has the bird's eye view,

[39:24] Bob Dobbs: which biases people towards the vertical school of symbolism.

[39:29] Bob Dobbs: But the technique of flight,

[39:31] Bob Dobbs: is that got more with the gap than the bird's eye view,

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: if you're looking down on a landscape flying over it?

[39:40] Cameron McEwen: I think it's both.

[39:43] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan uses it both ways.

[39:47] Cameron McEwen: The general idea is that this...

[39:52] Cameron McEwen: A kind of attitude which can be taken up by the theoretician is actually how all experience already works,

[40:02] Cameron McEwen: that human beings already are taking flight between moments and they're taking flight over the possibilities of experience and experience can be seen as growing out of this process,

[40:17] Cameron McEwen: but it's totally unconscious.

[40:20] Cameron McEwen: in humans,

[40:21] Cameron McEwen: just like using the grammar of a language is unconscious.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: And if we're going to get a new kind of stability based on this extremely

[40:42] Cameron McEwen: unstable situation,

[40:44] Cameron McEwen: it has to come from the consciousness of

[40:50] Cameron McEwen: this,

[40:55] Cameron McEwen: I guess you could say of this fact of flight,

[40:57] Cameron McEwen: the fact that human beings are already doing this.

[41:01] Cameron McEwen: It's already something with the kernel of the future in it,

[41:09] Cameron McEwen: if we're going to have a future.

[41:12] Cameron McEwen: But it needs to,

[41:13] Cameron McEwen: we need to isolate the fundamental forms or the fundamental structure.

[41:20] Cameron McEwen: that are in play here,

[41:22] Cameron McEwen: and that's the medium that is the message.

[41:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[41:25] Bob Dobbs: So he pointed out that the movie was a mixture of the mechanical and electric,

[41:33] Bob Dobbs: so the eye and the ear.

[41:36] Bob Dobbs: It was a means of flight through the kinetic aspects of the movie,

[41:41] Bob Dobbs: and it was the final container.

[41:46] Bob Dobbs: He said the movie contained all other media.

[41:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: Then you get into radio and TV,

[41:51] Bob Dobbs: which is pure process of circuitry.

[41:54] Bob Dobbs: So the cinema completes the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[42:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[42:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:03] Bob Dobbs: and the aesthetic moment.

[42:05] Cameron McEwen: It represents,

[42:07] Cameron McEwen: not only does it complete it,

[42:08] Cameron McEwen: but it represents an attempt to get back to it,

[42:14] Cameron McEwen: an attempt to sort of put it into concrete.

[42:18] Cameron McEwen: So you can see today with all of the crap that

[42:22] Cameron McEwen: Netflix and Amazon Prime and

[42:25] Cameron McEwen: HBO produce as movies,

[42:30] Cameron McEwen: they're called movies,

[42:32] Cameron McEwen: but really it's just junk that can be thrown together in an attempt to fixate viewers'

[42:43] Cameron McEwen: attention.

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: to re-

[42:47] Bob Dobbs: the meme of individuality or individual subjectivity.

[42:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:52] Cameron McEwen: get back to the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[42:54] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[42:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:56] Bob Dobbs: and so that's what America is,

[42:58] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[42:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: Movies and rock and roll,

[43:01] Bob Dobbs: kinetic and the literate individual,

[43:05] Bob Dobbs: but mechanized or going through hardware industry.

[43:08] Bob Dobbs: Correct,

[43:10] Cameron McEwen: and I assume that that's getting close to a...

[43:17] Cameron McEwen: to,

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[43:19] Cameron McEwen: close to a springboard for your book.

[43:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[43:24] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[43:27] Bob Dobbs: What,

[43:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[43:31] Bob Dobbs: on page 136 of

[43:36] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to archetype,

[43:38] Bob Dobbs: he talks about the eight examples of national plenary awareness,

[43:43] Bob Dobbs: a phrase that gives a sense of mastery.

[43:46] Bob Dobbs: I was wondering what it would be in Canada.

[43:51] Bob Dobbs: Is there a phrase that gives a sense of what he called plenary awareness in Canadian culture?

[44:02] Bob Dobbs: And what would be the century bias?

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: I brought this up in a talk in

[44:12] Bob Dobbs: July 2001.

[44:14] Bob Dobbs: when I was visiting Halifax,

[44:16] Bob Dobbs: and

[44:18] Bob Dobbs: I was reading some Air

[44:21] Bob Dobbs: Canada magazine on the way from New York to

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: Halifax, and it gave me all these ideas about fashions and that,

[44:30] Bob Dobbs: some different articles in there.

[44:32] Bob Dobbs: But

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: I came up with,

[44:35] Bob Dobbs: now you might know this,

[44:36] Bob Dobbs: but you were in the States too,

[44:38] Bob Dobbs: but there was some kind of ad for beer.

[44:44] Bob Dobbs: that people decided the slogan on it,

[44:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[44:47] Bob Dobbs: I am one or I am important or something.

[44:50] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: Canadian commercial or beer commercial?

[44:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[44:55] Cameron McEwen: but I find it easy to imagine.

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: so if anybody remembers it,

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: I decided that was the expression for Canadian quadrophrenia.

[45:06] Bob Dobbs: Canadians were quadrophrenia because they were the borderline case.

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: They were up against a whole bunch of different cultures and territories.

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: You know how McLuhan talked about that?

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[45:16] Bob Dobbs: And so they,

[45:18] Bob Dobbs: in a way,

[45:19] Bob Dobbs: didn't have one...

[45:21] Bob Dobbs: one sensory preference.

[45:23] Bob Dobbs: They would hop from one to another in a low dimension,

[45:27] Bob Dobbs: a low definition aspect.

[45:31] Bob Dobbs: So I was making up this whole theory about the Canadian culture and people,

[45:35] Bob Dobbs: I asked the audience,

[45:36] Bob Dobbs: what phrase in your culture is symptomatic of what I'm describing as quadrophrenia?

[45:41] Bob Dobbs: And a couple people came up with that commercial.

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: So I'll have to go back and look at the tape and see what that phrase was.

[45:50] Bob Dobbs: remember it but just wondering if you but you weren't in canada in that period you had lost your locality you were an american for years right yes yeah i had uh i had at that point in time i'd i've been uh largely in the states for about 20 years right

[46:09] Cameron McEwen: though um um i was uh my most of my family was still in Canada and I was

[46:18] Cameron McEwen: going back to visit once or twice a year.

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[46:25] Bob Dobbs: so people,

[46:27] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Gutenberg

[46:28] Bob Dobbs: Galaxy talks about the verbal versus the pictorial.

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: So on the surface,

[46:32] Bob Dobbs: the movie seems a threat to book culture.

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: And sure,

[46:37] Bob Dobbs: teachers in the

[46:38] Bob Dobbs: 20s probably worried that kids were watching too much movies,

[46:41] Bob Dobbs: right?

[46:42] Bob Dobbs: Watching too many movies and losing their literacy.

[46:47] Bob Dobbs: So that's what's so unique about McLuhan.

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: Say,

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: no,

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: no,

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: movies ain't tactility.

[46:51] Bob Dobbs: They're the completion of literacy of the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[46:55] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[46:55] Bob Dobbs: that would have been a hard one for people to get if they actually knew he said it back in the 50s.

[47:00] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[47:00] Bob Dobbs: right.

[47:03] Cameron McEwen: But let me just go back for a minute.

[47:05] Cameron McEwen: When you were talking about sort of the instability of identity in Canada and how everything was low-res compared to...

[47:16] Cameron McEwen: to

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: American high res.

[47:21] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[47:23] Cameron McEwen: what's interesting about

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: Canada and what kind of enthused him about being a Canadian is that

[47:34] Cameron McEwen: Canada, because of its low res experience,

[47:41] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of picture of how experience works.

[47:46] Cameron McEwen: So the all experience,

[47:49] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[47:50] Cameron McEwen: is Canadian,

[47:52] Cameron McEwen: but what is American is the attempt to fixate experiences.

[47:58] Cameron McEwen: As we were saying before about the

[48:02] Cameron McEwen: Jumbotron, what happens in the United States is that the experience which is low res and which doesn't feel right because it's...

[48:16] Cameron McEwen: fluid and it's not we are number one,

[48:21] Cameron McEwen: that kind of low-res experience gets highlighted,

[48:27] Cameron McEwen: gets Duncan Pryde in American culture.

[48:32] Cameron McEwen: And that tension between low and high res is still very much going on.

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: And I would be very surprised if it doesn't play a big role in your pamphlet.

[48:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[48:47] Bob Dobbs: And did you say that the epiphany of we're number one,

[48:53] Bob Dobbs: is that what you're saying,

[48:54] Bob Dobbs: is the American preference,

[48:57] Bob Dobbs: the American archetype?

[48:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[48:59] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[49:01] Cameron McEwen: It's an attempt to get back to the

[49:03] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg galaxy or an attempt to pour the foundations of the

[49:08] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg galaxy into the world,

[49:11] Cameron McEwen: into a world that's inherently dynamic and can't be.

[49:15] Cameron McEwen: concretized.

[49:17] Cameron McEwen: So the fundamental difference between

[49:24] Cameron McEwen: Canadians and Americans is that

[49:27] Cameron McEwen: Americans simply cannot let go of being number one,

[49:33] Cameron McEwen: cannot let go of having experience that is fixated,

[49:40] Cameron McEwen: whereas Canadians never had that.

[49:44] Cameron McEwen: are uncomfortable with that,

[49:46] Cameron McEwen: find it strange and constraining.

[49:50] Cameron McEwen: and just hard to believe.

[49:53] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking that the aesthetic moment that probably peaked with the beatniks going on the road and having some epiphany,

[50:02] Bob Dobbs: some archetypal meaningful experience,

[50:06] Bob Dobbs: that would be trying to get a fix on things in a liquid situation,

[50:10] Bob Dobbs: find the one that's the mountain.

[50:13] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[50:14] Cameron McEwen: but look at what's going on now with the cancel culture.

[50:19] Cameron McEwen: The cancel culture is simply the idea that a single dogma can be concretized as true.

[50:32] Cameron McEwen: And you need to salute it,

[50:36] Cameron McEwen: obey it,

[50:38] Cameron McEwen: further it as the meaning of life.

[50:42] Cameron McEwen: And all American academia have been Gleichschaltung.

[50:48] Cameron McEwen: schultz,

[50:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[50:49] Cameron McEwen: That was the Nazi word for getting everything to be the same,

[50:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[50:55] Cameron McEwen: That's now happening in American culture.

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: So the media,

[50:59] Cameron McEwen: the academia,

[51:00] Cameron McEwen: the Congress,

[51:02] Cameron McEwen: everybody is attempting to signal their need for one dimensionality.

[51:15] Cameron McEwen: And of course,

[51:15] Cameron McEwen: it's creating huge

[51:17] Cameron McEwen: problems because let's say you have one idea about immigration and that one idea is that if immigration is not purely white then

[51:32] Cameron McEwen: it's good then you end up with a situation on the border that on the one hand has dogma and on the other hand has reality and nobody knows how to fix that

[51:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[51:49] Bob Dobbs: I had a thought there.

[51:56] Bob Dobbs: The archetype of the individual epiphany,

[52:01] Bob Dobbs: that was the transcendentalist.

[52:03] Bob Dobbs: This is why McLuhan set himself up in the ancient quarrel against the transcendentalist,

[52:09] Bob Dobbs: the Emerson,

[52:10] Bob Dobbs: Ralph Waldo Emerson school.

[52:12] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,

[52:13] Bob Dobbs: would you say that...

[52:16] Bob Dobbs: Thomism,

[52:18] Bob Dobbs: Aquinas'

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: philosophy or doctrine was multifaceted,

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: not subject to the effect of the printed book?

[52:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[52:28] Cameron McEwen: that's certainly what McLuhan often wrote.

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[52:32] Cameron McEwen: When he wrote about the affinities between Joyce and Aquinas,

[52:37] Cameron McEwen: what he was saying is that for both of them,

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: the labyrinth is a kind of master image.

[52:46] Cameron McEwen: The labyrinth is the confrontation with different points of view where if there can be a weighting,

[53:01] Cameron McEwen: weight,

[53:03] Cameron McEwen: W-E-I-G-H,

[53:05] Cameron McEwen: if there can be a weighting or a proper emphasis on those different points of view,

[53:11] Cameron McEwen: it can't be because one of them is privileged.

[53:16] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[53:18] Cameron McEwen: it has to be something like the procedure of Thomas where the various objections are listed and then they are taken up in their own terms.

[53:32] Cameron McEwen: So that's very similar to what we were saying earlier about the piano experience or about the possibilities of experience.

[53:44] Cameron McEwen: lie vertically below all experience.

[53:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: Again,

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: another idea.

[53:53] Bob Dobbs: It escapes me for a second.

[53:55] Bob Dobbs: Let me think.

[53:58] Bob Dobbs: So I'm thinking about the Canadian character.

[54:05] Bob Dobbs: In general,

[54:06] Bob Dobbs: though,

[54:06] Bob Dobbs: Canadians and Americans go out to be alone.

[54:10] Bob Dobbs: They both grew up in the wilderness.

[54:15] Bob Dobbs: So

[54:17] Bob Dobbs: Canada is not extremely,

[54:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[54:22] Bob Dobbs: obviously un-American.

[54:24] Bob Dobbs: It's these subtleties we're talking about between the Canadian and the American.

[54:28] Bob Dobbs: And maybe it's more obvious to other parts of the world.

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: they talk about

[54:33] Bob Dobbs: Canadians being very different from Americans.

[54:36] Bob Dobbs: But among ourselves,

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: we don't see it as much between Canadians and Americans.

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: So.

[54:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan defines the American

[54:47] Bob Dobbs: is not visual.

[54:48] Bob Dobbs: He's kinetic manipulatory.

[54:50] Bob Dobbs: So that's industry.

[54:52] Bob Dobbs: Whereas the British are visually biased.

[54:55] Bob Dobbs: I know it like the back of my hand.

[54:58] Bob Dobbs: So the kinetic plus visual part of America leads to the paradox that they're always inventing anti-environment that undermine their treasured literate

[55:14] Bob Dobbs: individualist visual bias.

[55:16] Bob Dobbs: origins or archetype.

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[55:20] Bob Dobbs: They're always undermining themselves.

[55:22] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[55:23] Cameron McEwen: But that's sort of the case with all experience.

[55:26] Cameron McEwen: You could say that that's one of the insights of American cosmic man is that

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: America presents a kind of speed up portrait of everybody.

[55:41] Cameron McEwen: In the world.

[55:42] Bob Dobbs: Every culture in the world.

[55:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:46] Cameron McEwen: well,

[55:47] Cameron McEwen: of individual experience.

[55:50] Cameron McEwen: You're talking about America and many things that undermines what it was.

[55:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[55:54] Cameron McEwen: all experiences like that.

[55:56] Cameron McEwen: That's what it means to grow up.

[55:59] Cameron McEwen: That's what it means to become educated.

[56:02] Cameron McEwen: That's what it means to learn a language when you're an infant.

[56:10] Cameron McEwen: Growing up means to destabilize what you were.

[56:15] Cameron McEwen: And the American answer to that destabilization,

[56:20] Cameron McEwen: which is inherent to all experience,

[56:24] Cameron McEwen: it's inherent to being a human being,

[56:27] Cameron McEwen: the American response to that is twofold.

[56:32] Cameron McEwen: One is,

[56:32] Cameron McEwen: as you're saying,

[56:33] Cameron McEwen: to invent new things that even more destabilize.

[56:38] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: it's the demand for stabilization.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: And it's that.

[56:45] Cameron McEwen: contrast that really defines the United States.

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: Canada,

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: in comparison,

[56:52] Cameron McEwen: is much slower.

[56:57] Cameron McEwen: Canadians are much more content with where they are,

[57:01] Cameron McEwen: where they were,

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: compared to Americans.

[57:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[57:07] Cameron McEwen: But let me just,

[57:08] Cameron McEwen: if I can,

[57:10] Cameron McEwen: I want to go back to this whole idea of going out to be alone.

[57:13] Cameron McEwen: Because that actually recaptures what we've talked about from start to finish.

[57:19] Cameron McEwen: Because going out to be alone for McLuhan has been misunderstood.

[57:23] Cameron McEwen: People think that he's thinking about,

[57:26] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: you go out and you only go out to be alone,

[57:33] Cameron McEwen: but how can you go to a restaurant where there's all these people?

[57:36] Cameron McEwen: How can you go to a concert where there's all these people or a hockey game or something?

[57:41] Cameron McEwen: and they just they they

[57:43] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't make sense to people,

[57:44] Cameron McEwen: and so they repeat it,

[57:46] Cameron McEwen: but they have no idea what McLuhan was talking about.

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: But

[57:50] Cameron McEwen: I think what McLuhan was talking about is how do you go out from yourself?

[57:58] Cameron McEwen: How do you express yourself?

[58:02] Cameron McEwen: And the idea of going out to be alone means that the...

[58:10] Cameron McEwen: the

[58:12] Cameron McEwen: constellation of personality comes only from inside.

[58:18] Cameron McEwen: So you go out from yourself,

[58:20] Cameron McEwen: of course you're with other people,

[58:22] Cameron McEwen: and the question arises,

[58:24] Cameron McEwen: how much influence,

[58:26] Cameron McEwen: how much input is there from those people on your identity?

[58:31] Cameron McEwen: And

[58:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan idea is that

[58:34] Cameron McEwen: Americans and

[58:36] Cameron McEwen: Canadians too,

[58:38] Cameron McEwen: but to a lesser extent.

[58:40] Cameron McEwen: Canadians and Americans go out to be alone in the sense that they define who they are from the inside and don't allow input from the outside.

[58:52] Cameron McEwen: And he says that's completely different in every other culture of the world.

[58:56] Cameron McEwen: And of course,

[58:57] Cameron McEwen: he's right.

[58:58] Cameron McEwen: And it means that in international relations,

[59:04] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[59:05] Cameron McEwen: Americans find it very,

[59:07] Cameron McEwen: very difficult.

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: even to begin to understand other cultures,

[59:12] Cameron McEwen: because that would mean that they weren't going out of themselves to be alone.

[59:18] Cameron McEwen: It would mean that there was input coming from the outside,

[59:21] Cameron McEwen: and that's prohibited by their idea of who they are.

[59:26] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[59:26] Bob Dobbs: and I think you're right that they make new technologies to retrieve the individual,

[59:33] Bob Dobbs: and that's capitalism.

[59:34] Bob Dobbs: You're always,

[59:36] Bob Dobbs: like,

[59:36] Bob Dobbs: why did radio...

[59:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[59:38] Bob Dobbs: in the 20s and

[59:39] Bob Dobbs: 30s become commercialized.

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: Sarnoff,

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan Wright about him,

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: it always has to be put back into private ownership.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: So capitalism is Americanism in a way.

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: absolutely.

[59:56] Bob Dobbs: And so they figured when they made

[59:59] Bob Dobbs: Web 1.0,

[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: the whole game was,

[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: how do we turn this back into the individual,

[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: the virtual patina of individuality?

[1:00:07] Bob Dobbs: So they went into pay internet,

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: and then Facebook and those guys took over.

[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: And nobody knows why they took over,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: how this happened.

[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: But that's...

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the reason you're going to always individualize increasingly complex and collective media back into the individual archetype,

[1:00:28] Bob Dobbs: even though it's never retrieved completely.

[1:00:31] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:00:32] Cameron McEwen: So we're like two people that are circling a drain.

[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: We keep coming back to the same place.

[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: We had briefly talked about the difference between red and blue Toryism.

[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: And what you're saying is that the

[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: United States has always been dominated by blue Toryism,

[1:00:58] Cameron McEwen: as to say a conservatism that distrusts social action,

[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: distrusts the collective.

[1:01:09] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?

[1:01:10] Bob Dobbs: They distrust the collective.

[1:01:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: And that leads to the Lone Ranger,

[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: and the...

[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: the savior who rides off into the sunset by himself or herself.

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:01:24] Cameron McEwen: They can't,

[1:01:25] Cameron McEwen: they can't help noting that that stranger who's sort of the answer to American individuality is also a nobody.

[1:01:39] Cameron McEwen: So they,

[1:01:40] Cameron McEwen: they have to have the mask on him or the,

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: or

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: Superman has to be

[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: Clark Kent.

[1:01:47] Cameron McEwen: And nobody knows the relationship between the two of them.

[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:01:51] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: Batman has to be Bruce Wayne.

[1:01:54] Cameron McEwen: And nobody knows the relationship between the two of them.

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: that makes me think that the present mass culture is everybody attempting to be nobody to get a kind of conformity,

[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: uniformity,

[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: or consensus in a frightening situation.

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: Everybody goes,

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: because there's lots of...

[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: scientific data that the masks don't work.

[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: So why do people prefer it?

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: in America,

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: they prefer it because it reduces everybody to nobody again,

[1:02:24] Bob Dobbs: which people have to suppress their individual ambitions for any kind of collective action in America.

[1:02:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: they didn't go communist in the 30s.

[1:02:35] Bob Dobbs: They just were fellow travelers,

[1:02:37] Bob Dobbs: and that brought in welfare.

[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: so this is,

[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: I think Americans are quite conscious of this duality.

[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: You can find it with

[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: Homer Simpson,

[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: right,

[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: where on the one hand,

[1:02:55] Cameron McEwen: people want to be individuals.

[1:02:58] Cameron McEwen: They want to be themselves,

[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: Be yourself.

[1:03:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm me and all this sort of stuff.

[1:03:04] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[1:03:05] Cameron McEwen: everybody is the same.

[1:03:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: And needs to be the same for economics.

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:03:11] Cameron McEwen: it needs to be the same for legal regulations and all that sort of stuff,

[1:03:15] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:03:18] Cameron McEwen: this is a big problem.

[1:03:23] Cameron McEwen: Notice how with masks,

[1:03:25] Cameron McEwen: it's not only a signal of the nobody,

[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: it's also a signal of the somebody.

[1:03:31] Cameron McEwen: And who's the somebody?

[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: The somebody is somebody who has discovered the singularity of individuality.

[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: And the singularity of thinking right,

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: So people wear the mask not because of COVID or something.

[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: It's a sign that they have discovered the truth,

[1:03:54] Cameron McEwen: that they know the proper culture,

[1:03:58] Cameron McEwen: the proper stance that everybody should have.

[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:03] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:04:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:05] Cameron McEwen: That's where we're at.

[1:04:07] Cameron McEwen: And it's quite frightening because...

[1:04:11] Cameron McEwen: underneath everybody's feet,

[1:04:13] Cameron McEwen: the earthquakes are much more frequent and much more devastating.

[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: And the response to that is to pile more and more cement on top of it.

[1:04:26] Cameron McEwen: It's like people that are trying to stop ocean erosion.

[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: And they're putting up concrete barriers to try to define what's...

[1:04:39] Cameron McEwen: ours and what belongs to the ocean.

[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: And the ocean just comes along every few years and destroys it.

[1:04:48] Cameron McEwen: That's our situation now.

[1:04:54] Bob Dobbs: put on a surface Americanism.

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: Are you able to talk to any American about what we're talking about,

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: the difference between

[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: Canadians or anybody and Americans?

[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever have a conversation with anybody about that?

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: usually when you speak to Americans about something like this,

[1:05:14] Cameron McEwen: their eyes kind of glaze over.

[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: It's just not a topic that interests them.

[1:05:22] Cameron McEwen: They think it's

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: kind of a provincial concern.

[1:05:27] Cameron McEwen: It's like a midget trying to talk about dunking a basketball to

[1:05:33] Cameron McEwen: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

[1:05:37] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says that the reason Westerners don't investigate the effects of media is it's an invasion of privacy.

[1:05:45] Bob Dobbs: So privacy is a big issue in America,

[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: so to talk this way is an invasion of privacy or rudeness.

[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: to talk about the effects of anti-environment on Americans.

[1:05:56] Cameron McEwen: Notice how that's exactly what I was trying to say a minute ago about going out to be alone.

[1:06:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:06:04] Cameron McEwen: Privacy is the notion that you go out of yourself,

[1:06:09] Cameron McEwen: you express yourself,

[1:06:10] Cameron McEwen: you live in a social environment.

[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: All of those things you can't help.

[1:06:15] Cameron McEwen: But when you find yourself in that situation,

[1:06:19] Cameron McEwen: your identity needs to be private.

[1:06:21] Cameron McEwen: That is to say...

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: only comes from you.

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:06:26] Cameron McEwen: If you think of language,

[1:06:28] Cameron McEwen: think of how stupid that is in terms of language.

[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: You have to use language,

[1:06:37] Cameron McEwen: but language has nothing to do with you.

[1:06:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: So let's go over to the book and see what I attempted to reveal.

[1:06:49] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:06:51] Cameron McEwen: Let me...

[1:06:51] Cameron McEwen: Let me get your book up here.

[1:06:53] Cameron McEwen: You can keep talking as I get it.

[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: So this book is called What We Slash You Didn't Know About Trump.

[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:07:06] Bob Dobbs: people might think,

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: there's no Trump right now.

[1:07:10] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Trump still around.

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: And he's going to make this new

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: TV platform or information platform.

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: That's his next invasion.

[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: of people.

[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to,

[1:07:24] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at the opening pages,

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: and we did the first couple of quotes,

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: because we got into cul-de-sac,

[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: I'll let you,

[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what to say.

[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: I have to see what you say.

[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: What does McLuhan say?

[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what I think until I say it.

[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what I think until you speak.

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:07:51] Cameron McEwen: I'm still trying to bring it up well the problem is not finding the book it's finding the proper thumb drive before I okay

[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: I can't say anything you'll be too fascinated it'll distract you okay I'll say this

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: The failure of the McLuhan industry to,

[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember what you said

[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: 15 minutes ago,

[1:08:31] Bob Dobbs: maybe multiple perspectives or techniques to spin the judgment or something.

[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: Does my pamphlet fall into the problems,

[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: the mistakes of the McLuhan school,

[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: or do you see I'm trying to do something that you would read?

[1:08:48] Bob Dobbs: you require or say we haven't got to successfully yet?

[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: I think that

[1:08:56] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure that we entirely agree about

[1:09:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, but agreement isn't the point with McLuhan.

[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: On any given quote,

[1:09:09] Cameron McEwen: I think we probably both have interesting things to say.

[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: But more important than that is that

[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: What you try to do,

[1:09:19] Cameron McEwen: especially in this book,

[1:09:20] Cameron McEwen: but I think generally,

[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: what you try to do is you try to kind of apply

[1:09:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. And not only McLuhan,

[1:09:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:09:31] Cameron McEwen: You probably think that Joyce is at least as important or more important than McLuhan.

[1:09:42] Cameron McEwen: You try to apply these people to...

[1:09:44] Cameron McEwen: what you see going on around you in the world.

[1:09:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:09:48] Cameron McEwen: And you come up with interesting stuff.

[1:09:51] Cameron McEwen: So to me,

[1:09:52] Cameron McEwen: that's the single most important thing that...

[1:09:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan leads to.

[1:09:57] Cameron McEwen: It's,

[1:09:58] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: how to look at the world and how to understand it.

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:10:05] Bob Dobbs: you were saying that the McLuhan industry,

[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: they try to go back to Gutenberg.

[1:10:11] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: Distilled McLuhan.

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: And so they miss the Marconi galaxy.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: They miss the multiple perspectives,

[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: basically.

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: But it's...

[1:10:23] Cameron McEwen: If we think of the Gutenberg galaxy and then the

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: Marconi galaxy,

[1:10:31] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan at his best emphasizes that we're always exposed to both.

[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: And so individual experience can come out of one or the other or of both,

[1:10:50] Cameron McEwen: but the theoretician...

[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: of media needs constantly to bear in mind that there is this spectrum of figure and ground or eye and ear or

[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg and Marconi and the theoretician not only needs to look at human experience in terms of that spectrum but he or she needs to look from that

[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: spectrum.

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: From the spectrum.

[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: The Munsell sphere in Hot and Cool,

[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: where the viewer is inside the Moby's strip or the circle or the sphere or the color spectrum.

[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: Inside it.

[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:11:38] Cameron McEwen: And that's the phrase,

[1:11:40] Cameron McEwen: understanding media,

[1:11:41] Cameron McEwen: which comes off people's lips so easily,

[1:11:46] Cameron McEwen: means something like what we were just talking about.

[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: So something very much more complicated than some guy sitting in his well-appointed office,

[1:12:01] Cameron McEwen: maybe with some research assistants hovering around,

[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: and they're going to understand media by thinking about TV or something.

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: what was my point there?

[1:12:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan.

[1:12:29] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: I think I was going to say that as you talk,

[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: I realize that's what I'm doing.

[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: What you're desiring to be done is what I've done here,

[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: and you even see it.

[1:12:40] Bob Dobbs: You might see a linearity that isn't there as much as you think it's there.

[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: the

[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: but there was another thought.

[1:12:51] Bob Dobbs: So if

[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is using a Munton,

[1:13:02] Bob Dobbs: what I call quadrophrenia,

[1:13:06] Bob Dobbs: that's because there's many forms that he can play with,

[1:13:09] Bob Dobbs: so he juxtaposed the forms to forms.

[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: my first early revelation about McLuhan was

[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't just talking about what media do to me or people.

[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: It's what media do to other media.

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: And then the more you understand that,

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: you see that that's what McLuhan talking about.

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: That's why he doesn't have his private religion,

[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: private point of view,

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: private stuff come in.

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: He's studying the language of forms,

[1:13:36] Bob Dobbs: but it's the language of the forms interplaying among themselves.

[1:13:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of people don't get to that point.

[1:13:43] Cameron McEwen: That's why I talked about the spectrum.

[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: is so important.

[1:13:50] Cameron McEwen: He says at one place that cliche can be isolated but the archetype always retrieves all other archetypes.

[1:14:02] Cameron McEwen: Why is that?

[1:14:03] Cameron McEwen: It's because the archetype is naturally part of the spectrum and no archetype can be called forth,

[1:14:15] Cameron McEwen: if you will,

[1:14:16] Cameron McEwen: without calling forth the whole spectrum.

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: take today,

[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: that Joyce understood that two words can evoke a whole universe,

[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: or maybe one word.

[1:14:28] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:14:29] Cameron McEwen: And let's just,

[1:14:30] Cameron McEwen: let's look at the very first quotation that you have.

[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: So on page one,

[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: the first lines of the preface say,

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: the road to understanding media,

[1:14:45] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[1:14:47] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[1:14:47] Cameron McEwen: the road to understanding media effects.

[1:14:49] Cameron McEwen: begins with arrogant superiority.

[1:14:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:14:53] Cameron McEwen: we were talking about flight.

[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: We were talking about how it's natural to human experience to have a vertical dimension to it that is usually completely unconscious.

[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: And so here you are in the very first line,

[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: the road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority.

[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: So that

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: is exactly what taking flight is about,

[1:15:21] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:15:21] Cameron McEwen: Taking flight is absolutely necessary,

[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: and the interesting thing about this necessity is that it's always happening anyway.

[1:15:31] Cameron McEwen: It's just you don't know it's happening.

[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: And you're quoting McLuhan.

[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: It's not what I'm writing in prose.

[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: It's a McLuhan quote.

[1:15:39] Cameron McEwen: It's your very first quote from McLuhan,

[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: The Road to Understanding Media Effects.

[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: begins with arrogant superiority.

[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: If one lacked this sense of superiority,

[1:15:50] Cameron McEwen: this detachment,

[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: it would be quite impossible to write about them.

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid.

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: So it's a great quotation,

[1:16:00] Cameron McEwen: and the fact that you start with it is a very good sign for the book.

[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: For the book,

[1:16:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:16:06] Bob Dobbs: Start off with the right foot.

[1:16:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: And then it goes,

[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: you know...

[1:16:13] Cameron McEwen: Where?

[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: What?

[1:16:17] Cameron McEwen: Where nobody's hand is ever set.

[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: where the hand of man never set foot.

[1:16:23] Bob Dobbs: Which is what I tried to do here.

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:16:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: So this is an early quote,

[1:16:30] Bob Dobbs: relatively earlier.

[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: And he's talking about media as people think.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: Media,

[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: TV,

[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: thinking about TV.

[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: But then the next quote is at the end of his life,

[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: the life of utterance.

[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: And it's all about what's happening right then.

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: After Watergate,

[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: all the investigations of the intelligence of the CIA by the Frank Church Committee,

[1:16:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:16:52] Bob Dobbs: in American culture,

[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: all about espionage.

[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: So this quote is where McLuhan,

[1:17:00] Bob Dobbs: the world that

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan maybe predicted,

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: and now he's analyzing it,

[1:17:06] Bob Dobbs: trying to get a perspective on it.

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: So do you want to read that one?

[1:17:10] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: This is the Alpha and the

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: Omega.

[1:17:14] Cameron McEwen: Greg,

[1:17:14] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:17:15] Cameron McEwen: this is,

[1:17:15] Cameron McEwen: we should note that the first quote,

[1:17:19] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:17:19] Cameron McEwen: is from the interview with Gerald Stearn.

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:17:23] Cameron McEwen: So that's in 67.

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:17:26] Cameron McEwen: And this other interview is 78.

[1:17:30] Cameron McEwen: So it's 10 years later.

[1:17:33] Cameron McEwen: 67,

[1:17:34] Cameron McEwen: he's already written

[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: Understanding Media.

[1:17:39] Cameron McEwen: He's already found

[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: Gestalt,

[1:17:42] Cameron McEwen: Psychology.

[1:17:44] Cameron McEwen: And he is in the process of thinking about how do I explain this stuff to people that don't want

[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: it explained to them,

[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: number one.

[1:18:03] Cameron McEwen: And number two,

[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: what does it say about the coming world,

[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan continual exercise of second sight?

[1:18:14] Cameron McEwen: And what he does in that

[1:18:17] Cameron McEwen: 10-year period is foresee a world that we,

[1:18:25] Cameron McEwen: 40 to 50 years later,

[1:18:28] Cameron McEwen: are currently living.

[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: an extremist.

[1:18:34] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't extreme enough,

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: but he was pretty extreme for his time,

[1:18:38] Bob Dobbs: in what he says.

[1:18:39] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: I would say that

[1:18:44] Cameron McEwen: There are many things that

[1:18:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw that we haven't really understood very well.

[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:18:53] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it's necessarily true that he didn't see how extreme things would get.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: In certain respects,

[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: he saw very clearly how extreme things would get,

[1:19:08] Cameron McEwen: and we don't see how extreme they are.

[1:19:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: It...

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: And I remember in 67 with the Twiggy phenomenon and whatever else was happening in pop culture,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: I think it's the first time he says it,

[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[1:19:22] Bob Dobbs: we can expect more and more bizarre forms.

[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: So he predicted the SubGenius that would come into

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: Canadian-American life by saying it's going to get more and more bizarre.

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: You remember that quote?

[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: It was in a newspaper article.

[1:19:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:19:40] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:19:40] Cameron McEwen: I don't.

[1:19:41] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember it,

[1:19:41] Cameron McEwen: but of course it's the sort of thing that he definitely would say.

[1:19:50] Cameron McEwen: I think that that's something that he encountered very early on in his teaching,

[1:19:59] Cameron McEwen: that the students were coming from such strange presuppositions and assumptions that the

[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: old model

[1:20:17] Cameron McEwen: of education just completely broke down.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: maybe I should read this.

[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.

[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: it's your quotation here.

[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: and this is an unpublished interview with David Sohn,

[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: who was an American,

[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what he did.

[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: He was an

[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: American, not a professor,

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: I don't think,

[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: or anything,

[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: just a guy who liked to read McLuhan.

[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: And he would drop into the center and talk to McLuhan,

[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: once a year or something.

[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: And he probably talked about McLuhan in his town in the States where he's from.

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: So he's an eccentric individual,

[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: not the usual type of people that McLuhan being interviewed by,

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: the Robert Fulfords and that.

[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: And it got unpublished.

[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: It didn't get published.

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: it got unpublished.

[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: So here's what McLuhan says to him.

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: Pollster activities are all espionage.

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: Snooping on publics.

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: The whole credit system is based on espionage.

[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: By the way,

[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: you can find out all the secret life of anybody by buying it from a crediting agency.

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: It is a new kind of activity,

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: and it may well undermine our political life,

[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: because it has been discovered that in every single case of representatives in politics,

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: there is a conflict of interest.

[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: You cannot be a representative of a big sector of the public without having conflicts of interest between your job and your role-playing and your private interests.

[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: And so the discovery of the conflict of interest,

[1:21:49] Bob Dobbs: which is really the whole issue in Watergate,

[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: has in a sense overturned our political life.

[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: I know that right here in Canada there's nobody in politics who doesn't have a conflict of interest.

[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: the politicians,

[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: they stand by their integrity.

[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: They don't have a conflict of interest,

[1:22:06] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan would say,

[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: you're all criminals,

[1:22:09] Bob Dobbs: you all broke the law.

[1:22:13] Bob Dobbs: I know that right here in Canada there's nobody in politics who doesn't have a conflict of interest.

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: That would piss people off.

[1:22:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the kind of stuff he'd say that he would make them no friends,

[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:22:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:22:25] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of cancel culture is the denial of that.

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: we'll go to that in a minute.

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: I'll finish the quote.

[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: Many lawyers go into politics and by definition they have a conflict of interest.

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: Any lawyer has a conflict of interest in politics.

[1:22:42] Bob Dobbs: He's using his political position to obtain for himself new clients and new connections at all times.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: That's how he gets into politics in the first place.

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: so I think that's a great quote.

[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: It shows McLuhan,

[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:22:57] Bob Dobbs: on the ground watching what's happening around people.

[1:23:01] Bob Dobbs: He's not trying to create a theory of consciousness.

[1:23:04] Bob Dobbs: He's not even trying to create a tetrad.

[1:23:06] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at the processes that are happening around him,

[1:23:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:23:10] Bob Dobbs: and noticing.

[1:23:12] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[1:23:12] Bob Dobbs: nobody is free of a conflict of interest.

[1:23:16] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: that sort of makes law obsolete,

[1:23:19] Bob Dobbs: or at least in that realm of politics.

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: If everybody has a conflict of interest,

[1:23:24] Bob Dobbs: first of all,

[1:23:25] Bob Dobbs: how could that be?

[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: Then where is the integrity of the politician if the politician is supposed to represent integrity,

[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: even though everybody knows he's the most or least integral person?

[1:23:40] Bob Dobbs: That comes into our face every day.

[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: And he said Watergate,

[1:23:47] Bob Dobbs: the dirty underbelly of politics,

[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: was given in the

[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: 20s and 30s and 40s.

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: Everybody knew it was all,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: in that sense,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: corrupt.

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: But it became showbiz with Watergate,

[1:23:58] Bob Dobbs: meaning we had moved somewhere else.

[1:24:02] Bob Dobbs: So there was no secrecy.

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: So secrets and holding secrets became the new figure.

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: the playground or you know an art form right so espionage takes over uh everything in in entertainment movies uh politics um sports everything is espionage and

[1:24:26] Bob Dobbs: so that then kills the mission impossible or spy versus spy those

[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: 60s james bond those spy shows so they they were not

[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: you take Dr.

[1:24:41] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:24:41] Bob Dobbs: It's true that with decentralization,

[1:24:44] Bob Dobbs: some guy who's got some new invention that he managed to make or steal,

[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: he can threaten the whole world,

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: sort of like a chaos butterfly.

[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: That's part of the meaning of,

[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: Dr.

[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: It's about the present hijackers of the planet.

[1:25:00] Bob Dobbs: But you have an old-fashioned individualist up against it,

[1:25:03] Bob Dobbs: all by himself.

[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: what McLuhan said,

[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: the detective versus the bureaucrat.

[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?

[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:15] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: so these are some of the things.

[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: did you start to say,

[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: you said something we might want to go back to.

[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: what I want to do is note a couple things about these quotations.

[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: First off,

[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: it's a great introduction to your book,

[1:25:33] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: We noted that the first quotation is 67,

[1:25:39] Cameron McEwen: the second is 10 years later,

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: and so that's a linear take on them.

[1:25:45] Cameron McEwen: But on your page,

[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: the 67 is above the 78,

[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: and not only is it above as location,

[1:25:57] Cameron McEwen: it's about being above.

[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: So it's about arrogance,

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: superiority,

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: and detachment,

[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:26:04] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: And.

[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: So the way that these quotations can be seen is that when one takes the arrogant superiority that the first quotation talks about and

[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: uses it to look at what's going on in American and Canadian politics and Canadian and American society and economy,

[1:26:34] Cameron McEwen: then here's what you see,

[1:26:37] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:26:37] Cameron McEwen: So there's a sense in which the

[1:26:41] Cameron McEwen: 67 quotation is before the

[1:26:46] Cameron McEwen: 78 one.

[1:26:48] Cameron McEwen: And this goes to your notion that,

[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: although I'm always harping on the chronological aspect of your thinking,

[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: at the same time,

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: there's a contemporaneous.

[1:27:04] Cameron McEwen: aspect,

[1:27:05] Cameron McEwen: all at once aspect,

[1:27:07] Cameron McEwen: and that can be seen right here in the first page.

[1:27:10] Bob Dobbs: Excellent.

[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: I remember what you brought up,

[1:27:12] Bob Dobbs: cancer culture.

[1:27:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to try to think of it differently.

[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: So this obsession,

[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: fetish for consensus,

[1:27:26] Bob Dobbs: is that the word for what?

[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:27:31] Bob Dobbs: So this...

[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: This desire to have a uniformity naturally would come out of,

[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: make sense out of the chaos of social media.

[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: even Zuckerberg,

[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: they get investigated by Congress and they say,

[1:27:47] Bob Dobbs: we don't know what's going on.

[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: We don't know who's in charge back at the headquarters,

[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: which is going to lead to the end of the book.

[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: But the so canceling,

[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: is that?

[1:28:02] Bob Dobbs: A retrieval of

[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: American roots in Calvinism,

[1:28:05] Bob Dobbs: in Puritanism?

[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: Sure,

[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:10] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: now,

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: they can't implement it completely,

[1:28:15] Bob Dobbs: because more and more people are rebelling,

[1:28:17] Bob Dobbs: and,

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: Trump himself is going to try to provide anti-environment to outdo cancel culture with his new platform.

[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: he's going to come up against it,

[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: try to make it go around it.

[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: In a sense,

[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: Trump what needs to be canceled.

[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: not for Americans when they want to see themselves in the mirror.

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: And if they can't see that anymore,

[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: he's an archetype.

[1:28:44] Bob Dobbs: That's why he was popular.

[1:28:46] Bob Dobbs: He represented the,

[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: my friend calls it the fuck you thing,

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: where you become so wealthy that you are the supreme

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: Lone Ranger.

[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: you're not a Lone Ranger.

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: You're a godfather at first.

[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: and you're not subject to anybody's pressures because you've got so much money and nobody can get to you.

[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: But then you want to turn it anti-environment,

[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: so you become the lone ranger trying to improve the world in some way or improve America or retrieve America.

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: but he's like

[1:29:21] Cameron McEwen: Gulliver being tied down.

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:29:27] Cameron McEwen: because Trump...

[1:29:32] Cameron McEwen: was able to do a few things as president,

[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: but most of the things that he talked about doing,

[1:29:41] Cameron McEwen: he simply wasn't able to,

[1:29:42] Cameron McEwen: either because he didn't understand politics or because there was too much power on the other side or because the issue was more complicated than he thought.

[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: But,

[1:29:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:29:55] Cameron McEwen: just for example,

[1:29:57] Cameron McEwen: he talked about releasing documents.

[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: about the investigation of Russiagate.

[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: He talked about that for four years,

[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: and at the end,

[1:30:08] Cameron McEwen: he wasn't able to do it.

[1:30:11] Cameron McEwen: He could not get...

[1:30:12] Cameron McEwen: the bureaucrats to move.

[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:16] Cameron McEwen: So it's an interesting phenomenon,

[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: actually.

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: I just read about the Congress confirmed

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: Biden's presidency on January 6th.

[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: And the very next day,

[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: the head of the director of national intelligence,

[1:30:38] Bob Dobbs: Ratcliffe,

[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: released his long awaited report.

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: where he points out,

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: the report does,

[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: that Trump suspicions are justified.

[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: But it's after Trump,

[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: and he Explorations that he couldn't release it earlier because it would appear to be interfering politically,

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: so he kept it aside.

[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: But when it was irrelevant,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: it wouldn't help

[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: Trump in office if it had come out a couple months earlier.

[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: And by justifying Trump,

[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: he releases it,

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: and it's obsolete.

[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: out on a...

[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: What do you call it,

[1:31:12] Bob Dobbs: a content level,

[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: a gossipy level?

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: What do you call when you're talking about the events of the day,

[1:31:20] Bob Dobbs: which can be the ground?

[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: But we're now waiting for the Durham report.

[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: And there's a commercial out where Durham says that he's a tough guy and this ain't going to be no pussy capitulation.

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: So we'll see.

[1:31:35] Bob Dobbs: We'll see if that happens.

[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: we'll see.

[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't tell when I saw it whether the commercial was a put on or not.

[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: It might have been done by Saturday Night Live or something,

[1:31:45] Bob Dobbs: but it seemed to have him in there talking.

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: So another confusing bit of data thrown at me because I made the mistake of looking at the Android Meme,

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:31:59] Bob Dobbs: The goal today is to be uninformed,

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: or at least on the content level,

[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: to study the language of form.

[1:32:08] Cameron McEwen: And remember,

[1:32:10] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly what the romantics were doing,

[1:32:14] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:32:14] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to be uninformed about the other moments.

[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:32:18] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to be uninformed about other points of view.

[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: And by avoiding people.

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[1:32:26] Cameron McEwen: by going out to be alone.

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:32:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:32:30] Cameron McEwen: We're circling around the same ideas all the time,

[1:32:33] Cameron McEwen: and I think we're doing it in a way that is interesting and helpful.

[1:32:39] Cameron McEwen: but we're also showing how central these things were to McLuhan and are to contemporary history.

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: and can be equal to your notion of the periodic table.

[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: He's come up with the new media elements,

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: the basic elements of experience today.

[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: now,

[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: Dee,

[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: what else about that?

[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: What did you just say before going out to be alone?

[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: You cited something.

[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: I was citing the Durham report.

[1:33:19] Cameron McEwen: I was saying I was going back.

[1:33:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:33:22] Cameron McEwen: I didn't relate to the Durham report,

[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: although

[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: I believe that nothing is going to come of that myself.

[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: that's what I wanted to talk about.

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: The language of forms and media affecting media.

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: I call it the media anti-environment are etherealized to the point of being memes.

[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: What is the ground today?

[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: my book tries to point out what the ground is,

[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: but we're not going to say what it is.

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: But I'm just asking you,

[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: what do you think,

[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: with all media canceling out each other,

[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: then where are we and what is the medium?

[1:33:59] Bob Dobbs: Have you got a way to answer that?

[1:34:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:34:02] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:34:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:34:04] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if the answer is...

[1:34:05] Cameron McEwen: description,

[1:34:06] Cameron McEwen: but I can certainly discuss it.

[1:34:09] Cameron McEwen: If we think of human experience as a constant taking flight above the possibilities of experience,

[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: the spectrum of experience,

[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: and especially in America,

[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: the need is to forget this hovering over the possibilities and

[1:34:35] Cameron McEwen: to make concrete some particular identity.

[1:34:41] Cameron McEwen: So the great problem in the United States is that what is attempted is not even possible.

[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: That the very attempt...

[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: has already got cracks and difficulties in it and there's only two possible responses you can make it more and more and more concrete more and by concrete I don't

[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: I don't mean the opposite to fluid I mean concrete in the sense of a material concrete that is used to build a building concrete that is used to

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: make something stable as a foundation.

[1:35:32] Cameron McEwen: So the American experience is adding more and more and more concrete to an unstable situation.

[1:35:39] Cameron McEwen: And when that finally breaks,

[1:35:42] Cameron McEwen: we're going to have a huge problem.

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's the

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: Joni Mitchell song,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: put up another parking lot or something.

[1:35:54] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:35:54] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:35:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:35:55] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: Take paradise.

[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: put a parking lot over it.

[1:36:01] Cameron McEwen: Tear down a great old building and put up a parking lot.

[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: Did you finish your point?

[1:36:09] Cameron McEwen: I'm not trying to discuss your point,

[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: but you go ahead.

[1:36:16] Cameron McEwen: You lead on.

[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: They used to say the

[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: East was inscrutable when Westerners traveled to the

[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: Asia or the Orient.

[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't think you use that word anymore,

[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: to non-industrialized cultures,

[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: tribal places.

[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: They'd encounter the inscrutable East.

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: I always thought it was neat that McLuhan said in the global theater,

[1:36:40] Bob Dobbs: America became the inscrutable and became the inscrutable American,

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: the ugly American or an inscrutable West.

[1:36:49] Bob Dobbs: There's a cliche about the inscrutable East that people might have heard.

[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: You can't count on people.

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: young people knowing this stuff now.

[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: I encountered a young person,

[1:36:59] Bob Dobbs: he was reading McLuhan,

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: and he says,

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: what's nationalism?

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: You know?

[1:37:05] Bob Dobbs: It's probably surprising what the gaps are in their knowledge.

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: But the inscrutable East was a cliché way back there,

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: and so

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was pretty original,

[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: come up with the inscrutable West is what we are.

[1:37:19] Bob Dobbs: Because as the global theater took over,

[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: and the

[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: Less developed cultures in the second world,

[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: the third world,

[1:37:28] Bob Dobbs: and the aboriginal fourth world were collective,

[1:37:31] Bob Dobbs: tribal,

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: oral,

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: tactile.

[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: America's kinetic visual bias was just becoming more and more alien to everybody.

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: And Trump retrieves that alien aspect of the American individual,

[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: American archetype,

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: and becomes the most horrified,

[1:37:48] Bob Dobbs: threatening phenomenon since Hitler.

[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: He actually was just retrieving what the inscrutable America was.

[1:37:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:38:00] Cameron McEwen: I think that's an excellent insight,

[1:38:02] Cameron McEwen: actually.

[1:38:05] Cameron McEwen: If we think about this need to be number one,

[1:38:07] Cameron McEwen: this need to go out and be alone,

[1:38:13] Cameron McEwen: what's happening there is a divorce between individual identity and the possibilities of identity.

[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: The possibilities of identity are inherently plural,

[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: are inherently gapped,

[1:38:27] Cameron McEwen: and are inherently dynamic.

[1:38:30] Cameron McEwen: So what was inscrutable about the East is that you could go there and you could say,

[1:38:35] Cameron McEwen: in Japan,

[1:38:36] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:38:37] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:38:38] Cameron McEwen: how many people,

[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: what percentage of the population is Buddhist?

[1:38:43] Cameron McEwen: And the answer would be,

[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: it's 78%.

[1:38:47] Cameron McEwen: And then you'd say,

[1:38:48] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:38:48] Cameron McEwen: what percentage of the...

[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: population is Shinto.

[1:38:52] Cameron McEwen: And then they would say,

[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: that's 83%.

[1:38:55] Cameron McEwen: And a Western mind could not understand how people could have multiple religions.

[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: They couldn't possibly understand that.

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: So now the ugly American is the

[1:39:11] Cameron McEwen: American that actually exposes this multiplicity behind the mask.

[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: The

[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: American is somebody who's supposed to be smiling,

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: in charge of things,

[1:39:27] Cameron McEwen: the good manager,

[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: leave it up to me to govern the world and all will be well.

[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: And below that is extreme instability.

[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: And we're now living in a time where that gap,

[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: which is very,

[1:39:43] Cameron McEwen: very explosive,

[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: there's a lot of power in that gap,

[1:39:47] Cameron McEwen: is growing wider and wider.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: and wider,

[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: and nobody knows what's going to happen.

[1:39:53] Cameron McEwen: And I think you're right that

[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: Trump a kind of signal.

[1:39:58] Cameron McEwen: of that growing gap.

[1:40:02] Cameron McEwen: It's like a fault in the earth,

[1:40:06] Cameron McEwen: the San Andreas Fault,

[1:40:08] Cameron McEwen: that is opening and opening and opening.

[1:40:10] Cameron McEwen: And everybody knows that the end is not good.

[1:40:15] Cameron McEwen: But they hope it happens after they're gone.

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: do you have a

[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan take on the Biden image yet?

[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: Wow.

[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: What would I say about that?

[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: Biden is the sort of the idol of cancel culture.

[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:39] Cameron McEwen: Biden is that person that you're not allowed to have various views on.

[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: He just represents the unmitigated good.

[1:40:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:40:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:40:54] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:40:56] Cameron McEwen: In order to be...

[1:40:57] Cameron McEwen: the representative cancel culture,

[1:40:59] Cameron McEwen: you can't be anyone in particular.

[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: And remember McLuhan quote from 72 in Take Today,

[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: the automated presidential surrogate is a superlative nobody.

[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: Trump violated that.

[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: He was a somebody because he came from that other world business.

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: So that archetype,

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: he was an invasion.

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: it's not only business.

[1:41:23] Cameron McEwen: It's the major thing wrong Trump.

[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: is that he's not xenochrony,

[1:41:30] Cameron McEwen: he's extremely egotistical,

[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: he's not Phelan,

[1:41:35] Cameron McEwen: he doesn't give a shit about other people,

[1:41:39] Cameron McEwen: and he represents an extreme threat to the self-identity of Americans,

[1:41:49] Cameron McEwen: or at least of some Americans.

[1:41:51] Bob Dobbs: I can see soccer moms having a real problem letting their kids know of this guy's existence,

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: because the whole thing about...

[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: Growing up and being educated,

[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: they have to go towards a refined sophistication that the president's supposed to represent,

[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:42:06] Bob Dobbs: the benefits of intelligence.

[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: And you've got a porn star.

[1:42:12] Cameron McEwen: He's the grab-the-pussy guy.

[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: you've got a porn star as president.

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: how outrageous is this?

[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing.

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: maybe they tried to assassinate him,

[1:42:25] Bob Dobbs: but it's amazing he survived.

[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: all these years.

[1:42:29] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: Kennedy was a threat.

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: He was a powerful TV image.

[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: He was a threatened big brother.

[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: So they had to get rid of his image.

[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: And I was just reading...

[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: Kennedy knew something about politics.

[1:42:44] Cameron McEwen: So he may have represented,

[1:42:47] Cameron McEwen: at the level of administration,

[1:42:49] Cameron McEwen: at the level of law,

[1:42:51] Cameron McEwen: at the level of leverage in Washington,

[1:42:55] Cameron McEwen: Kennedy may have been more of a threat.

[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: This guy,

[1:42:58] Cameron McEwen: Trump,

[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: sort of came out of left field,

[1:43:01] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: I think the bureaucrats,

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: especially in the Pentagon,

[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: realized early on that he simply didn't know where the levers were.

[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:43:14] Cameron McEwen: So how could he actually pilot the plane?

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: So I was just thinking that Kennedy was the last perfect president for the liberal dream.

[1:43:26] Bob Dobbs: So.

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: There never was a charismatic president after him until maybe Reagan.

[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: But that might have been more imposed on people,

[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: forced by the Android Meme,

[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: because there were so many bad presidents,

[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: they had to come up with some kind of retrieval of small-town America and decency.

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: But then,

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: has there been anybody since Reagan?

[1:43:50] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: And then

[1:43:53] Bob Dobbs: Obama was another kind of charisma.

[1:43:56] Bob Dobbs: And then there's no more president possible.

[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: So anybody can take over.

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: Do you see people?

[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that?

[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: Takeover is a bad word.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: I know.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:44:07] Cameron McEwen: they get buried.

[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: so many candidates want to get buried.

[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: You know that

[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: Meghan Markle or whatever her name is,

[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: Prince Harry's wife?

[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: I know who she is.

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: she recently is expelled.

[1:44:22] Bob Dobbs: Exploring about running for president because she had a good Oprah show.

[1:44:27] Bob Dobbs: That's a side of intelligence,

[1:44:28] Bob Dobbs: sophistication.

[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: But it shows you how obsolete.

[1:44:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would have to update that.

[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: There used to be an automated presidential surrogate,

[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: but too many nobodies applied for the job.

[1:44:47] Cameron McEwen: That's very,

[1:44:47] Cameron McEwen: very funny.

[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: we have a pattern there.

[1:44:50] Bob Dobbs: We can sell that one.

[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: But listen,

[1:44:53] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:44:53] Cameron McEwen: we're...

[1:44:57] Cameron McEwen: I can't hear you.

[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: It's 7.20.

[1:45:01] Bob Dobbs: I thought I couldn't hear you.

[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: you're there.

[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: You think we've run,

[1:45:05] Bob Dobbs: we've done two quotes.

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: What would you say next?

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: You don't have to go into it because we'll do it next week.

[1:45:13] Bob Dobbs: But what would be your next point of interest in the beginning here?

[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: The cul-de-sac?

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: But we did the cul-de-sac.

[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: It took 19 shows.

[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: we've sort of,

[1:45:24] Cameron McEwen: but...

[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: I think we can take it up again in terms of your first two quotes.

[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: In terms of what we've been talking about.

[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: So what we can do is put a bow on our discussion of the cul-de-sac and then move on from there into

[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: your book.

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: You're a little burbly,

[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: but I think we heard everything you said.

[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: So.

[1:45:54] Bob Dobbs: We're finished for today.

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot.

[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,

[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: Thank you,

[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: I enjoyed it.

[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: it was really good.

[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: Thanks for your contributions.

[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: I'll look forward to talking to you next week.

[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: then.

[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: Good night.

[1:46:08] Cameron McEwen: Good.

[1:46:09] Cameron McEwen: Good night.

[1:46:10] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.

[1:46:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.