Dialogue 29 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Bob and Ewen Cameron are back.

[00:05] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs and Cameron McEwen with number 29,

[00:10] Bob Dobbs: episode 29.

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: And we went to the very end of this small book and went over line by line the interview with the tech body,

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: which is my conclusion in the book.

[00:28] Bob Dobbs: And the title is How President...

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: no,

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: no,

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: that's the first title.

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: I did my first statement Trump was in the spring of 2017 after he was elected and was in the White House.

[00:40] Bob Dobbs: I called that how President Donald Trump has become the first executive political leader to put on the shamanic tradition.

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: And then I felt the need to update my stuff,

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: so

[00:54] Bob Dobbs: I did a second.

[00:57] Bob Dobbs: This book is the second part,

[00:58] Bob Dobbs: but it includes the first essay.

[01:02] Cameron McEwen: Let me ask about the phrase put on there,

[01:06] Cameron McEwen: which is a technical phrase of McLuhan.

[01:10] Cameron McEwen: Was your point that he put that on intentionally or unconsciously?

[01:17] Bob Dobbs: Hard to tell.

[01:18] Bob Dobbs: I would say unconsciously.

[01:21] Bob Dobbs: But he's such a unique figure,

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: it had a shamanic effect on a lot of Americans.

[01:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: they thought he was so honest and being real and these kind of things.

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: sure,

[01:39] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[01:40] Cameron McEwen: But it's a very interesting image,

[01:44] Cameron McEwen: in my view,

[01:44] Cameron McEwen: because if you think of some sort of tribe somewhere that has a shaman,

[01:53] Cameron McEwen: Then,

[01:54] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[01:56] Cameron McEwen: that's Shaman's...

[01:59] Cameron McEwen: reputation within the group wouldn't depend upon his or her morality or how they dressed or what kind of parents they had or something like that it would have to do with their power that

[02:18] Cameron McEwen: was acknowledged by some or all of the group and that's a that's an interesting way to look at Trump phenomenon and my view yeah

[02:28] Bob Dobbs: And I meant it,

[02:29] Bob Dobbs: it's partly put on with me.

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: I know in the media,

[02:34] Bob Dobbs: that's a ridiculous statement.

[02:35] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[02:36] Bob Dobbs: the lamestream media,

[02:37] Bob Dobbs: this guy's a dumb jerk,

[02:39] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[02:40] Bob Dobbs: How could he be a shaman if they even knew what a shaman was?

[02:43] Bob Dobbs: And if they were

[02:45] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg people,

[02:46] Bob Dobbs: they wouldn't even respect shamans.

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: So they might think that I'm putting Donald Trump.

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: So in the mainstream people,

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: they would be confused by it.

[02:57] Bob Dobbs: But those that...

[02:59] Bob Dobbs: Study the shaman tradition,

[03:00] Bob Dobbs: the whole new age world is into it in different ways.

[03:04] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't think Trump a shaman,

[03:06] Bob Dobbs: he's an asshole,

[03:08] Bob Dobbs: based on their bias.

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: So

[03:11] Bob Dobbs: I put it on to get an effect on them.

[03:17] Bob Dobbs: It's only an elite like yourself,

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: properly schooled in the correct areas,

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: say what you said.

[03:27] Bob Dobbs: Good statement,

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: That's interesting.

[03:29] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[03:30] Bob Dobbs: It fits in a way.

[03:32] Bob Dobbs: So my second essay,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: longer essay,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: was what we slash you didn't know about Trump.

[03:39] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying what you didn't know about Trump,

[03:42] Bob Dobbs: the audience.

[03:43] Bob Dobbs: I know what I know about Trump,

[03:46] Bob Dobbs: but I was being polite,

[03:47] Bob Dobbs: so I included myself.

[03:48] Bob Dobbs: And maybe

[03:51] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know about the tech body as I am presented it in 2016.

[03:56] Bob Dobbs: He didn't present it until 2018,

[03:58] Bob Dobbs: 2019.

[03:59] Bob Dobbs: So I didn't Trump was doing the tech body in 2016.

[04:03] Bob Dobbs: So in relation to the tech body,

[04:06] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know as much as anybody else.

[04:11] Cameron McEwen: So when you say doing the tech body,

[04:14] Cameron McEwen: the word doing,

[04:17] Cameron McEwen: is that the same as putting on the shaman persona?

[04:25] Cameron McEwen: is that you know

[04:26] Cameron McEwen: is doing different from putting on.

[04:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[04:29] Bob Dobbs: he has no clue about the tech body.

[04:32] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't know the tech body is dominating him or his image is controlled by the tech body.

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: So if we think of a shaman,

[04:45] Cameron McEwen: oftentimes they would visit another world or speak with the dead or something like this.

[04:52] Cameron McEwen: But oftentimes they wouldn't know themselves what they were doing.

[04:58] Cameron McEwen: They would be in some kind of trance.

[05:01] Cameron McEwen: They would be in some sort of auto mode.

[05:05] Cameron McEwen: And then when they came out of that,

[05:08] Cameron McEwen: they might be asked questions.

[05:10] Cameron McEwen: about,

[05:12] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[05:12] Cameron McEwen: what were you doing,

[05:13] Cameron McEwen: what did you mean,

[05:14] Cameron McEwen: or something like that,

[05:15] Cameron McEwen: and the shaman wouldn't know what the hell they were talking about.

[05:18] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[05:19] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[05:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[05:20] Cameron McEwen: Because there's multiple personalities that are involved in the shamanic mode.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[05:28] Bob Dobbs: some of the more accomplished shamans knew what they were doing,

[05:31] Bob Dobbs: but who knows?

[05:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm not a judge.

[05:35] Bob Dobbs: I haven't met many of these really conscious.

[05:41] Bob Dobbs: shamans,

[05:41] Bob Dobbs: but I've met unconscious,

[05:44] Bob Dobbs: which are mediums,

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: like JW.

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: And they can heal people.

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: They do all kinds of things when they're in trance.

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: So,

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[05:54] Bob Dobbs: I've even seen ghosts in JW's home that a session with Ion evokes.

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: Very odd-looking ghosts,

[06:02] Bob Dobbs: strange contraptions.

[06:03] Bob Dobbs: They look like a data structure.

[06:05] Bob Dobbs: And they're there.

[06:07] Bob Dobbs: You can see them.

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: And then the little dog comes in and starts...

[06:10] Bob Dobbs: barking at it.

[06:12] Bob Dobbs: So

[06:14] Bob Dobbs: I've had interesting experiences around JW and ION.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body,

[06:22] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[06:23] Bob Dobbs: is a completely new phenomenon for humans.

[06:27] Bob Dobbs: This is a Donald Trump or mind-blower.

[06:32] Bob Dobbs: People have no idea what's really going on.

[06:35] Bob Dobbs: But

[06:36] Bob Dobbs: I think McLuhan and ION agrees.

[06:40] Bob Dobbs: and maybe even the tech body,

[06:41] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan intuited this was coming.

[06:44] Bob Dobbs: The old way I used to say it,

[06:46] Bob Dobbs: talking about the Android Meme,

[06:47] Bob Dobbs: was that technology came alive and took on a life of its own.

[06:53] Bob Dobbs: That's a plebeian or lowbrow way to talk about it.

[07:00] Bob Dobbs: No,

[07:00] Cameron McEwen: but I think it's still a very effective description of what's going on.

[07:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:07] Bob Dobbs: and I'm trying to...

[07:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm available to talk to any level of sophistication about it.

[07:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm not targeting academics,

[07:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm not targeting the CIA,

[07:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm not targeting stupid people or uninformed people.

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: Who's ever interested,

[07:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm willing to take the time to explain it.

[07:26] Bob Dobbs: And this,

[07:27] Bob Dobbs: eventually I wrote this to explain it for people who could take the time to read it.

[07:33] Bob Dobbs: So,

[07:34] Bob Dobbs: in that sense,

[07:35] Bob Dobbs: it's a humble project,

[07:37] Bob Dobbs: but I'm hardly humble myself.

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[07:40] Bob Dobbs: right?

[07:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[07:41] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[07:46] Bob Dobbs: So the second title,

[07:48] Bob Dobbs: which was created in the fall of 2020,

[07:51] Bob Dobbs: so three and a half years later,

[07:54] Bob Dobbs: What We Slash You Didn't Know About Trump.

[07:57] Bob Dobbs: So those are the two parts.

[07:58] Bob Dobbs: So we begin,

[08:00] Bob Dobbs: and I want to it is targeted towards McLuhan,

[08:07] Bob Dobbs: and I want to

[08:09] Bob Dobbs: inform people about McLuhan that they have no idea,

[08:14] Bob Dobbs: no matter how much they read about McLuhan,

[08:16] Bob Dobbs: that he anticipated the tech body or this weird phenomenon.

[08:19] Bob Dobbs: So

[08:20] Bob Dobbs: I think I've made a breakthrough on translating McLuhan,

[08:24] Bob Dobbs: right?

[08:25] Bob Dobbs: And I think it's worth people exploring it.

[08:28] Bob Dobbs: And I think I'm qualified to do that.

[08:32] Bob Dobbs: That's my agenda.

[08:33] Bob Dobbs: Hey,

[08:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[08:34] Bob Dobbs: you hear from all kinds of different levels of McLuhan.

[08:37] Bob Dobbs: But it was about time Bob...

[08:40] Bob Dobbs: The archivist of McLuhan judged what was going on.

[08:44] Bob Dobbs: So I tried to make an honest,

[08:47] Bob Dobbs: sincere,

[08:49] Bob Dobbs: accurate,

[08:50] Bob Dobbs: and correcting,

[08:52] Bob Dobbs: and mind-blowing statement.

[08:55] Bob Dobbs: That was my goal.

[08:56] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: Let me just emphasize how difficult that goal is.

[09:05] Cameron McEwen: You spoke of the attempt to translate

[09:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[09:10] Cameron McEwen: And I don't think that the task is radically different from trying to translate Plato or trying to translate

[09:18] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle.

[09:21] Cameron McEwen: And there's lots of other people that knew things that are very,

[09:25] Cameron McEwen: very difficult to understand.

[09:29] Cameron McEwen: and they're difficult to understand because there's no direct route to...

[09:39] Cameron McEwen: seeing what they're talking about.

[09:41] Cameron McEwen: It's a little bit like learning another language or being in a anti-environment where...

[09:47] Cameron McEwen: You have to make a kind of jump,

[09:50] Cameron McEwen: and Plato called that jump dialectic.

[09:54] Cameron McEwen: Dialectic,

[09:56] Cameron McEwen: after

[09:57] Cameron McEwen: Plato, becomes misunderstood as some sort of intellectual thing.

[10:02] Cameron McEwen: But for

[10:03] Cameron McEwen: Plato, dialectic is something that can happen between minds.

[10:10] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[10:11] Cameron McEwen: it happens in all communication,

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: but people do not understand.

[10:17] Cameron McEwen: understand what is going on when they communicate.

[10:21] Cameron McEwen: And so the recurrent attempt to translate is something that's like a motor of the tradition,

[10:32] Cameron McEwen: but it's a motor that's not understood.

[10:34] Cameron McEwen: It's in the background.

[10:35] Cameron McEwen: And what that motor is doing is also not understood.

[10:40] Cameron McEwen: And your attempt to translate McLuhan takes place against that.

[10:45] Cameron McEwen: background,

[10:46] Cameron McEwen: a very difficult background of trying to show people what everybody knows,

[10:51] Cameron McEwen: but nobody knows.

[10:52] Bob Dobbs: You're right.

[10:53] Bob Dobbs: And I'm fully aware of that.

[10:54] Bob Dobbs: I know the task.

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: And

[11:00] Bob Dobbs: Alex Kuskis told me that somebody wrote to him after this came out to put on the new Explorations site.

[11:08] Bob Dobbs: She said,

[11:09] Bob Dobbs: how is he equating Trump and McLuhan?

[11:12] Bob Dobbs: How could...

[11:13] Bob Dobbs: How can they talk about him in the same breath?

[11:15] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[11:15] Bob Dobbs: what is he doing?

[11:17] Bob Dobbs: And

[11:18] Bob Dobbs: Alex told me he said back to the guy,

[11:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what Bob's doing.

[11:23] Cameron McEwen: And

[11:23] Bob Dobbs: I was shocked and disgusted with that response.

[11:28] Bob Dobbs: Come on,

[11:28] Bob Dobbs: Alex.

[11:31] Bob Dobbs: First of all,

[11:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm not saying Trump equal to McLuhan,

[11:34] Bob Dobbs: for freak's sake.

[11:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[11:36] Bob Dobbs: that's not what this story is about.

[11:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm using McLuhan to explain Trump.

[11:41] Bob Dobbs: And this guy,

[11:42] Bob Dobbs: whoever he was,

[11:42] Bob Dobbs: was suggesting,

[11:44] Bob Dobbs: you can't discuss McLuhan Trump.

[11:46] Bob Dobbs: Trump so disgusting,

[11:48] Bob Dobbs: such a good shaman,

[11:50] Bob Dobbs: that you can't put McLuhan into the same world.

[11:52] Bob Dobbs: So

[11:53] Bob Dobbs: I was amazed.

[11:55] Cameron McEwen: I got to say that

[11:57] Cameron McEwen: I am a little bit surprised at Alex's response,

[12:02] Cameron McEwen: that he didn't know what was going on,

[12:03] Cameron McEwen: because usually the understanding of McLuhan or the understanding of talk about McLuhan,

[12:11] Cameron McEwen: is blocked by what people do understand,

[12:14] Cameron McEwen: to think they understand.

[12:16] Cameron McEwen: So the beginning of understanding is always to know that you don't understand.

[12:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[12:22] Cameron McEwen: So I liked what Alex said there,

[12:24] Cameron McEwen: that he didn't know what the hell you were talking about.

[12:29] Bob Dobbs: And he should have corrected the guy at least and say,

[12:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm not equating

[12:33] Bob Dobbs: Trump and McLuhan,

[12:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[12:36] Bob Dobbs: and discussing.

[12:37] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[12:38] Cameron McEwen: it all depends on what you mean by equating.

[12:40] Bob Dobbs: in one sense you are yes but what is it i'm not uh i got the sense unless alex badly translated the guy that there's no way you discuss trump and McLuhan you don't put McLuhan in the same disgusting new york ghetto Trump from right

[12:58] Cameron McEwen: well the other guy i'm you know didn't know how to think that's somebody that's somebody that never reads poetry or never talks to somebody who's interesting.

[13:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[13:09] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[13:11] Cameron McEwen: so I'm not interested in the other guy.

[13:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm only interested in what

[13:14] Cameron McEwen: Alex had to say,

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: because to me that's the idea of not knowing what the hell you're talking about.

[13:20] Cameron McEwen: That's good.

[13:21] Cameron McEwen: That's a good place to start.

[13:23] Bob Dobbs: But he didn't know that.

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: No,

[13:29] Bob Dobbs: and so

[13:31] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[13:32] Bob Dobbs: Alex,

[13:33] Bob Dobbs: screw you.

[13:34] Bob Dobbs: You're an idiot to not give that kind of simple.

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: non-cooperative not even trying to attempt to explain what I am doing a little bit and that's why I got kicked off the list you know I insulted him he said so that's the end of that list and they don't get any more McLuhan letters that

[13:55] Bob Dobbs: I was posting so you got back onto that list after a while no no I was on years ago you know three or four years ago and got kicked off

[14:07] Bob Dobbs: Because I was posting too much.

[14:10] Bob Dobbs: It was some ridiculous reason.

[14:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[14:12] Bob Dobbs: posting too much.

[14:15] Bob Dobbs: I was putting out all kinds of good McLuhan stuff for new people that were coming there and wanted to learn about McLuhan.

[14:22] Bob Dobbs: Geez,

[14:23] Bob Dobbs: the archive was laying out.

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[14:26] Bob Dobbs: so

[14:26] Bob Dobbs: I went to the auto archives in the summer of 2017 after I got this gift.

[14:34] Bob Dobbs: And...

[14:36] Bob Dobbs: So that means I was kicked off in late 2016,

[14:40] Bob Dobbs: early 2017.

[14:41] Bob Dobbs: So then when Alex found out that I had all these letters,

[14:44] Bob Dobbs: he invited me back on.

[14:46] Bob Dobbs: And I did okay for a year or so until this instant came up with this response.

[14:53] Bob Dobbs: And I said,

[14:53] Bob Dobbs: come on,

[14:54] Bob Dobbs: Alex.

[14:54] Bob Dobbs: And he got mad.

[14:56] Bob Dobbs: So that left me with…

[14:57] Cameron McEwen: So you were kicked off a second time.

[14:59] Bob Dobbs: Second time.

[15:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[15:00] Bob Dobbs: twice.

[15:03] Bob Dobbs: So,

[15:03] Bob Dobbs: but...

[15:04] Bob Dobbs: Fake Explorations,

[15:05] Bob Dobbs: I like that place because I could talk about ion.

[15:07] Bob Dobbs: I was not allowed to talk about ion on the McLuhan list,

[15:10] Bob Dobbs: on Alice's list.

[15:12] Bob Dobbs: No mention of that,

[15:13] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[15:13] Bob Dobbs: Even though

[15:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went to the evergreens himself,

[15:18] Bob Dobbs: for sake's sake,

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: and went to mediums.

[15:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's part of the phenomenon of McLuhan.

[15:25] Bob Dobbs: So

[15:27] Bob Dobbs: I prefer Fake Explorations.

[15:29] Bob Dobbs: That's created by Adam Pugin,

[15:30] Bob Dobbs: a young assistant teacher at the University of Toronto.

[15:34] Bob Dobbs: who anti-environment lets me put anything up there pretty well.

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: So that's good,

[15:39] Bob Dobbs: because I'm interested in translating

[15:43] Bob Dobbs: ION through McLuhan,

[15:45] Bob Dobbs: or McLuhan through ION,

[15:47] Bob Dobbs: and I discuss McLuhan all the time with ION.

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: ION makes incredible,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: accurate,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: interesting statements about the McLuhan phenomenon and other absurd levels too.

[15:59] Bob Dobbs: But to me,

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: ION is an update of the...

[16:03] Bob Dobbs: style of McLuhan,

[16:05] Bob Dobbs: the way

[16:06] Bob Dobbs: Ion interacts with the callers in the audience.

[16:09] Bob Dobbs: There's,

[16:11] Bob Dobbs: in that sense,

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: the full shamanic meaning,

[16:15] Bob Dobbs: Ion's a shaman,

[16:15] Bob Dobbs: and so was McLuhan.

[16:17] Bob Dobbs: Matter of fact,

[16:18] Bob Dobbs: Robert Fulford called McLuhan an Eskimo.

[16:20] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever see that article?

[16:21] Bob Dobbs: 1967?

[16:24] Cameron McEwen: I think I did.

[16:24] Cameron McEwen: It rings a big bell,

[16:25] Cameron McEwen: but I can't remember.

[16:27] Bob Dobbs: I thought it was really good.

[16:28] Bob Dobbs: It's a good label for McLuhan back in 1967.

[16:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was not limited to his culture,

[16:38] Bob Dobbs: and he also had a great,

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: at least imaginary,

[16:46] Bob Dobbs: intuition that he understood the primitive culture because of Carpenter's information.

[16:53] Bob Dobbs: So,

[16:54] Bob Dobbs: compared to most,

[16:55] Bob Dobbs: just talking from an awareness of the Eskimo,

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: now Inuit,

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: reality,

[17:01] Bob Dobbs: culture,

[17:03] Bob Dobbs: It makes you different from the fellow Canadian.

[17:06] Bob Dobbs: So

[17:06] Bob Dobbs: Fulford did well there.

[17:08] Bob Dobbs: McClellan is an Eskimo.

[17:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: Robert Fulford had zero understanding of...

[17:14] Bob Dobbs: I know,

[17:14] Bob Dobbs: but he could write...

[17:17] Bob Dobbs: He could write...

[17:17] Bob Dobbs: I read his column when I lived in Toronto,

[17:21] Bob Dobbs: 77 to 93.

[17:23] Bob Dobbs: Read his column every week.

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: I think it was in the Toronto Star back then.

[17:26] Bob Dobbs: I enjoyed his simple translation of...

[17:31] Bob Dobbs: a sophisticated mind,

[17:33] Bob Dobbs: a guy who was aware of a lot of levels,

[17:37] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[17:37] Bob Dobbs: He's quite encyclopedic in a bland,

[17:40] Bob Dobbs: bourgeois,

[17:41] Bob Dobbs: middle-class way.

[17:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[17:42] Bob Dobbs: I enjoyed what he pointed out,

[17:44] Bob Dobbs: what he would discover.

[17:46] Bob Dobbs: And he'd occasionally write about McLuhan.

[17:47] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever read his book,

[17:48] Bob Dobbs: Best Seat in the House?

[17:50] Cameron McEwen: No.

[17:51] Bob Dobbs: Interesting.

[17:52] Bob Dobbs: He decided that he had the best seat in Canadian culture because he was in grade school with Glenn Gould.

[17:59] Bob Dobbs: He knew McLuhan.

[17:59] Bob Dobbs: He knew a lot of...

[18:01] Bob Dobbs: many other people in the art world of Toronto and across the country.

[18:06] Bob Dobbs: So

[18:07] Bob Dobbs: I was always interested in Robert Fulford commentary and whatever.

[18:13] Cameron McEwen: What I think of is a guy goes to school,

[18:17] Cameron McEwen: Glenn Gould,

[18:18] Cameron McEwen: knows artists and interviews McLuhan and all this sort of stuff.

[18:21] Cameron McEwen: And then he dies.

[18:23] Cameron McEwen: And then on his tombstone,

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: he's got,

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: here lies Robert Fulford.

[18:28] Cameron McEwen: He had the best.

[18:29] Cameron McEwen: seat in the house.

[18:31] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous.

[18:34] Cameron McEwen: What a way to lead a life.

[18:37] Cameron McEwen: Jesus Christ.

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: But that's,

[18:40] Bob Dobbs: it's Toronto snobbery.

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:43] Cameron McEwen: it's ludicrous.

[18:44] Bob Dobbs: He had his own cult.

[18:46] Bob Dobbs: Many young people just had a call.

[18:48] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to get into the humanities or the arts and magazine culture.

[18:52] Bob Dobbs: They went to Fulford.

[18:52] Bob Dobbs: He ran his own scene.

[18:54] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure.

[18:56] Cameron McEwen: It's a,

[18:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: But he was a mediocre cult leader,

[19:03] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[19:03] Cameron McEwen: A leader of a mediocre cult,

[19:05] Cameron McEwen: I would say.

[19:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[19:06] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[19:07] Cameron McEwen: He might have been a superlative leader of a mediocre cult.

[19:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[19:15] Bob Dobbs: so he competed with McLuhan.

[19:21] Cameron McEwen: He tried to.

[19:22] Cameron McEwen: It's absurd.

[19:23] Cameron McEwen: It's absurd.

[19:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan just talked to him.

[19:28] Cameron McEwen: Like he was talking to somebody from Mars.

[19:33] Bob Dobbs: A bad student of Northrop Frye.

[19:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[19:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what Fulfer was.

[19:41] Bob Dobbs: He was a bad student of Northrop Frye.

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[19:47] Bob Dobbs: so I start off laying out the thing I wrote in 2017 where I poked at people.

[19:57] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[19:57] Bob Dobbs: look at this,

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: two schools of thought that McLuhan talked about.

[20:02] Bob Dobbs: And Trump one of them.

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: If you take the cathartic ethical approach,

[20:06] Bob Dobbs: you're not going to be able to understand

[20:08] Bob Dobbs: Trump.

[20:09] Bob Dobbs: But if you take the cognitive school,

[20:11] Bob Dobbs: look at the perceptual level Trump and the figure and ground,

[20:15] Bob Dobbs: then you might get somewheres.

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: So

[20:19] Bob Dobbs: I just rubbed this obscure McLuhan quote,

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: into this pop culture phenomenon that was disgusting so many people.

[20:27] Cameron McEwen: So speak a little bit more about these two schools,

[20:34] Cameron McEwen: because I don't entirely understand what you're saying.

[20:38] Cameron McEwen: But it seems like it's necessary to understand it in order to understand the brochure.

[20:46] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[20:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[20:47] Bob Dobbs: I'm scrolling down to find where that begins.

[20:52] Bob Dobbs: Slowly scrolling down because you can't scoop it down.

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: It goes past it.

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: Do you have that problem on your computer?

[21:02] Cameron McEwen: The reason for that,

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[21:04] Cameron McEwen: is that you're set to a certain kind of score.

[21:07] Cameron McEwen: scrolling that jumps between pages instead of just,

[21:14] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[21:14] Cameron McEwen: I think you can reset that,

[21:15] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know what kind of computer you have and what the settings are.

[21:18] Bob Dobbs: I'll get my computer repairman.

[21:20] Cameron McEwen: But we'll come to it.

[21:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[21:22] Cameron McEwen: if it's hard to find,

[21:23] Cameron McEwen: don't worry about it.

[21:24] Cameron McEwen: We'll come to it.

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: no,

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: I've got it.

[21:26] Cameron McEwen: And you can address it then.

[21:27] Bob Dobbs: No,

[21:27] Bob Dobbs: we come.

[21:28] Bob Dobbs: I have it now.

[21:29] Bob Dobbs: It just took a while to scroll down.

[21:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[21:30] Cameron McEwen: good.

[21:31] Bob Dobbs: But when my computer repairman comes over,

[21:33] Bob Dobbs: I'll get him to check that.

[21:35] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't jump page to page,

[21:37] Bob Dobbs: but it's just slow.

[21:38] Bob Dobbs: And if I pull down on the little square on the right column,

[21:44] Bob Dobbs: it just goes too far.

[21:45] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to make it go short.

[21:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[21:48] Bob Dobbs: so

[21:49] Bob Dobbs: I start off saying,

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: no previous president of the U.S.

[21:52] Bob Dobbs: This is in the spring of 2017.

[21:54] Bob Dobbs: No previous president of the USA has ever used the office of the White House to provide a training in perception.

[22:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm kind of laughing as I'm doing this,

[22:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[22:04] Bob Dobbs: It's obvious McLuhan not.

[22:05] Bob Dobbs: What page are you on,

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: Bob?

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: What?

[22:06] Cameron McEwen: What page?

[22:07] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[22:07] Cameron McEwen: page four.

[22:08] Cameron McEwen: Page four.

[22:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[22:11] Cameron McEwen: I see it.

[22:12] Bob Dobbs: No previous president.

[22:13] Bob Dobbs: So we're going to.

[22:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: let me just read it.

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: Go into it this way for a minute.

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: No previous president of the USA has ever used the office of the White House to provide a training in perception.

[22:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan does a good job explaining how each president's image resonates with the technological ground of the day.

[22:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: say through most of the 20th century.

[22:36] Bob Dobbs: So the president actually expresses the ground more than other people in some way.

[22:41] Bob Dobbs: And so is a training of perception of the larger ground if you know how to look at it?

[22:46] Bob Dobbs: So it's not accurate for me to say that no other guy provided training perception.

[22:53] Bob Dobbs: But I'm implying Trump was a little more conscious of the game.

[22:57] Bob Dobbs: The White House was so obsolete that he had an extra bravado.

[23:03] Bob Dobbs: and indifference to the role.

[23:05] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[23:05] Bob Dobbs: He was going to hijack it,

[23:06] Bob Dobbs: basically,

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: for business purposes or something.

[23:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[23:11] Cameron McEwen: hijacking is a good image there,

[23:14] Cameron McEwen: not only because it's a favorite image of

[23:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in the

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: 70s, but also in the sense that what you're saying is that every president,

[23:26] Cameron McEwen: in order to be the president,

[23:29] Cameron McEwen: has to have a special relationship Thank you.

[23:33] Cameron McEwen: to the contemporary society more or less as its representative.

[23:41] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[23:43] Cameron McEwen: And in order to understand the series of presidents in the way that you want to understand them,

[23:53] Cameron McEwen: you have to see them as these kinds of representatives.

[23:57] Cameron McEwen: And what I think you're saying Trump is that Trump,

[24:02] Cameron McEwen: His representation comes to consciousness in a new way,

[24:10] Cameron McEwen: and that new way is shocking.

[24:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[24:16] Cameron McEwen: For some people,

[24:18] Cameron McEwen: it's shockingly bad,

[24:19] Cameron McEwen: and for some people,

[24:20] Cameron McEwen: it's shockingly good.

[24:22] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[24:23] Bob Dobbs: and it's a product of the new world,

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: I call it Web 2.0,

[24:27] Bob Dobbs: social media world,

[24:28] Bob Dobbs: that people aren't thinking clearly about or perceptively.

[24:32] Bob Dobbs: So they got the shock of somebody reflecting their present that they didn't know was happening around them.

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: in social media.

[24:41] Bob Dobbs: So when I look back at the presidency since

[24:48] Bob Dobbs: FDR, or maybe even the 20s,

[24:50] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn Coolidge,

[24:52] Bob Dobbs: every guy that was a president,

[24:56] Bob Dobbs: it was correct that that guy won.

[24:58] Bob Dobbs: He was appropriate.

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: His competitor was not in some way.

[25:01] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[25:02] Bob Dobbs: just take

[25:03] Bob Dobbs: Reagan versus Mondale.

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: Mondale is nowhere qualified like Reagan is,

[25:08] Bob Dobbs: unconsciously.

[25:09] Bob Dobbs: To be president at that phase of cable TV,

[25:13] Bob Dobbs: Star Wars,

[25:15] Bob Dobbs: global theater and extreme,

[25:16] Bob Dobbs: and in my terms,

[25:17] Bob Dobbs: the beginning of the Android Meme.

[25:20] Bob Dobbs: Mondale doesn't make it.

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: He deserved to lose.

[25:24] Bob Dobbs: The president is actually auditioning.

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: They're presenting their image.

[25:28] Bob Dobbs: How does this work?

[25:29] Bob Dobbs: Look at the way I am.

[25:30] Bob Dobbs: Look at the way I come across.

[25:35] Cameron McEwen: You're saying that the president can be understood.

[25:40] Cameron McEwen: as auditioning for a theater.

[25:45] Bob Dobbs: For a very important central point in the theater.

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[25:51] Cameron McEwen: And so the presidents have to be understood as put on a certain role.

[25:57] Cameron McEwen: And in order to put on that role,

[26:02] Cameron McEwen: maybe you have to have a certain body shape or a certain way of talking.

[26:08] Cameron McEwen: talking or something.

[26:11] Cameron McEwen: But it's a notion of the world as a theater in which everybody is putting on one or more roles,

[26:24] Cameron McEwen: and the president's role is a kind of starring role that needs to express what the particular play is.

[26:38] Cameron McEwen: is all about.

[26:39] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[26:40] Bob Dobbs: And what was I going to say about Reagan?

[26:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan in 76 or so in People magazine,

[26:52] Bob Dobbs: he predicted that Reagan was the best guy to become the next president because he had merged with his role.

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: he used some of his favorite phrases.

[27:01] Bob Dobbs: He was a man who merged with his role and the presidential White House was

[27:07] Bob Dobbs: becoming more of a

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillardian simulation or something.

[27:12] Bob Dobbs: And so Reagan matched that.

[27:13] Bob Dobbs: And that was shocking when people read McClellan in the 70s and say,

[27:17] Bob Dobbs: what,

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: Reagan?

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: Come on,

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: that guy's a dummy.

[27:20] Bob Dobbs: And

[27:21] Bob Dobbs: I never respected

[27:25] Bob Dobbs: Reagan as a mind or as a guy who should be president,

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: but the great outpouring by the Android Meme and the fake people or...

[27:35] Bob Dobbs: somebody,

[27:36] Bob Dobbs: the global audience,

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: for when he died and they put him in state for a week.

[27:40] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?

[27:43] Bob Dobbs: I understood why he got that status,

[27:48] Bob Dobbs: even though I personally didn't think he,

[27:49] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[27:50] Bob Dobbs: deserved it as a person or as a corrupt guy that he'd been in California.

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: I have a very obscure book by

[27:59] Bob Dobbs: Larry Flint where he goes into the,

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: with And...

[28:05] Bob Dobbs: Forget the author.

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: Larry Flint sponsored it.

[28:09] Bob Dobbs: He was an assassination,

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: Kennedy assassination researcher,

[28:12] Bob Dobbs: friend of May Brussel.

[28:13] Bob Dobbs: Don somebody.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: And he had a lot of dirt on

[28:17] Bob Dobbs: Reagan, the human being,

[28:18] Bob Dobbs: as governor.

[28:20] Bob Dobbs: Incredible stuff.

[28:21] Bob Dobbs: And that's...

[28:25] Cameron McEwen: If you think of

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: Reagan and Mondale contrasted,

[28:30] Cameron McEwen: Reagan had more bodies.

[28:32] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[28:33] Cameron McEwen: He had a TV body.

[28:35] Cameron McEwen: He had sort of a Star Wars body from his roles in movies.

[28:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[28:44] Cameron McEwen: Of course,

[28:44] Cameron McEwen: he had his chemical body.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: You know how he had his astral body?

[28:52] Bob Dobbs: His wife had an astrologer in the White House.

[28:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[28:57] Cameron McEwen: I remember there was stuff like that.

[29:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[29:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[29:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[29:02] Cameron McEwen: But that's,

[29:05] Cameron McEwen: Mondale was a down-to-earth labor union sort of guy.

[29:11] Cameron McEwen: And so the thinking about presidents in terms of the number of bodies and how the bodies related,

[29:19] Cameron McEwen: I think is interesting.

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: it works.

[29:22] Bob Dobbs: If you need a model,

[29:23] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,

[29:24] Bob Dobbs: people need concepts to get a sense of balance in their reality,

[29:28] Bob Dobbs: even though he was not about concepts.

[29:31] Bob Dobbs: But he knew that his

[29:33] Bob Dobbs: Perseps presented in book form would be seen as concepts.

[29:37] Bob Dobbs: And he was offering concepts for people to,

[29:42] Bob Dobbs: as he said,

[29:44] Bob Dobbs: the regular experts in society.

[29:47] Bob Dobbs: didn't dare to pretend they knew what was going on.

[29:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan pretended he knew what was going on.

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: He did a good job at it.

[29:53] Bob Dobbs: Everybody liked what he presented.

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: So why did I say that?

[29:59] Cameron McEwen: Without understanding what he was saying,

[30:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[30:03] Cameron McEwen: They liked his Postman.

[30:04] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[30:04] Bob Dobbs: right.

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: They liked his Postman.

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: And let's see.

[30:10] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying McLuhan,

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: Persep,

[30:14] Bob Dobbs: I think I had a point there.

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: no,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: just that he says to the New York Times in 67,

[30:22] Bob Dobbs: that young guy,

[30:23] Bob Dobbs: Richard somebody,

[30:26] Bob Dobbs: who did a lot of writings about avant-garde culture.

[30:31] Cameron McEwen: Kostelanetz.

[30:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[30:33] Bob Dobbs: Kostelanetz.

[30:34] Bob Dobbs: And he,

[30:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said it to him.

[30:41] Bob Dobbs: And he's a young baby boomer guy who's into concepts.

[30:45] Bob Dobbs: He's going to make a career out of it,

[30:47] Bob Dobbs: get grants and write books.

[30:49] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan statement to him was fitting for that young baby boomer.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: It would be a way a baby boomer would understand,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[30:58] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan putting us on because we need concepts.

[31:01] Bob Dobbs: It's a kind of therapy,

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: collective therapy.

[31:05] Cameron McEwen: I see that as a statement of despair.

[31:09] Cameron McEwen: By me?

[31:12] Cameron McEwen: No,

[31:13] Cameron McEwen: by him.

[31:14] Cameron McEwen: by McLuhan because what happens if you want to translate as we were talking about you translating McLuhan the whole point is to get

[31:29] Cameron McEwen: the person to stop thinking in one way and to start thinking in another way and the as long as the person thinks in concepts

[31:42] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[31:42] Cameron McEwen: as long as the person thinks in terms of the old thinking,

[31:47] Cameron McEwen: as long as the person thinks in terms of the old language and just translates word for word from he or she hears a word,

[32:01] Cameron McEwen: let's say in French,

[32:02] Cameron McEwen: and then they rack their brain and they come up with some sort of English translation and then they go on to the next word.

[32:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[32:10] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly not to understand

[32:14] Cameron McEwen: French. It's to understand

[32:18] Cameron McEwen: English, a way of classifying French words in English.

[32:26] Cameron McEwen: So what a translation is trying to do is trying to get a person to make a jump,

[32:32] Cameron McEwen: and that jump can be called tactility.

[32:35] Cameron McEwen: It can be called...

[32:38] Cameron McEwen: living the gap.

[32:39] Cameron McEwen: It can be called a lot of things.

[32:42] Cameron McEwen: But when McLuhan talks about supplying concepts,

[32:47] Cameron McEwen: that's a kind of despair.

[32:49] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of saying,

[32:51] Cameron McEwen: I've tried for 30 years to communicate,

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: and every time I try to communicate,

[32:59] Cameron McEwen: the person,

[32:59] Cameron McEwen: instead of understanding the new language,

[33:03] Cameron McEwen: understands the new words in the old language.

[33:11] Bob Dobbs: I agree.

[33:13] Bob Dobbs: Did you finish your sentence?

[33:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[33:16] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[33:16] Cameron McEwen: I could have gone on,

[33:17] Cameron McEwen: but I realized that

[33:19] Cameron McEwen: I was getting away from your point,

[33:22] Cameron McEwen: and so I wanted to hand the ball back to you.

[33:24] Bob Dobbs: Good,

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: because I want to say this.

[33:27] Bob Dobbs: For the record,

[33:30] Bob Dobbs: I lived in New York for many years,

[33:32] Bob Dobbs: and I met Kostelanetz.

[33:34] Bob Dobbs: So we had an argument.

[33:39] Bob Dobbs: with the landlord or something.

[33:41] Bob Dobbs: So he had to go to civil court,

[33:43] Bob Dobbs: whatever they call it.

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: And we walk in,

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: in the evening,

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: the room's quite filled and there's a guy at a table at the front haranguing the judges or whatever they are.

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: the judges.

[33:58] Bob Dobbs: Haranguing on about what an unfair deal he was getting from Con Ed and all this stuff.

[34:04] Bob Dobbs: And so I didn't know who he was.

[34:07] Bob Dobbs: But then when he...

[34:07] Bob Dobbs: finished because quite a scene when he walked out I recognized him cost the Phelan so I went up I started talking to him and we walked home once we finished our thing which didn't take very long and we walked home and had a nice talk but

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: I was laughing to myself right here's this guy he had a great career in cultural journalism in New York Times and many books and many grants any in

[34:38] Bob Dobbs: When would this be?

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: At 2005,

[34:43] Bob Dobbs: here's New York,

[34:44] Bob Dobbs: collapsed place,

[34:45] Bob Dobbs: and he's ranting on.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: This is what happened to a good mind,

[34:50] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[34:52] Bob Dobbs: He's a nobody in the larger structure of New York City,

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: and he's pissed off,

[34:59] Bob Dobbs: and he doesn't care what they think,

[35:00] Bob Dobbs: he just insults them.

[35:02] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't win,

[35:04] Bob Dobbs: he lost his case,

[35:05] Bob Dobbs: and whatever

[35:06] Bob Dobbs: Con Ed was doing on him,

[35:08] Bob Dobbs: but that's funny,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: eh?

[35:10] Bob Dobbs: a guy he didn't know what i knew about him i eventually told him later a little bit about myself but uh you know it's like i don't know being the uh because he was a good McLuhan he studied McLuhan a lot and would quote him at

[35:27] Bob Dobbs: least you know kept up on McLuhan so it was like i'm a i'm a i'm a a stepbrother that he never met and i'm not telling him

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: And I'm watching it because I know his whole history with his father,

[35:42] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[35:44] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[35:45] Bob Dobbs: that's a little side story about what happened to Richard Kostelanetz.

[35:50] Bob Dobbs: Don't know where he is today.

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying no previous president of the USA has ever used the office of the White House to provide a training and perception.

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: there's a slight consciousness Trump about how to play the game because.

[36:06] Bob Dobbs: Nobody had the media savviness that he brought on himself by being a host of a TV show and a gossip guy in the New York Post.

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: He had a modern familiarity of media,

[36:20] Bob Dobbs: especially in New York City,

[36:22] Bob Dobbs: that the citizen had.

[36:23] Bob Dobbs: The citizen is naive in the

[36:26] Bob Dobbs: Ike era.

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: Ike is naive in the

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: 50s, it would seem.

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: So there's a bit of consciousness and put on in...

[36:36] Bob Dobbs: Trump compared to other presidents.

[36:39] Bob Dobbs: And it's required of that time because the American population is quite conscious,

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: tech savvy and sophisticated,

[36:49] Bob Dobbs: unconsciously brought into those higher decibels of level of consciousness that McLuhan would say,

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: but way more sophisticated than people were 50 years ago,

[36:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:59] Bob Dobbs: before.

[37:00] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[37:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[37:00] Cameron McEwen: think of it like pro wrestling.

[37:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[37:07] Cameron McEwen: millions and millions of people are watching pro wrestling and they're all caught up in it and all this sort of stuff but they don't reflect on and they don't reflect on and they don't care about if what's going on is a real fight or if it's staged or what the hell it is kind of they're

[37:30] Cameron McEwen: spending their time enjoying themselves they don't find illusion

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: They know it's fake.

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: No,

[37:36] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[37:37] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[37:38] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[37:39] Cameron McEwen: And so then along comes somebody Trump that is an illusionist.

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[37:47] Cameron McEwen: That's what You're Fired is all about.

[37:49] Cameron McEwen: It's kind of pro-wrestling.

[37:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[37:53] Bob Dobbs: And remember,

[37:54] Bob Dobbs: there's footage of him fighting the head of the

[37:57] Bob Dobbs: World Wide Wrestling,

[37:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[37:59] Bob Dobbs: that

[38:00] Bob Dobbs: Canadian. He's a Canadian.

[38:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[38:01] Bob Dobbs: You know that guy.

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[38:03] Cameron McEwen: I know who you're talking about.

[38:04] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember.

[38:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[38:06] Bob Dobbs: they're on the ground beside the outside of the ring fighting.

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: And

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: I assume it was a Postman.

[38:14] Bob Dobbs: But I'm not an expert of what was going on there.

[38:18] Bob Dobbs: But they're crawling on the ground,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: really going at it,

[38:22] Bob Dobbs: right?

[38:24] Bob Dobbs: You would never,

[38:26] Bob Dobbs: no president,

[38:27] Bob Dobbs: even Gary,

[38:28] Bob Dobbs: whatever his name is,

[38:29] Bob Dobbs: who never made it,

[38:31] Bob Dobbs: no president.

[38:32] Bob Dobbs: would be ever caught doing that,

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: right?

[38:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[38:37] Bob Dobbs: Which

[38:38] Bob Dobbs: I enjoy Trump bravado,

[38:41] Bob Dobbs: even though it was crude for people.

[38:46] Cameron McEwen: When you say bravado,

[38:48] Cameron McEwen: do you mean that you thought it was a conscious bravado?

[38:54] Cameron McEwen: No.

[38:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[38:56] Bob Dobbs: I like...

[38:57] Bob Dobbs: He was constantly did not give a damn about media.

[39:01] Bob Dobbs: He didn't care what his image was.

[39:03] Bob Dobbs: And,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: it came out that he would call up reporters and pretend he was a friend Trump and promote Trump another person.

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: But it Trump,

[39:14] Bob Dobbs: apparently.

[39:17] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't care that the gossip people kind of knew it Trump.

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: his indifference is very good,

[39:24] Bob Dobbs: very appropriate to our time.

[39:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[39:27] Cameron McEwen: interesting.

[39:28] Cameron McEwen: If you think of what we were saying earlier about bodies.

[39:35] Cameron McEwen: you can see the multiple bodies of

[39:38] Cameron McEwen: Reagan being somewhat conscious of each other and careful with each other.

[39:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[39:48] Cameron McEwen: And so what happens in the...

[39:51] Cameron McEwen: jump Trump is that you have these multiple bodies,

[39:55] Cameron McEwen: multiple roles,

[39:56] Cameron McEwen: multiple images,

[39:57] Cameron McEwen: and they no longer give a shit about each other.

[40:00] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[40:01] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[40:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[40:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[40:05] Cameron McEwen: And then when we think about how the presidents and society need to kind of mirror each other,

[40:15] Cameron McEwen: what you see is a society

[40:19] Cameron McEwen: coming to consciousness of its multiple contradictory rules.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[40:27] Cameron McEwen: and saying,

[40:28] Cameron McEwen: well,

[40:28] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[40:29] Cameron McEwen: who gives a shit?

[40:29] Cameron McEwen: That's the way it is.

[40:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:31] Bob Dobbs: and it was shown on the talk shows,

[40:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[40:33] Bob Dobbs: the Jerry Springer shows of the

[40:35] Bob Dobbs: 90s, where people idiotically displayed their crazy lives and didn't care what people thought.

[40:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[40:42] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[40:42] Cameron McEwen: Didn't see it.

[40:43] Cameron McEwen: And all sorts of people were watching this and didn't care.

[40:48] Cameron McEwen: care about what they were watching.

[40:51] Cameron McEwen: It's unbelievable.

[40:53] Cameron McEwen: Just as an example,

[40:54] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[40:55] Cameron McEwen: with Jerry Springer,

[40:56] Cameron McEwen: the cardiologist that I go to has a large waiting room and they force people to watch television.

[41:07] Cameron McEwen: Why they do it,

[41:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[41:08] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it's like airports having a contract with CNN.

[41:16] Cameron McEwen: Anyway,

[41:16] Cameron McEwen: one day I'm there waiting for

[41:17] Cameron McEwen: for my appointment to see my cardiologist,

[41:20] Cameron McEwen: and

[41:21] Cameron McEwen: Jerry Springer is ours.

[41:23] Cameron McEwen: And there's prostitutes that are arguing about what they should do for what charge and all this stuff.

[41:30] Cameron McEwen: And as always,

[41:32] Cameron McEwen: they start to fight with each other.

[41:37] Cameron McEwen: These prostitutes,

[41:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[41:39] Cameron McEwen: And they're fighting,

[41:42] Cameron McEwen: and their language is getting raunchier and raunchier and raunchier.

[41:46] Cameron McEwen: And...

[41:47] Cameron McEwen: The people there were waiting to see their cardiologists.

[41:51] Bob Dobbs: These are mostly elderly women.

[41:55] Cameron McEwen: You could see that the whole waiting room was getting further and further and further away from the television.

[42:02] Cameron McEwen: And people began to more or less fight for seats at the back of the waiting room to get away from the television.

[42:12] Cameron McEwen: The television was beaming out bullets.

[42:16] Cameron McEwen: or something that they couldn't take.

[42:18] Cameron McEwen: It was one of the more amazing scenes of my life.

[42:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: no,

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: I get that.

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: There's a guy I knew in

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: L.A. when I was living in New York.

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: So this is like around 1999 or so.

[42:32] Bob Dobbs: And he got people,

[42:33] Bob Dobbs: guests for these kind of shows.

[42:36] Bob Dobbs: And so I got a call from this lady,

[42:39] Bob Dobbs: and she wanted to have me on the show as an expert or something.

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: So she asked me questions,

[42:46] Bob Dobbs: and I gave McLuhan,

[42:49] Bob Dobbs: good,

[42:50] Bob Dobbs: technical,

[42:51] Bob Dobbs: interesting statements.

[42:52] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[42:54] Bob Dobbs: I assumed it was I should be sober and grace her with my wisdom,

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: my McLuhan wisdom.

[43:03] Bob Dobbs: After the interview,

[43:03] Bob Dobbs: I got a call from Tom,

[43:06] Bob Dobbs: a half-hour later.

[43:07] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[43:07] Bob Dobbs: what the hell did you say to that lady?

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: She was so pissed off.

[43:12] Bob Dobbs: She thought that...

[43:13] Bob Dobbs: you were going to say that you tried to kill Reagan or some crazy fucking idea.

[43:20] Bob Dobbs: And she was not.

[43:22] Bob Dobbs: She said he was a typical bourgeois white guy with a stupid Nevitt bunch of shit.

[43:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what he was talking about.

[43:29] Bob Dobbs: It was horrible.

[43:31] Bob Dobbs: Don't do that again.

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: Tom almost lost his job because he recommended me.

[43:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's pretty funny,

[43:40] Bob Dobbs: eh?

[43:41] Bob Dobbs: I don't hear you laughing.

[43:41] Cameron McEwen: It is.

[43:42] Bob Dobbs: funny yeah well you were in you you put on your non-crazy mask yeah and yeah the um so tom was actually irresponsible on how he he gave her the impression i was pretty wild you

[44:00] Cameron McEwen: know and they may have given you the wrong impression of what they were uh looking for you yeah he didn't tell me capability of being wild

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: I could have.

[44:10] Bob Dobbs: If they wanted me to be well,

[44:11] Bob Dobbs: I could have been,

[44:12] Bob Dobbs: but I thought they were one of them.

[44:15] Bob Dobbs: But I was interacting with your fucking doctor's office.

[44:19] Bob Dobbs: That's what the problem was.

[44:20] Bob Dobbs: They were looking for somebody to be in that office on the screen.

[44:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[44:26] Cameron McEwen: On Jerry's planet.

[44:28] Bob Dobbs: And the other guy was Monty somebody,

[44:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: another name.

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: There's two of them.

[44:35] Bob Dobbs: You remember that other name,

[44:36] Bob Dobbs: Monty somebody?

[44:37] Bob Dobbs: Not the black guy.

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: But there was another white guy who had a pretty rowdy show.

[44:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[44:45] Bob Dobbs: so...

[44:45] Cameron McEwen: There was a guy called Marty Hall,

[44:46] Cameron McEwen: but I don't...

[44:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that's who you're talking about.

[44:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[44:49] Bob Dobbs: I don't think that's it.

[44:50] Bob Dobbs: So who knows?

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: It's so many thousand years ago.

[44:55] Bob Dobbs: So

[44:56] Bob Dobbs: I didn't...

[44:57] Cameron McEwen: Let me just interrupt for half a second here.

[45:00] Cameron McEwen: On

[45:01] Cameron McEwen: July the 2nd,

[45:03] Cameron McEwen: so six days ago,

[45:06] Cameron McEwen: I sent you a letter about

[45:10] Cameron McEwen: John Cage going to lunch with Marshall McLuhan.

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[45:14] Cameron McEwen: And it came out of a book by Richard Kostelanetz.

[45:18] Cameron McEwen: And so when we talked about Kostelanetz,

[45:25] Cameron McEwen: it was kind of a reversion,

[45:28] Cameron McEwen: an unconscious reversion in a circle.

[45:31] Cameron McEwen: Back to that email,

[45:32] Cameron McEwen: you probably didn't even notice that it involved Kostelanetz.

[45:36] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[45:37] Cameron McEwen: But yeah,

[45:39] Cameron McEwen: so it's interesting how life has those kind of echoes and reversals in time.

[45:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[45:46] Bob Dobbs: in an information overloaded society,

[45:49] Bob Dobbs: there's more potential for those kind of synchronicities to happen.

[45:53] Cameron McEwen: They must happen,

[45:54] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[45:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[45:55] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: And

[45:56] Bob Dobbs: I didn't notice anything because I don't like the way Cage talks about McLuhan.

[46:00] Bob Dobbs: He's dull.

[46:02] Bob Dobbs: It's silly almost.

[46:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[46:05] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[46:06] Cameron McEwen: It's,

[46:08] Cameron McEwen: how can I say,

[46:09] Cameron McEwen: it's a guy who's,

[46:11] Cameron McEwen: he's got a sort of fixed idea and he uh

[46:15] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't really listen to ideas that contradict it or that aren't parallel with it,

[46:23] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[46:25] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[46:29] Bob Dobbs: He feigns...

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan once said to me that Bucky Fuller was a

[46:35] Bob Dobbs: 19th century artist,

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: and he and John Cage were 20th century artists.

[46:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's interesting.

[46:41] Bob Dobbs: He puts Cage up there close to him,

[46:43] Bob Dobbs: but Cage acts.

[46:45] Bob Dobbs: He's a totally unconscious 20th century artist,

[46:47] Bob Dobbs: it seems.

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't understand the effects he's working with or the conscious way McLuhan talked about his own art.

[46:55] Bob Dobbs: Cage is nowhere near McLuhan on that level.

[46:58] Bob Dobbs: And that quote shows it once again.

[47:01] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't read that before,

[47:03] Bob Dobbs: that one.

[47:04] Bob Dobbs: And you know,

[47:05] Bob Dobbs: he was probably saying it cost a lot.

[47:08] Bob Dobbs: There was a laziness,

[47:10] Bob Dobbs: the two of them,

[47:10] Bob Dobbs: who had made it in

[47:12] Bob Dobbs: New York culture,

[47:13] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[47:14] Bob Dobbs: And they were talking about McClure lazily.

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[47:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[47:18] Cameron McEwen: Kostelanetz should have...

[47:20] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[47:21] Cameron McEwen: This is not Cage talking to Kostelanetz.

[47:24] Cameron McEwen: What Kostelanetz did was he went back to a whole bunch of obscure interviews that

[47:32] Cameron McEwen: Cage had held.

[47:33] Cameron McEwen: Some of them were with high school newspapers and with college yearbooks and stuff like that.

[47:40] Cameron McEwen: Things that nobody had ever seen.

[47:42] Cameron McEwen: And he...

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: collected what you could call

[47:48] Cameron McEwen: Cage's table talk or something from all these obscure sources.

[47:53] Cameron McEwen: And so what I did was I went through his table talk and had a look at what he had to say about McLuhan.

[48:04] Cameron McEwen: Usually it was just mentioning him in passing.

[48:09] Cameron McEwen: But the passage,

[48:10] Cameron McEwen: the one passage that I thought was

[48:14] Cameron McEwen: Interesting.

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: I sent to you and it simply was sort of a,

[48:22] Cameron McEwen: as you were saying,

[48:22] Cameron McEwen: it was a kind of affirmation on Cage's part that at the end of the day,

[48:29] Cameron McEwen: he knew something that McLuhan didn't.

[48:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[48:32] Cameron McEwen: But he was wrong about that.

[48:34] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[48:37] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[48:38] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[48:38] Cameron McEwen: I got you off the book.

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: We should go back to the two.

[48:43] Cameron McEwen: schools or approaches.

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: No,

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: I know where we are,

[48:45] Bob Dobbs: but I was just thinking,

[48:46] Bob Dobbs: I haven't thought about Cage.

[48:49] Bob Dobbs: He has very good quotes,

[48:51] Bob Dobbs: useful as figures in the medium as massage.

[48:54] Bob Dobbs: There are good quotes that McLuhan could use,

[48:56] Bob Dobbs: but naive people thought he was promoting John Cage.

[49:00] Bob Dobbs: He didn't,

[49:01] Bob Dobbs: he didn't know,

[49:02] Bob Dobbs: people didn't know they were presenting effects.

[49:05] Bob Dobbs: People are effects of anti-environment.

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: Their art is popular because of anti-environment.

[49:12] Cameron McEwen: It's like a president representing society.

[49:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[49:16] Bob Dobbs: And did you...

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking of

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan.

[49:24] Bob Dobbs: You know that statement,

[49:25] Bob Dobbs: art is anything you can get away with.

[49:28] Bob Dobbs: I always thought that was said by someone else,

[49:31] Bob Dobbs: not by McLuhan.

[49:32] Bob Dobbs: But he's quoted as saying it.

[49:36] Bob Dobbs: And if I'm right,

[49:36] Bob Dobbs: they read it lazily.

[49:38] Bob Dobbs: They just think McLuhan said it.

[49:40] Bob Dobbs: But do you know...

[49:41] Bob Dobbs: Where it came from?

[49:42] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever see it?

[49:43] Bob Dobbs: No.

[49:45] Cameron McEwen: I've seen the quote a million times.

[49:47] Bob Dobbs: No,

[49:47] Bob Dobbs: but did you ever see in an essay by McLuhan?

[49:52] Cameron McEwen: No.

[49:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[49:53] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen it by McLuhan.

[49:56] Bob Dobbs: And yet people will,

[49:58] Bob Dobbs: they'll quote McLuhan in the revivals.

[50:00] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[50:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is a little more red now.

[50:03] Bob Dobbs: They'll quote that as his statement on art.

[50:06] Bob Dobbs: And it's far from what McLuhan was saying about art.

[50:10] Bob Dobbs: Lazy talk.

[50:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[50:13] Cameron McEwen: what happens?

[50:14] Cameron McEwen: What happens in the media anti-environment that something gets said.

[50:23] Cameron McEwen: Maybe somebody Wright an article and they say that McLuhan said this.

[50:29] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he did,

[50:29] Cameron McEwen: maybe he didn't.

[50:31] Cameron McEwen: But then that article somehow gets into the ether and becomes very popular.

[50:39] Cameron McEwen: And so that saying becomes sort of...

[50:43] Cameron McEwen: put in concrete.

[50:44] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[50:45] Cameron McEwen: It's because this article has become so popular,

[50:53] Cameron McEwen: therefore what's in the article is what really happens.

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: And,

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: it has no relationship with reality whatsoever.

[51:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: But it's wrestling.

[51:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[51:07] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[51:08] Bob Dobbs: That's what's funny.

[51:09] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[51:10] Bob Dobbs: I consider McLuhan the Einstein of the second half.

[51:13] Bob Dobbs: second half of the 20th century,

[51:14] Bob Dobbs: and the fate of an intellectual is ridiculous in the second half of the 20th century.

[51:22] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[51:22] Bob Dobbs: there's so much confusion about everybody.

[51:24] Bob Dobbs: Misquoted,

[51:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[51:26] Bob Dobbs: rumors,

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: image,

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: gossip,

[51:28] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan was lost,

[51:30] Bob Dobbs: was consciously,

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: he knew,

[51:33] Bob Dobbs: he understood that was happening,

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: but he was Finnegans Wake,

[51:36] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake,

[51:39] Bob Dobbs: like everybody else in his time.

[51:42] Bob Dobbs: And that's what...

[51:42] Bob Dobbs: People don't see the irony of a great thinker or perceiver or an original person that never got any insight to what he was talking about.

[51:56] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[51:56] Cameron McEwen: But you see,

[51:58] Cameron McEwen: I see that as having always happened.

[52:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[52:02] Cameron McEwen: right.

[52:02] Cameron McEwen: I see that as happening already with Plato.

[52:05] Cameron McEwen: And Plato was blessed because he did have a great student in Aristotle.

[52:12] Cameron McEwen: Most great thinkers do not have any kind of following,

[52:17] Cameron McEwen: and their thinking is basically never understood.

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[52:23] Cameron McEwen: So at least Plato had Aristotle,

[52:26] Cameron McEwen: but what you were just saying about McLuhan fate is the fate of thinking.

[52:33] Cameron McEwen: Thinking has been done throughout the tradition,

[52:38] Cameron McEwen: but thinking has never been translated in a way that...

[52:42] Cameron McEwen: people understood.

[52:43] Cameron McEwen: So it always has to start again and again and again.

[52:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[52:49] Bob Dobbs: But I say that McLuhan represents,

[52:52] Bob Dobbs: among ratios,

[52:54] Bob Dobbs: a super breakthrough arriving at something that people could use practically.

[53:00] Bob Dobbs: Thinking finally became relevant to people.

[53:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[53:04] Cameron McEwen: But that's because that's in your linear mode.

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[53:08] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking the...

[53:10] Cameron McEwen: You're not going linear.

[53:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[53:14] Bob Dobbs: so the next sentence.

[53:17] Bob Dobbs: In Western art,

[53:17] Bob Dobbs: there are two schools or approaches to the creative act as spelled out by Marshall McLuhan.

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: So this is from

[53:25] Bob Dobbs: Interior landscape,

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: a collection of his essays,

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: came out in 69.

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: But this is a quote from,

[53:35] Bob Dobbs: I should have given the era,

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: but...

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: It's about Joyce.

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: So it's 1953.

[53:46] Bob Dobbs: It's in one of the two

[53:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan essays on Joyce in 53.

[53:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[53:51] Cameron McEwen: 53 or 54.

[53:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[53:53] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan says,

[53:55] Bob Dobbs: helping the reader to get a handle on Joyce,

[53:58] Bob Dobbs: that in the non part of this,

[54:01] Bob Dobbs: he Explorations the history of the cathartic school,

[54:05] Bob Dobbs: I think symbolized by people like

[54:07] Bob Dobbs: Matthew Arnold,

[54:09] Bob Dobbs: who were moralists.

[54:10] Bob Dobbs: and

[54:11] Bob Dobbs: wouldn't go anywhere near popular culture.

[54:15] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said the more relevant artist for the

[54:19] Bob Dobbs: 20th century was the artist,

[54:21] Bob Dobbs: because they were surrounded by pop culture,

[54:23] Bob Dobbs: that dared to look at pop culture and bring it into their aesthetic theories or whatever.

[54:31] Bob Dobbs: So

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, and I don't know if anybody ever said this before,

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: these two types,

[54:39] Bob Dobbs: do you know any critic in the 19th century?

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: that was aware of these two schools?

[54:44] Bob Dobbs: Did McLuhan make this up?

[54:46] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[54:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the answer to that question,

[54:50] Cameron McEwen: but I would be very surprised if he didn't take that from somebody or even from a movement.

[54:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[54:59] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[55:00] Cameron McEwen: I really don't know much about

[55:03] Cameron McEwen: Gertrude Levy,

[55:04] Cameron McEwen: but it may be that she talks about stuff like this.

[55:10] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[55:11] Cameron McEwen: One of the interesting things about

[55:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is that he read people like Levy when nobody else was.

[55:21] Cameron McEwen: Nobody took her seriously.

[55:23] Cameron McEwen: And maybe

[55:26] Cameron McEwen: 15 or 20 years later,

[55:29] Cameron McEwen: from reading McLuhan,

[55:31] Cameron McEwen: Fry started to read Levy.

[55:34] Cameron McEwen: And there's a lot of sort of interesting things.

[55:38] Cameron McEwen: like this that went on between McLuhan and

[55:41] Cameron McEwen: Frye and

[55:42] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and the University of Toronto,

[55:44] Cameron McEwen: where people like in the early

[55:47] Cameron McEwen: 50s are probably saying,

[55:48] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[55:48] Cameron McEwen: this guy's a jerk.

[55:51] Cameron McEwen: He reads non-academic people like Levy and he's interested in extreme forms of Catholicism or something.

[56:00] Cameron McEwen: And then

[56:01] Cameron McEwen: 15 years later,

[56:03] Cameron McEwen: they're saying,

[56:03] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[56:03] Cameron McEwen: look at this interesting stuff in

[56:05] Cameron McEwen: Levy. Right.

[56:08] Bob Dobbs: And they've been changed by the media,

[56:11] Bob Dobbs: and they forgot that McLuhan said something about the person.

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[56:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[56:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[56:18] Cameron McEwen: So what that shows is that the despair that somebody like

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had because all of the percepts were automatically changed in the concepts and translation became impossible or dialectic.

[56:35] Cameron McEwen: It became impossible.

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: In his better moments,

[56:41] Cameron McEwen: he knew,

[56:42] Cameron McEwen: as T.S.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: Eliot did,

[56:44] Cameron McEwen: that communication does not take place in that way.

[56:50] Cameron McEwen: Communication takes place in a different way that we don't understand.

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: As you just said,

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: there's a change in the media environment,

[56:59] Cameron McEwen: and then understanding happens somehow.

[57:03] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[57:05] Cameron McEwen: spare that we were talking about before is in a certain way misplaced.

[57:10] Cameron McEwen: It's hard not to have it because the thinker feels that if only my thought could be rethought,

[57:22] Cameron McEwen: then we'd be in a better place.

[57:25] Cameron McEwen: But thinking almost never gets rethought.

[57:29] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[57:29] Cameron McEwen: what happens is it gets lost,

[57:32] Cameron McEwen: but in getting lost,

[57:34] Cameron McEwen: It's...

[57:34] Cameron McEwen: still has the possibility of being communicated.

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: No,

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: all very good points you're making there.

[57:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[57:42] Bob Dobbs: so

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[57:44] Bob Dobbs: For that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison,

[57:49] Bob Dobbs: art can never be regarded as a source of knowledge,

[57:52] Bob Dobbs: but only as a moral discipline and a study of endurance.

[57:56] Bob Dobbs: Now he's describing what later he calls the cathartic school,

[58:01] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan is not of that bent.

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: So then this next sentence,

[58:06] Bob Dobbs: the artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on materia signata,

[58:10] Bob Dobbs: and that's in quotes,

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: but the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies.

[58:15] Bob Dobbs: This school has supported the idea of the function of artist catharsis,

[58:19] Bob Dobbs: which as G.R.

[58:20] Bob Dobbs: Levy shows in The Gate of Horn,

[58:22] Bob Dobbs: was a preparation for the lesser Greek mysteries.

[58:26] Cameron McEwen: Let's just stop there for half a second.

[58:28] Cameron McEwen: And if we remember what we were saying earlier about

[58:33] Cameron McEwen: Trump.

[58:34] Cameron McEwen: and pro-wrestling and the president representing society and stuff.

[58:39] Cameron McEwen: Look at this phrase,

[58:40] Cameron McEwen: the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies.

[58:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[58:45] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what we were saying before.

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[58:48] Bob Dobbs: The artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on materia signata.

[58:55] Bob Dobbs: That's the cognitive school.

[58:57] Bob Dobbs: But the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies,

[59:01] Bob Dobbs: that's not the kind of a sentence that a Catholic would say.

[59:04] Bob Dobbs: say,

[59:04] Bob Dobbs: or maybe a sophisticated Catholic might know that,

[59:08] Bob Dobbs: but the forged check on our hopes and sympathies are...

[59:14] Cameron McEwen: It's like Trump's TV show.

[59:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:18] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what it is.

[59:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[59:21] Bob Dobbs: but the thing is once you get into the 20th century,

[59:26] Bob Dobbs: McClellan said moral values,

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: which were more prominent in the culture of the 19th century,

[59:32] Bob Dobbs: just aren't going to make it.

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: for perceiving what's going on in the 20th century.

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: So the humanists stress on values.

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: immorality and aesthetic superiority or snobbishness,

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: elitism is a forged check.

[59:51] Bob Dobbs: It's a damaged,

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: it's a very dangerous situation on normal human hopes and sympathies.

[59:59] Bob Dobbs: It's actually wrong to do cathartic art in the 20th century.

[1:00:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: but it may be wrong in some...

[1:00:12] Cameron McEwen: moral sense.

[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: I don't think McLuhan...

[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: Not maybe wrong,

[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: not perceptive.

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: It's not helping what art is supposed to do in McLuhan...

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: but on the other hand,

[1:00:24] Cameron McEwen: nobody knows what art is supposed to do,

[1:00:27] Cameron McEwen: and so the forged check is kind of inevitable.

[1:00:35] Cameron McEwen: The only way,

[1:00:37] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan at least,

[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: the only way not to have a forged check in our hopes

[1:00:41] Cameron McEwen: and sympathies is to be a reader of radiant signatures on materia signata,

[1:00:48] Cameron McEwen: which is how we saw Joyce.

[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: And thinking that

[1:00:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is commenting on the art establishment and their rearview mirrorism.

[1:01:04] Bob Dobbs: He talks about that in Understanding Media.

[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: And it's always ironic to consider how Ted Carpenter went into that world.

[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: the cultures are business art world.

[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: So he defected from McLuhan,

[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: I often say.

[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: He defected from

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan anti-environment stance on art.

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: He did write about it in a book in the late

[1:01:30] Bob Dobbs: 60s, but he ended up living with the mafia that ran the art world.

[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: You know about that family,

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:01:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:01:39] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:01:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: But they,

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: they participated in a world of bullshit,

[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:01:53] Cameron McEwen: But there were definitely levels of taste within that art world.

[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: And that family,

[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: the Schlumberger family,

[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: I forget their

[1:02:09] Cameron McEwen: French name.

[1:02:11] Cameron McEwen: But they had excellent taste,

[1:02:17] Cameron McEwen: and some of the art that they promoted and preserved and purchased is very great art.

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: Wasn't it something like the meal?

[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:02:30] Bob Dobbs: de Menil.

[1:02:31] Bob Dobbs: de Menil.

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: the de Menil family.

[1:02:36] Bob Dobbs: So that was her.

[1:02:39] Bob Dobbs: the Schlumberger daughter was married to a French culture vulture,

[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Menippean,

[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: who did himself get investigated for being a suspect in the Kennedy assassination.

[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: Did I ever tell you that?

[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: He was part of the Dallas gang that was very suspicious around the oil executive,

[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: Clint Murchison.

[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: And in the Warren Commission,

[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: there's 26 volumes of it,

[1:03:07] Bob Dobbs: which I uh

[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: used to have.

[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: He's interviewed.

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: He's called before the Warren Commission and interviewed by,

[1:03:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: Alan Dulles and McCloy.

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: Under suspicion.

[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: He was grouped to be the judges.

[1:03:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:03:24] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:03:26] Bob Dobbs: and he only lived a few more years.

[1:03:29] Bob Dobbs: He died in 73.

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: But that's a pretty amazing thing that the,

[1:03:36] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:03:37] Bob Dobbs: they make a famous

[1:03:39] Bob Dobbs: art scene in Houston,

[1:03:40] Bob Dobbs: Texas when they first come from Europe and they make the Mark Rothko chapel and that was one of the things I was thinking of their superior taste yeah they made the whole art world of the avant-garde including Andy Warhol they made it they

[1:04:00] Bob Dobbs: had a young guy working for them and he went up to New York and became manager for Warhol and then met everybody else and And so...

[1:04:07] Bob Dobbs: So the whole 60s art explosion that McLuhan commented on was promoted by the de Menils.

[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: And Carpenter was married to one of the

[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: de Menils' daughters.

[1:04:22] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:04:24] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: let's see.

[1:04:30] Cameron McEwen: We should say that,

[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: for people who don't know,

[1:04:34] Cameron McEwen: these people were fabulously wealthy.

[1:04:38] Cameron McEwen: Their holdings in

[1:04:39] Cameron McEwen: Texas and in New York were incredible.

[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: I believe in the Hamptons,

[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: their property was,

[1:04:46] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,

[1:04:47] Cameron McEwen: 40 acres or 80 acres or something on the water.

[1:04:52] Cameron McEwen: It was one of the greatest states in the Long Island scene.

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: I went out there.

[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: and got to witness it.

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: they had an apartment at 222 Central Park South,

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: right at the foot of

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: Central Park and around

[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: 59th Street.

[1:05:16] Bob Dobbs: And there was an incredible design on the front of the building,

[1:05:22] Bob Dobbs: which

[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: I think was the two or three floors that...

[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: she had that carpenter lived in when he was in new york city and uh i just happened to see uh last week that i saw the title of the address in uh some new york news and they tore down this it was a smaller building they tore it down and

[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: made this huge high rise now it's one of the most expensive the second or most expensive art apartment building in new york yeah yeah well it's a fabulous location

[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:05:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:05:58] Cameron McEwen: No question about it.

[1:05:59] Cameron McEwen: And isn't it right next door to the

[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: Columbus Art Museum?

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: that's just down the street.

[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: That goes into

[1:06:10] Bob Dobbs: 15th, that becomes 60th Street,

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: And Trump Tower is right on that circle,

[1:06:16] Bob Dobbs: too.

[1:06:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:06:18] Cameron McEwen: at the other end.

[1:06:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: so the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies.

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: The other school did not deal with hopes and sympathies.

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: It dealt with the present century mix,

[1:06:36] Bob Dobbs: say.

[1:06:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:06:39] Cameron McEwen: the most important thing is when McLuhan uses a phrase like the signer of Fort Jack and hopes and sympathies,

[1:06:47] Cameron McEwen: he is making a reference for people that are reading his work to people that...

[1:06:57] Cameron McEwen: sign a check on reality,

[1:07:00] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: That's the contrast that he has in mind here.

[1:07:06] Cameron McEwen: So that if you're a reader of radiant signatures,

[1:07:11] Cameron McEwen: really what you're doing is you're checking out reality.

[1:07:16] Cameron McEwen: And for those that can't check out reality,

[1:07:19] Cameron McEwen: they have to sign a forged check on hopes and sympathies,

[1:07:24] Cameron McEwen: which are a kind of curtain before

[1:07:27] Cameron McEwen: hiding reality.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: it gets into value judgments and cultural alibis about the role of art and how valuable it is or something.

[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: the call it the Mamako School of Art.

[1:07:48] Bob Dobbs: When women ran art,

[1:07:50] Bob Dobbs: they thought it was an image of higher things.

[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: Now remember,

[1:07:54] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said pop art meant that men took over art.

[1:07:58] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever pick up on that?

[1:08:00] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:01] Cameron McEwen: he talks about it somewhere.

[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: But if he were using terms like that,

[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: he's not talking about people that have testicles and people who don't.

[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:08:13] Cameron McEwen: He's talking of images.

[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: and the women ran culture in the

[1:08:19] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.

[1:08:20] Bob Dobbs: They were the teachers and schools and that.

[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: And...

[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: That was,

[1:08:26] Bob Dobbs: you would say that the women weren't as tough as the artists because women were not in resonance with the left hemisphere patriarchal literate

[1:08:40] Bob Dobbs: world.

[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: They were right hemisphered.

[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: So they hoiked up right hemisphere values,

[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: whatever they are,

[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: but something that's not science and logic and math,

[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: but is...

[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: science became an art form and art became science,

[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: that's what McLuhan says in Take Today,

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: then the technician comes into the art world,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: the male,

[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[1:09:07] Bob Dobbs: male abilities.

[1:09:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's before women's lib,

[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: when women were allowed to go to engineering schools later.

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn was in med school in the early

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: 70s in Halifax,

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: 74.

[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: And it was a big deal to have women in med school.

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: that recently you know there was absolutely and it really changed fast within a couple years there were equal number of women young ladies uh in the in the med school but um uh carol was right on the transition border so

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: so men take over the art world and it also and also in the

[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: 30s in laws of media eric Wright

[1:09:53] Bob Dobbs: and maybe Marshall wrote it too,

[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: that the artists of the

[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: 30s got bogged down in political ideologies.

[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: And so the art in the

[1:10:03] Cameron McEwen: 30s... McLuhan talks about that in his Dos Passos article.

[1:10:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan does?

[1:10:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: In Dos Passos.

[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Dos Passos is the political guy.

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: He's a leftist.

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:10:21] Bob Dobbs: I think McLuhan in that essay,

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: he points out Dos Passos is part of a trend,

[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't see him being as blatant as

[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: Eric Wright in Laws of Media that the whole art culture world is totally confused,

[1:10:36] Bob Dobbs: even Pound and Lewis and everybody,

[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: They got lost in the effect of radio.

[1:10:45] Bob Dobbs: I don't see McLuhan,

[1:10:47] Bob Dobbs: he's not that sharp about it with...

[1:10:50] Bob Dobbs: uh dos passos he just knows dos passos is missing out on the cognitive school and too much in the value school of helping the working class or something right but he's also mcclure is also a more careful thinker

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: and a more careful writer than eric then who he eric oh yeah yeah right no you're right right so um so you know he uh you

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: people,

[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: knowledgeable people who knew McLuhan relatively well,

[1:11:30] Bob Dobbs: they said that's a bad book.

[1:11:32] Bob Dobbs: Eric botched it.

[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: They say that's not McLuhan.

[1:11:36] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:11:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:38] Cameron McEwen: there are parts of the laws of media that distort

[1:11:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan fairly radically.

[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:47] Cameron McEwen: Because what Eric wanted to do was...

[1:11:51] Cameron McEwen: to provide a kind of base for McLuhan,

[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: and he tries to do it in terms of epistemology or anthropology or something.

[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: What did he say?

[1:12:03] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to provide a type of base?

[1:12:06] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: base,

[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: B-A-S-E.

[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: base.

[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:12] Cameron McEwen: foundation.

[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: But is my speech so slurred?

[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: just sometimes.

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: It's just the phone.

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: Not...

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: it's good.

[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: Just that word I couldn't get.

[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:12:26] Cameron McEwen: So anyway,

[1:12:27] Cameron McEwen: when

[1:12:29] Cameron McEwen: Eric tries to ground McLuhan in different ways in Laws of Media,

[1:12:36] Cameron McEwen: he usually does it in terms of sources that McLuhan didn't read because they came out after he died and are not very thoughtful sources to begin with.

[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: And then to use them to clarify or ground McLuhan,

[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: that wasn't a good move.

[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: And that's your specialty.

[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: You critique even someone like Eric,

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: who many people would think knew a lot more about McLuhan than you did.

[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: And you make some interesting points.

[1:13:14] Cameron McEwen: In many ways he did.

[1:13:15] Cameron McEwen: In many ways he did,

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: But you make some points that nobody else seems capable of making or even noticed.

[1:13:24] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: We'll see,

[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: We don't want to get too excited yet.

[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: A lot of people,

[1:13:32] Cameron McEwen: one of the ways in which thinkers are misunderstood,

[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: even by their own families,

[1:13:39] Cameron McEwen: is that thinkers are thought of as kings.

[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: And so then the...

[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: generation are the princes and they in turn have to become kings.

[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: And so you have this phenomenon of the

[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan family being asked to address various academic bodies more or less on behalf of Marshall.

[1:14:13] Cameron McEwen: The insane idea is that

[1:14:17] Cameron McEwen: these members of the McLuhan family have any idea about what Marshall was talking about.

[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: right,

[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:14:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:14:28] Bob Dobbs: so this first school,

[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: the cathartic school,

[1:14:33] Bob Dobbs: this school has supported the idea of the function of art as catharsis,

[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: which is the populist view of art.

[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: People say,

[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:14:43] Bob Dobbs: art is an epiphany.

[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: what would they say,

[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: at the art schools and that?

[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: Very traumatic,

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: whatever they were learning,

[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: and then they made an art painting about it or something,

[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: and it's all emotional.

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: Carthus would be explicated as living through.

[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:15:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: All the Neurotica clichés about the artist in the garret,

[1:15:09] Bob Dobbs: the alienated guy who just can't,

[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: he's too sensitive for the industrial age.

[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:15:18] Bob Dobbs: So this school has supported the idea of the function of artist catharsis,

[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: which as G.R.

[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: Levy shows in The Gate of Horn,

[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: was a preparation for the lesser Greek mysteries,

[1:15:29] Bob Dobbs: which is Gnosticism?

[1:15:33] Cameron McEwen: Lesser Greek mysteries?

[1:15:34] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:15:35] Cameron McEwen: the lesser Greek mysteries are the preparatory mysteries prior to Alepsis.

[1:15:46] Cameron McEwen: Prior to what?

[1:15:48] Cameron McEwen: Alepsis.

[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: What's Alexi?

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:15:53] Cameron McEwen: Alepsis.

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: not getting the word.

[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: No?

[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: E-L-E-V-E-V-S-I-S,

[1:16:08] Cameron McEwen: Alepsis.

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: Eleusis,

[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: E-L-E-U-S-I-S.

[1:16:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:16:14] Cameron McEwen: So I was pronouncing it in modern Greek,

[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: and you're taking it back to ancient

[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: Greek.

[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay. But isn't that...

[1:16:23] Bob Dobbs: Paganism,

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: which tended to be Gnostic?

[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: in

[1:16:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan terms,

[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: I guess I would agree.

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: It's just that

[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: Gnosticism can be understood as a style of thought,

[1:16:45] Cameron McEwen: which anybody could have,

[1:16:47] Cameron McEwen: or it can be understood as various sects that

[1:16:53] Cameron McEwen: grew up in the 500 years around the time of the phonetic alphabet.

[1:17:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:17:03] Cameron McEwen: a little bit later and going from,

[1:17:05] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:17:06] Cameron McEwen: from 300 BC to 300 AD,

[1:17:09] Cameron McEwen: that kind of time frame.

[1:17:12] Cameron McEwen: So if you're saying esoteric or Gnostic in the small g sense,

[1:17:20] Cameron McEwen: then I would agree.

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: so the cathartic school might be paganism,

[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: but if the world is not opaque,

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: if it's opaque,

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: an opaque prison,

[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: you get emotional about that.

[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: But if the world is not opaque,

[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: and if the mind is not of the earth earthy,

[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: then this moral view of art should yield to the cognitive view.

[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: However that may be,

[1:17:49] Bob Dobbs: the cathartic ethical view of art...

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: has led to a doctrinaire hostility to the use of discontinuity in art.

[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: And that's the,

[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[1:17:57] Bob Dobbs: the theme of Matthew Arnold's Preface to Poems,

[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: a book he put out called Poems in 1853.

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: And note,

[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: this is in 1853 when this article's been...

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: 1953,

[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: so it's the 100th anniversary of that date.

[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: However that may be,

[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: the cathartic ethical view of art has led to a doctrinaire hostility to the use of discontinuity in art.

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: The theme of Arnold's preface to poems,

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: 1853,

[1:18:24] Bob Dobbs: and indifference,

[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: so hostility to the use of discontinuity,

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: and this hostility also is indifferent to all popular art.

[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: And in the past century,

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: with every technological device advancing the discontinuous character of communication,

[1:18:41] Bob Dobbs: that's a good statement,

[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: the stand taken by the cathartic and ethical school has enveloped the entire world of popular culture.

[1:18:49] Bob Dobbs: in a haze of esoteric Innis,

[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: disguised,

[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: however,

[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: as a profound moral concern with the wider hope.

[1:18:56] Bob Dobbs: There's the hope and sympathies,

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: the wider hope and the higher things.

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: Joyce had a phrase for this Antigonish attitude,

[1:19:04] Bob Dobbs: the cultic twilight,

[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: based on the Celtic twilight,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: a phenomenon in

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Dublin that Yeats was part of,

[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: the retrieval of,

[1:19:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: Irish folklore before Europe showed up.

[1:19:25] Cameron McEwen: And the emphasis there being on toilet.

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: toilet,

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: the toilet.

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying,

[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: so then what I do is I feature a video excerpt of

[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: Zbigniew Brzezinski's daughter and Joe Scarborough,

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: the morning talk show people,

[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: discussing

[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: Trump morals and everything.

[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: And I say this is an example of the cathartic view of art applied to the art of the White House and how...

[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: feeble it is in dealing Trump Donald Trump outdoes these people all the time.

[1:20:08] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't get subject to the wider hope and the higher things.

[1:20:13] Bob Dobbs: So you need to use the cognitive style to look Trump.

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: Can't use the cathartic or the look at don't look Trump as ethics,

[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: a problem in ethics or whatever,

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: which the courts are always trying to do.

[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: during his administration.

[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to catch him on some businessman corruption,

[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:20:34] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:20:35] Cameron McEwen: and which is always a signer of a forged check.

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:39] Cameron McEwen: Because this supposed morality has no base.

[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: It's not anything that they can hand over to their own children,

[1:20:48] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: It's not even something that they believe themselves.

[1:20:52] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:20:53] Cameron McEwen: I think they were both married,

[1:20:55] Cameron McEwen: and then they had an affair.

[1:20:57] Cameron McEwen: got divorced and got married themselves or i don't even know uh what exactly happened there i don't want to know but i just know that this view of morality is is bullshit even in terms of them yeah put it another way especially in terms of that right

[1:21:16] Cameron McEwen: so so these people on uh i don't what's it called today or something like that the view the view Thank you.

[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:21:24] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:21:24] Cameron McEwen: they're not on the view.

[1:21:25] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: good morning.

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: Good morning,

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: America.

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: Today kind of shows.

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:21:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:21:30] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:21:31] Cameron McEwen: they themselves are like a president.

[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: They put on their audience.

[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: And it's only because of this relationship with the audience that they're successful.

[1:21:46] Cameron McEwen: If they're not able to put on the audience,

[1:21:48] Cameron McEwen: then they can't get elected.

[1:21:49] Cameron McEwen: They can't get the job.

[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: And journalism is all about the wider hopes and ethical values and morality.

[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:22:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: And so

[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: Trump killed,

[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: the media,

[1:22:05] Bob Dobbs: the moralistic journalists,

[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: the Wolf Blitzers and Mike Wallaces or whatever of the world,

[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: of the New York media circus.

[1:22:15] Bob Dobbs: He bypassed with his shamanic hoiking up of the cognitive approach.

[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:22:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm somebody quoted me.

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: What?

[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: go ahead.

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: Somebody quoted me something Trump today.

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: And again,

[1:22:35] Bob Dobbs: it was simple,

[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: oddly said,

[1:22:38] Bob Dobbs: but so right on and honest or sort of quote honest,

[1:22:43] Bob Dobbs: I guess.

[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: But he had that ability to to address people probably around values retrieving.

[1:22:54] Bob Dobbs: the old America,

[1:22:56] Bob Dobbs: but he always did it as a perceptual thing,

[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: which probably got more perceptual because of his awkward way of speaking or his non-literate way of speaking,

[1:23:07] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: So he really was a walking percept.

[1:23:14] Cameron McEwen: When you are talking about what?

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: About what?

[1:23:20] Cameron McEwen: You're saying...

[1:23:21] Cameron McEwen: You've gone away.

[1:23:22] Bob Dobbs: Come back in.

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: You're too far away in your phone.

[1:23:24] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:23:25] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry.

[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: I was trying to exercise my arm,

[1:23:32] Cameron McEwen: which was going to sleep.

[1:23:36] Cameron McEwen: What I was questioning is your use of the past tense when you say he was doing this and that.

[1:23:45] Cameron McEwen: Do you mean to be using the past tense or do you mean to be using the present tense?

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: He's doing it today.

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: Still doing it.

[1:23:55] Cameron McEwen: That's what I mean.

[1:23:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:23:57] Cameron McEwen: so...

[1:23:59] Bob Dobbs: I mean the present and the past and the future.

[1:24:02] Bob Dobbs: All now.

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: He's a walking percept.

[1:24:08] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:24:09] Cameron McEwen: But when you come to the cognitive view,

[1:24:13] Cameron McEwen: do you believe that he actually knows anything about the cognitive view?

[1:24:17] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:24:17] Cameron McEwen: Or do you believe that it kind of speaks through him?

[1:24:21] Bob Dobbs: It's almost like you have to be the cognitive view today,

[1:24:25] Bob Dobbs: because how can anybody have an opinion about the Cayce of the globe of the past 10 years?

[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: How do you project values?

[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: You have to exude a kind of,

[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: what is that?

[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: A quote that McLuhan used to get,

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: he got it from Reagan,

[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: I may be wrong,

[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: but I'm never in doubt.

[1:24:45] Bob Dobbs: You have to be perceptually almost the Wild West sheriff,

[1:24:51] Bob Dobbs: which might be too old,

[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: but that was America,

[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: and he used that image in

[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: Bonanza talk of the

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: 60s. But he has to show a confidence,

[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: not based on ideas,

[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: but by being,

[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: tough.

[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said,

[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: As the world got more and more paleolithic,

[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: holeopathic,

[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: toughness was going to permeate all of society.

[1:25:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:18] Cameron McEwen: and that goes to what we've talked about in the past,

[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: about going out to be alone,

[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: If no role has a foundation,

[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: and if you have to have a role,

[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: if you have to put on a role,

[1:25:34] Cameron McEwen: then the only way to maintain it is by being tough.

[1:25:37] Cameron McEwen: It's by going out to be alone.

[1:25:42] Cameron McEwen: You don't give a shit about what anybody thinks about your role.

[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: You've got to do it,

[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: and that and the working class,

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: lower class,

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: the uneducated class,

[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: the tactile class,

[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: whatever you call the masses,

[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: they reported more and more over the last 40 years a disgust with the lack of toughness in the president.

[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: They,

[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: as tribal people,

[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: wanted that.

[1:26:10] Bob Dobbs: And they finally got it Trump.

[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: The kind of toughness that was extreme,

[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: but it was so late in the game,

[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: they wanted an extreme image.

[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: Or he made them want it,

[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: because when he did it,

[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: it reminded them,

[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: that's what we want.

[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: Because the world was becoming.

[1:26:28] Cameron McEwen: I think that's true.

[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: I'm not so sure that that is the answer that the world needs.

[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: But it's.

[1:26:36] Cameron McEwen: It's putting on the audience.

[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: It's putting on the market,

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:26:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:45] Bob Dobbs: and certainly the world doesn't need that.

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: They need the comprehensive awareness McLuhan had.

[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: They need to recognize the...

[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan retrieves the old

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: Shelley or Keats line,

[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: the poets are the legislators of the world.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan actually did that.

[1:27:05] Bob Dobbs: He took poetic knowledge,

[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: the cognitive school,

[1:27:08] Bob Dobbs: made it relevant,

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: and became a very influential,

[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: legislator of people's updating,

[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: a way to talk about the present.

[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: That's never been said before.

[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: He completed Keats and Shelley,

[1:27:24] Bob Dobbs: whoever said it.

[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: that's a kind of linear view.

[1:27:33] Cameron McEwen: I would say that the...

[1:27:35] Cameron McEwen: The

[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: Philosophical King is always an interesting project but never comes to fruition.

[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:27:46] Bob Dobbs: he pointed out that you could not be a Philosopher King in our time.

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: He said that.

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: He said the

[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: Philosopher King is completely obsolete and not relevant.

[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: And so he talked about the trend to government by committee.

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: But McClellan would make a smarter committee than the present.

[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: intelligence agency committee that does what I call tetrad management.

[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: But I'm just trying to point out that the line between the philosopher king and the committee is vague,

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: hard to draw.

[1:28:24] Cameron McEwen: Most people who draw it can only do it by being tough.

[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: Aristotle was

[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: It's very prescient when he said that all of the six possible forms of government transmute into each other periodically,

[1:28:43] Cameron McEwen: and sort of the law of government is that there is no fixed form.

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan developed,

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: now this is where the legislator of the world,

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: this is the poet coming up with laws of science,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: the new science.

[1:29:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:01] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: And understanding why something isn't fixed.

[1:29:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: I completely agree with that.

[1:29:10] Cameron McEwen: So what you're saying there is that the only fix to politics is not in politics.

[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: The only fix to social order is not in social order.

[1:29:25] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:29:25] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: in the

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the artist...

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: One of those guys'

[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: names,

[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: Roy Wittgenstein,

[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: Claude Lauder or something,

[1:29:41] Bob Dobbs: was the guy who made the hamburgers?

[1:29:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: I know who you're talking about,

[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: sort of a pop art type guy.

[1:29:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:50] Bob Dobbs: those guys got involved in an art and technology movement in the Malinowski.

[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: It was called E.A.T.,

[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: E.A.T.

[1:29:58] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall.

[1:29:59] Bob Dobbs: met the artists involved with that.

[1:30:03] Bob Dobbs: And they were...

[1:30:04] Cameron McEwen: The great acronyms.

[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:30:06] Bob Dobbs: EAT.

[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: And they were picking up the legislative media,

[1:30:13] Bob Dobbs: media comprehensiveists,

[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: media colleges.

[1:30:16] Bob Dobbs: That's how they translated McLuhan.

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: They were reading McLuhan and getting,

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: we're artists,

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: but we've got to get a little more technical or scientific or deal with technology and offer our...

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: refined sensibilities and Lewis began that in 1919 in his book the Carolyn design but here they are in the 60s retrieving that and under the influence of McLuhan trying to bring in artistic

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: sensibilities to the management of society's problems because the left hemisphere political strategies weren't working anymore and and he says in this great line in the

[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: forward to the interior landscape collection,

[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: which is where this quote I'm reading comes from,

[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: must we continue to mow down the Kennedys to show that the hot politics,

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: that that hot politics doesn't work on the cool medium of TV?

[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:31:15] Bob Dobbs: Great line.

[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:31:17] Cameron McEwen: he relates centrally to being tough.

[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:31:23] Bob Dobbs: And Nelson and I used to get on the radio and say that McLuhan admitted he was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

[1:31:32] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: must we continue to bow down?

[1:31:35] Bob Dobbs: But that would be the tribal we,

[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: the collective guilty we of the imploded resonant node that made HCE.

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: Here comes everybody to wax a little eloquent there for you.

[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: And always has.

[1:31:51] Cameron McEwen: calm,

[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: as you could say.

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: There's your non-Lithier self.

[1:31:55] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm thinking of

[1:31:58] Cameron McEwen: Brutus killing

[1:32:01] Cameron McEwen: Julius Caesar,

[1:32:02] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: so,

[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: alright,

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: back to this thing.

[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: my Postman is taking a very high culture pattern from McLuhan and applying it Trump.

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: Daring anybody to say that that's too,

[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: that's not the dirty world of politics,

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: come on.

[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: But actually,

[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: it does fit,

[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: because Trump move in past nostrums and value judgments of the journalistic political world.

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: He became pure percept,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: a tough,

[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: pure,

[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: tough walking percept.

[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: And the journalist...

[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: Some of the New York Times,

[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: there was interviews with them after a year or so Trump,

[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: and they said,

[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: we can't keep up with the guy.

[1:32:53] Bob Dobbs: The guy just says one lie after another.

[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: But see,

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: they didn't understand the wrestling hallucination going on,

[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: and lying was not the issue.

[1:33:06] Bob Dobbs: He was there to provide stability.

[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: McCloughan,

[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter got mad at McCloughan for...

[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: hanging out with Hubert Humphrey and LBJ,

[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: being seen in the same photo with them.

[1:33:19] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan had the toughness to say,

[1:33:23] Bob Dobbs: bless

[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: LBJ for,

[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: stabilizing the ship of state,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan knew how reckless the whole scene was.

[1:33:34] Bob Dobbs: And in his private letters to Mary McLuhan,

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: which I have,

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: to his daughter,

[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: where she's considering a divorce at 73,

[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: he's saying,

[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: this world is so sweet.

[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: screwed up,

[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: he didn't use that word,

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: but he meant that,

[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: that nuclear war can go off any second.

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: He understood the panic that was going on all over the place because nobody could really get this anti-environment probing of everything,

[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: by everything and of everything.

[1:34:01] Cameron McEwen: But he also understood how dangerous that panic was.

[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm saying,

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: the danger of it.

[1:34:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: so I was saying that

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan

[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: understood the violence of the time.

[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: It's way more violent by Trump time.

[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to add this.

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: So there was this guy,

[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: somewheres,

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: who wrote an essay on

[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: Trump probably read the Playboy interview.

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: in

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: March 69,

[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: and he'd be in his early

[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: 20s, I think,

[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: and he was influenced by the quotes.

[1:34:39] Bob Dobbs: And so the guy wrote all these different aspects of McLuhan style or image and showed Trump replayed McLuhan.

[1:34:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:34:49] Cameron McEwen: I think that's one of the essays that you link at the very end.

[1:34:54] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:34:54] Bob Dobbs: good.

[1:34:54] Bob Dobbs: I provide that.

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: let me just interrupt for a second.

[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: There were a couple of beeps.

[1:35:02] Cameron McEwen: ION the phone just now.

[1:35:04] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if that was some problem with the recording.

[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: Hello.

[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: Hello.

[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: Hello.

[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: it's still working.

[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: can you hear me on the echo?

[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:35:20] Cameron McEwen: good.

[1:35:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:35:20] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: do your,

[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: you do your thing again.

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: Hello,

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: hello.

[1:35:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: we can hear.

[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:35:27] Cameron McEwen: good.

[1:35:27] Bob Dobbs: So the noise.

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: The noise beeps might be caroling in the kitchen in the background.

[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: We should just go for another 15 minutes,

[1:35:38] Cameron McEwen: if that's okay with you.

[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: that's good,

[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: because we did start late.

[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: so we're going to explain.

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: Trump,

[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: the journalistic,

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: see the Gutenberg values,

[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: which hoik up the efficient causality and the

[1:35:56] Bob Dobbs: Qatari school of art.

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: That has the advantage in the

[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: 18th and 19th century.

[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: But still going strong.

[1:36:06] Bob Dobbs: What?

[1:36:07] Cameron McEwen: But still going strong.

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: because that's what we are.

[1:36:11] Bob Dobbs: The West,

[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: everybody became religious about and phatic about their cultural bias in the global theater.

[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: Everybody has to be tough with retrieving their values.

[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:36:23] Cameron McEwen: For tourism.

[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: That's going out to be alone.

[1:36:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: And...

[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: So it's happening,

[1:36:31] Bob Dobbs: we call it the tourist world,

[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: but it's not the way people live.

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: They don't live those values,

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: and that's the problem in education.

[1:36:40] Bob Dobbs: You can't get those values across to the kids.

[1:36:42] Bob Dobbs: It's not the way you can teach them.

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: You've got to tell them how they got mutated and how they are in the world of the tech body and give them a little detachment about the present,

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: and you can't use traditional Western values.

[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: create that perception you got to update the cognitive approach just to be a school teacher and that's what i'm trying to do and that's what mcclure was doing and that's why he's saying that discontinuity in electric anti-environment through the whole 20th century was

[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: uh mimed by the different art movements right with more and more and my mind in everybody's brain

[1:37:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:37:30] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:37:30] Cameron McEwen: So the attempt to be a moral authority,

[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: even about one's own acts,

[1:37:39] Cameron McEwen: never works.

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: it worked in the

[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: 19th and 18th century,

[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: not for the society,

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: but it worked to give yourself a high profile like a Charles Dickens.

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: but there's,

[1:37:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: there's a difference.

[1:37:58] Cameron McEwen: between different kinds of working,

[1:38:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:38:02] Cameron McEwen: If you want to be a great moral authority on everything that's ever happened in the history of the world,

[1:38:09] Cameron McEwen: then you can probably become a star on CNN.

[1:38:16] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying it doesn't work in that sense.

[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that it doesn't work in the sense that it automatically betrays itself as soon as...

[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: the moral judgment is announced.

[1:38:30] Cameron McEwen: It comes across as fake.

[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: It comes across as just bullshit.

[1:38:35] Cameron McEwen: And that's why we have these problems in education that you were just talking about.

[1:38:43] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: Trump coming back strong.

[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: It's like you can't stop Trump relevance of his image.

[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: with whatever Democratic values the Democrats are claiming to develop from book values.

[1:39:05] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to bring back a decent anti-environment,

[1:39:10] Bob Dobbs: a calm president who's remembering the higher hopes and sympathies.

[1:39:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: And Trump a little bit like the person um

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: who has the role of the jester on stage and he makes asides like what bullshit this is or what bullshit that is,

[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: And of course he's right.

[1:39:43] Cameron McEwen: In my view,

[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: at least,

[1:39:44] Cameron McEwen: what's happening to politics in the United States is extremely funny,

[1:39:51] Cameron McEwen: but extremely dangerous at the same time.

[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:39:54] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:39:55] Bob Dobbs: And you remind me,

[1:39:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talked about Trudeau as the first emperor come clown.

[1:40:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: And he talks about that in Take Today.

[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: you can't be a real...

[1:40:09] Cameron McEwen: emperor of anything unless you have a very good sense of your own clownishness.

[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: so that worked for Trudeau,

[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan said back in the late 60s that Trudeau would not be possible in the United States because the United States was in the hot seat,

[1:40:26] Bob Dobbs: had to deal with the problems,

[1:40:27] Bob Dobbs: was the policeman.

[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: And the crises were directly affecting the American image.

[1:40:35] Bob Dobbs: So you've got a more and more...

[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: serious presidential effect with

[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: Nixon, I guess,

[1:40:43] Bob Dobbs: and then Carter,

[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: Jerry Ford,

[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: not so much,

[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: and then Reagan.

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: Reagan is all about making America great again.

[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:53] Cameron McEwen: but as we said before,

[1:40:59] Cameron McEwen: Reagan's all about making

[1:41:00] Cameron McEwen: America great again in a Trump fashion,

[1:41:04] Cameron McEwen: but the two of them...

[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: have many bodies,

[1:41:09] Cameron McEwen: many masks,

[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it's right to draw a straight line,

[1:41:16] Cameron McEwen: say,

[1:41:17] Cameron McEwen: from Nixon to Carter,

[1:41:19] Cameron McEwen: and then go on to

[1:41:20] Cameron McEwen: Reagan and

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: Clinton and Obama.

[1:41:25] Cameron McEwen: All of these people suddenly are people on stage that have about 20 masks on a table beside them,

[1:41:35] Cameron McEwen: and they're experts in...

[1:41:37] Cameron McEwen: whipping off one mask and putting on another.

[1:41:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:40] Bob Dobbs: now that's what I call quadrophrenia,

[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: which you're going to develop later.

[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: And quadrophrenia refers to the tetrad.

[1:41:49] Bob Dobbs: You enhance a mask,

[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: you obsolesce it quickly,

[1:41:52] Bob Dobbs: you retrieve another one,

[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: and then you flip into its opposite.

[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: That process citizens are doing all the time.

[1:42:00] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:42:00] Bob Dobbs: And especially juggling their bodies.

[1:42:02] Bob Dobbs: So that's what quadrophrenia means to me.

[1:42:06] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:42:07] Bob Dobbs: Somebody sent me a movie from 2018,

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: and it was like an eccentric comedy or something,

[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: but the character's walking along a scene like a beach,

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: Coney Island,

[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: and he's walking up to the ice cream truck,

[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: and he goes,

[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: this is quadrophrenia.

[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: He uses my word

[1:42:28] Bob Dobbs: So I have to research where that,

[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: who are these people who used it?

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:42:32] Cameron McEwen: you've got to get a clip and put it up on,

[1:42:35] Cameron McEwen: give it to Ed.

[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: she sent me a clip,

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: and I've got to extract it.

[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: what,

[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: so I'm explaining how McLuhan sophisticated

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan cognitive view is the way to look Trump.

[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: So that's my opening revolutionary unique approach Trump in 2017.

[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: and I think it's very interesting myself.

[1:43:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: It's saying,

[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: the types of people that were cognitive for McLuhan were like Pound and Joyce.

[1:43:17] Cameron McEwen: And what you're saying here is that in order to understand what's going on Trump,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: you have to,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[1:43:27] Cameron McEwen: take distance.

[1:43:29] Cameron McEwen: And then you have to understand.

[1:43:36] Cameron McEwen: The reality of the situation,

[1:43:39] Cameron McEwen: you can't put on a moral mask and reflect on how what you see is in terms of that mask.

[1:43:54] Cameron McEwen: The mask has to be taken off and a direct relationship with reality taken up.

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:44:02] Bob Dobbs: with the proviso that he said...

[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: The objective,

[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: the objectivist stands naked before the world.

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: The subjectivist puts on the world.

[1:44:18] Bob Dobbs: You ever see those statements in the early 70s?

[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:44:22] Cameron McEwen: And yeah,

[1:44:23] Cameron McEwen: and you see what's interesting about that is that if somebody like myself comes along and says,

[1:44:28] Cameron McEwen: here's McLuhan saying,

[1:44:30] Cameron McEwen: have a direct relationship to the world.

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: It says,

[1:44:33] Cameron McEwen: if he did not.

[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: talk about media,

[1:44:37] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:44:37] Cameron McEwen: But for McLuhan,

[1:44:40] Cameron McEwen: the unalterable fact that everything we perceive is mediated does not mean...

[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: that we can't have a direct relationship with reality.

[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: And that's exactly what is not understood.

[1:44:55] Cameron McEwen: How can something that's mediated be direct?

[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: And so nobody understands that,

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: and that's been the great thought from Plato to the present.

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: Accurate and correct.

[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: And what would I add to that?

[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: The idea that media and nature merge

[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: Another version of what you're talking about being direct.

[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan says all languages,

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: all media are pseudo events.

[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: So you can't have a direct view if you're unaware of the media bias in the situation.

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: You have to be aware of the media bias to have a direct view.

[1:45:40] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: So we should sort of end around here.

[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: But let me say that this is.

[1:45:50] Cameron McEwen: sort of what

[1:45:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was doing around 1950.

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: Ennis had stressed the problem of solipsism.

[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: Ennis said that the great problem in looking at the different civilizations is that you can never get out of your own.

[1:46:14] Cameron McEwen: And that sort of solipsism...

[1:46:17] Cameron McEwen: means that not only can you not understand other cultures,

[1:46:21] Cameron McEwen: you can never understand your own,

[1:46:23] Cameron McEwen: because your own is an example of culture,

[1:46:27] Cameron McEwen: and yet all you can understand is one of them.

[1:46:30] Cameron McEwen: You can never understand the class.

[1:46:33] Cameron McEwen: The what?

[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: The class?

[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: E-L-A-S-S?

[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:46:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:46:38] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: Ennis was saying,

[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: in order to understand culture,

[1:46:43] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand culture in general,

[1:46:45] Cameron McEwen: all cultures.

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: But everybody's locked into their own,

[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: and they can never understand others properly.

[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: Therefore,

[1:46:57] Cameron McEwen: we're left with a problem of solipsism.

[1:47:00] Cameron McEwen: And although

[1:47:04] Cameron McEwen: Ennis didn't read much,

[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: if anything,

[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: of Nietzsche,

[1:47:09] Cameron McEwen: he came to a similar conclusion to Nietzsche,

[1:47:12] Cameron McEwen: and that is that

[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: The great problem that the modern world has to deal with is solipsism come nihilism.

[1:47:22] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan,

[1:47:23] Cameron McEwen: in the late

[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, was through reading Ennis,

[1:47:30] Cameron McEwen: talking with Ennis,

[1:47:32] Cameron McEwen: trying to understand what was going on with Ennis in relationship to his own Catholicism.

[1:47:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was left with a problem of...

[1:47:43] Cameron McEwen: How do we get out of solipsism?

[1:47:47] Cameron McEwen: And so his work from the late 1940s until sort of the middle

[1:47:55] Cameron McEwen: 1950s is very much concerned with how do we perceive existence aside from writing a forged check on it.

[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: And it's for anybody that wants to actually exercise the brain,

[1:48:12] Cameron McEwen: Actually,

[1:48:13] Cameron McEwen: think than reading

[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, say,

[1:48:16] Cameron McEwen: starting in 1949 with his Eliot essay on decorum and coming up to 1955 with his review of

[1:48:26] Cameron McEwen: Kenner book on Lewis.

[1:48:29] Cameron McEwen: That six-year period is one where McLuhan is trying to work out that very,

[1:48:36] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem.

[1:48:39] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: It gets more complex after his surgery going into the

[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: 70s.

[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: Did he add something to that

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: 49 to 55 period in the 70s?

[1:49:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,

[1:49:00] Cameron McEwen: did you want me to answer that question or were you going to go on?

[1:49:04] Cameron McEwen: I think the answer to that is that he did find interesting new ways to think about it.

[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: But he was never able to translate it,

[1:49:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:49:17] Cameron McEwen: We started off our conversation today talking about the difficulty of translation and how it's always the fate of a thinker not to be able to translate his or her thought forward.

[1:49:31] Cameron McEwen: And that's what happened to McLuhan.

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: He understood by 1958 that the answer to his problems from...

[1:49:42] Cameron McEwen: 49 to 55 was the medium is the message.

[1:49:46] Cameron McEwen: So if you sort out what media are,

[1:49:49] Cameron McEwen: then you can sort out how it is that lack of immediacy,

[1:49:57] Cameron McEwen: that is to say how mediation can be direct.

[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: So that was,

[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: he came up with what he thought was the answer,

[1:50:06] Cameron McEwen: but he couldn't hand it on.

[1:50:08] Cameron McEwen: So then in the

[1:50:10] Cameron McEwen: 60s and 70s,

[1:50:12] Cameron McEwen: What he did,

[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: he found all sorts of interesting ways to think about this.

[1:50:17] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[1:50:18] Cameron McEwen: in terms of hijacking.

[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:50:20] Cameron McEwen: Or in terms of comedy.

[1:50:25] Cameron McEwen: All sorts of really interesting things to sort of follow up.

[1:50:30] Cameron McEwen: But he didn't solve the problem of translation.

[1:50:33] Cameron McEwen: And no one ever has.

[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:50:35] Bob Dobbs: And just as many people would consider Finnegans Wake a failure,

[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: He used that as a model in many ways,

[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: and he repeated its failure.

[1:50:46] Bob Dobbs: And then you're saying nobody was a success.

[1:50:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: Would we have a success if the world was improved somehow,

[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: greatly?

[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: Is that proof?

[1:50:57] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?

[1:50:59] Cameron McEwen: Who knows?

[1:50:59] Cameron McEwen: But we have to come back to what we were saying earlier about despair.

[1:51:07] Cameron McEwen: No thinker is able to translate.

[1:51:10] Cameron McEwen: And yet,

[1:51:11] Cameron McEwen: communication is possible.

[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: That's the amazing thing.

[1:51:14] Cameron McEwen: It's a little bit like the problem of mediation and being direct,

[1:51:20] Cameron McEwen: that the thinker is not able to translate his or her thought,

[1:51:28] Cameron McEwen: and yet it is possible to communicate.

[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: And we see,

[1:51:33] Cameron McEwen: just for example,

[1:51:34] Cameron McEwen: in the history of science,

[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: we can see that.

[1:51:37] Cameron McEwen: People go along for thousands.

[1:51:40] Cameron McEwen: tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years by doing chemistry when they cook or when they cure leather or doing all sorts of things.

[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: When they digest their own food or breathe,

[1:51:53] Cameron McEwen: they're doing tremendous chemistry,

[1:51:55] Cameron McEwen: but they don't know what they're doing.

[1:51:57] Cameron McEwen: And then suddenly people figure out what's going on with chemistry.

[1:52:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:52:03] Cameron McEwen: that's kind of like the problem with thinking.

[1:52:08] Cameron McEwen: If human beings are going to survive,

[1:52:10] Cameron McEwen: they're going to have to figure out what's going on with their own thinking,

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: or they're going to think themselves to death.

[1:52:19] Cameron McEwen: That's the alternative.

[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: Thought,

[1:52:23] Bob Dobbs: think,

[1:52:24] Bob Dobbs: thought,

[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: thinking.

[1:52:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: That's my Forsdale response.

[1:52:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:52:31] Cameron McEwen: there you go,

[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: which is more or less Aristotle.

[1:52:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:52:34] Bob Dobbs: I went to Aristotelian response to your

[1:52:37] Bob Dobbs: Platonism.

[1:52:38] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:52:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:52:40] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan said,

[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: you can either be a Platonist or an

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: Aristotelian, and that would be in the Western world,

[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg world.

[1:52:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:52:48] Cameron McEwen: that was his.

[1:52:50] Cameron McEwen: He used that quotation from

[1:52:52] Cameron McEwen: Coleridge in his master's thesis at the University of Manitoba.

[1:52:57] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:52:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always knew that there weren't two temperaments of human beings.

[1:53:03] Cameron McEwen: There were at least three.

[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: Does he spell them out?

[1:53:07] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:53:07] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:53:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:53:08] Cameron McEwen: that's what his Ph.D.

[1:53:09] Cameron McEwen: thesis is all about,

[1:53:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:53:11] Cameron McEwen: The trivium.

[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: But you were citing his master's thesis at Manitoba,

[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: weren't you?

[1:53:18] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: I was saying you mentioned

[1:53:23] Cameron McEwen: Coleridge's citation in the,

[1:53:33] Cameron McEwen: what is it called,

[1:53:33] Cameron McEwen: literary biography.

[1:53:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: biographia.

[1:53:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:39] Cameron McEwen: so that's where he talks about everybody's born a Platonist or an Aristotelian.

[1:53:44] Cameron McEwen: And then McLuhan quotes that in his master's thesis.

[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: But even in his master's thesis,

[1:53:49] Cameron McEwen: he was well aware of there being three forms of temperament,

[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: which he got from his teacher,

[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: Rupert Lodge,

[1:53:58] Cameron McEwen: at Manitoba.

[1:53:59] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan always had the idea of what might be called applying Lodge

[1:54:05] Cameron McEwen: outside of philosophy to literature and other disciplines.

[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: And that's what he did in his

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: PhD thesis

[1:54:13] Cameron McEwen: 10 years later.

[1:54:17] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.

[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: now,

[1:54:19] Bob Dobbs: did Rupert Lodge present those three modalities as the trivium?

[1:54:24] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:54:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:54:27] Bob Dobbs: He may not have been aware of the trivium,

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: but it was an influence in his organization from earlier education.

[1:54:35] Cameron McEwen: Could be.

[1:54:36] Cameron McEwen: I don't know the sources of

[1:54:39] Cameron McEwen: Lodge's work.

[1:54:40] Cameron McEwen: That would be an interesting question to look into at some point.

[1:54:45] Cameron McEwen: Lodge was an Englishman,

[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: trained,

[1:54:48] Cameron McEwen: I believe he was at Oxford for a while and at Manchester,

[1:54:52] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:54:53] Cameron McEwen: I really don't know the people he was reading.

[1:54:56] Cameron McEwen: That's a very interesting question.

[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: Um...

[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what I was going to say about Rupert Lodge.

[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: What's the other guy?

[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: What are the two names that influenced him at Manitoba?

[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: Henry Wilkes Wright was the other guy.

[1:55:27] Cameron McEwen: They were the co-heads of the philosophy department.

[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: I don't even know if there were other people in the philosophy department,

[1:55:33] Cameron McEwen: but the two of them,

[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: up until the middle

[1:55:37] Cameron McEwen: 30s.

[1:55:38] Cameron McEwen: were the co-heads of the philosophy department.

[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: And then in the middle

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: 30s, sometime around 35,

[1:55:46] Cameron McEwen: the university hived off psychology from philosophy.

[1:55:51] Cameron McEwen: Previously,

[1:55:51] Cameron McEwen: they had been the same department.

[1:55:53] Cameron McEwen: And so when they were separated,

[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: then Wright became the head of the psychology department and Lodge remained the head of the philosophy department.

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: um...

[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan took engineering the first year,

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: then he went into English,

[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: but what's not said is that the big influences in Manitoba were in philosophy.

[1:56:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: Not only for McLuhan,

[1:56:24] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:56:26] Cameron McEwen: Lodge especially was a very,

[1:56:29] Cameron McEwen: very popular teacher and influenced a lot of folks.

[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: so let's leave it at that.

[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: That was very good.

[1:56:37] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:56:37] Cameron McEwen: And let me just say.

[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: But personally,

[1:56:43] Cameron McEwen: I learned some interesting stuff today.

[1:56:45] Cameron McEwen: I've read your book a couple times,

[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: I really,

[1:56:52] Cameron McEwen: even though I can see that it's right here in black and white,

[1:56:56] Cameron McEwen: what we're talking about today,

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: I did not understand before the particular angle that you were taking Trump from a cognitive view.

[1:57:08] Cameron McEwen: Awesome.

[1:57:09] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a very interesting thought,

[1:57:12] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:57:15] Cameron McEwen: I look forward to taking it up further next time.

[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: thank you very much.

[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: You're smart for getting it.

[1:57:22] Bob Dobbs: It is an act SubGenius what I came up with there.

[1:57:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:57:29] Cameron McEwen: that's a good mask to put on for a while.

[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:57:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:57:32] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you next week.

[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: Appreciate it.

[1:57:35] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.

[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:57:36] Bob Dobbs: bye.