This is even scarier than the antifa article....
The Facebooking of Everything
In the era of YouTube and Instagram, of course you cover Kim like Kendall Jenner.
Daniel HenningerFeb. 14, 2018 7:02 p.m. ET
The state of mind and the vocabulary of the American left, reflected in the media, have become the same no matter the subject—whether Kim Yo Jong or Kendall Jenner. This is the Facebook ing of everything.
Here, from the past week, are three separate but unified examples.
A Washington Post writer on Kim’s sister: “They marveled at her barely-there makeup and her lack of bling. They commented on her plain black outfits and simple purse. They noted the flower-shaped clip that kept her hair back in a no-nonsense style.”
A different Washington Post writer several days later, on a makeup artist who is an internet influencer: “What he’s known for, besides his woke understanding of gender politics and his sassy humor, is what he calls ‘the full-beat face.’ ”
A New York Times critic’s description of a painting of Michelle Obama, which will hang in the National Portrait Gallery: “ Amy Sherald’s take on Michelle Obama emphasized an element of couturial spectacle and rock-solid cool.”
The two most important cultural interpreters of the modern era have been Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol.
McLuhan predicted, at the dawn of TV, that mass media would engulf everything. Warhol saw where this massification was going, and in 1972 he produced Pop Art silkscreens of Mao Zedong wearing lipstick.
Until recently, the world of politics and Pop occupied largely separate realms. No more. In the era of Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, it is logical and consistent that writers covering the Olympics near the most dangerous nuclear standoff since the Cold War would turn Kim Yo Jong into a pop-culture icon.
The culture of social media—a tireless preoccupation with fleeting surface effects—has changed all media. Writers now have an eye for the status of everything, whether T-shirts or public figures. Not least, this means writers will mark down anyone who violates fashionable correctness.
Vice President Mike Pence’s status in Facebooked media dropped instantly last year when he said he would dine alone only with his wife. That was the day he was unfriended.
After that, it didn’t matter that in South Korea Mr. Pence sat with the father of the tortured and murdered Otto Warmbier or met with North Korean defectors. Ms. Kim was a successful “foil” to the lumpen, ostracized Mike Pence.
No one understood the new media world better than Barack Obama. With an instinct for the moment as sure as Warhol’s, Mr. Obama knew that so long has he acted cool, knowing and ironically detached, he’d be fine with the judges. He made it look easy.
The Obama years marked the birth of progressive cool, but something else in the liberal tradition got dropped.
Writers on the traditional left, such as Thomas Frank, worry that Democrats have drifted too far from their roots in the labor movement and the working class. He and others want the party to turn back, but it won’t happen.
In a liberal political culture dominated by social-media mobbing, only two things matter now: being on the right side of climate change and not misaligning with the politics of identity. If you’re a public figure and you get them right, what’s going on in the world isn’t that important, including the North Korean gulag.
The culture isn’t dead. Some writers resist. This is from Adam Johnson’s haunting 2012 novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” about a boy, Jun Do, in North Korea: “And what choice did he have about anything? . . . It wasn’t his fault that all the boys in his care were numb with abandonment and hopeless at the prospect of being recruited as prison guards or conscripted into suicide squads.”
Too often, though, political commentary is running more toward this pallid tweet from NBC News about the involuntary North Korean cheerleaders. “This is so satisfying to watch.”
The American left has become increasingly theatrical in its politics. After President Trump suggested a military parade, activists quickly said they’d recruited 50 people who would lie in front of tanks on Constitution Avenue, like in Tiananmen Square. What matters most is making a cool elision between totalitarian China in 1989 and an American presidency they process through YouTube videos.
Donald Trump long ago saw the Warholian turn of things, recently likening Davos to the Academy Awards, “except we have more photographers.” He upsets people for a lot of reasons. But in these times, what it comes down to is that none of them would ever let Donald Trump or anyone around him be their Facebook friend. Get that, and everything else in politics becomes clear.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
The Facebooking of Everything
In the era of YouTube and Instagram, of course you cover Kim like Kendall Jenner.
Daniel HenningerFeb. 14, 2018 7:02 p.m. ET
The state of mind and the vocabulary of the American left, reflected in the media, have become the same no matter the subject—whether Kim Yo Jong or Kendall Jenner. This is the Facebook ing of everything.
Here, from the past week, are three separate but unified examples.
A Washington Post writer on Kim’s sister: “They marveled at her barely-there makeup and her lack of bling. They commented on her plain black outfits and simple purse. They noted the flower-shaped clip that kept her hair back in a no-nonsense style.”
A different Washington Post writer several days later, on a makeup artist who is an internet influencer: “What he’s known for, besides his woke understanding of gender politics and his sassy humor, is what he calls ‘the full-beat face.’ ”
A New York Times critic’s description of a painting of Michelle Obama, which will hang in the National Portrait Gallery: “ Amy Sherald’s take on Michelle Obama emphasized an element of couturial spectacle and rock-solid cool.”
The two most important cultural interpreters of the modern era have been Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol.
McLuhan predicted, at the dawn of TV, that mass media would engulf everything. Warhol saw where this massification was going, and in 1972 he produced Pop Art silkscreens of Mao Zedong wearing lipstick.
Until recently, the world of politics and Pop occupied largely separate realms. No more. In the era of Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, it is logical and consistent that writers covering the Olympics near the most dangerous nuclear standoff since the Cold War would turn Kim Yo Jong into a pop-culture icon.
The culture of social media—a tireless preoccupation with fleeting surface effects—has changed all media. Writers now have an eye for the status of everything, whether T-shirts or public figures. Not least, this means writers will mark down anyone who violates fashionable correctness.
Vice President Mike Pence’s status in Facebooked media dropped instantly last year when he said he would dine alone only with his wife. That was the day he was unfriended.
After that, it didn’t matter that in South Korea Mr. Pence sat with the father of the tortured and murdered Otto Warmbier or met with North Korean defectors. Ms. Kim was a successful “foil” to the lumpen, ostracized Mike Pence.
No one understood the new media world better than Barack Obama. With an instinct for the moment as sure as Warhol’s, Mr. Obama knew that so long has he acted cool, knowing and ironically detached, he’d be fine with the judges. He made it look easy.
The Obama years marked the birth of progressive cool, but something else in the liberal tradition got dropped.
Writers on the traditional left, such as Thomas Frank, worry that Democrats have drifted too far from their roots in the labor movement and the working class. He and others want the party to turn back, but it won’t happen.
In a liberal political culture dominated by social-media mobbing, only two things matter now: being on the right side of climate change and not misaligning with the politics of identity. If you’re a public figure and you get them right, what’s going on in the world isn’t that important, including the North Korean gulag.
The culture isn’t dead. Some writers resist. This is from Adam Johnson’s haunting 2012 novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” about a boy, Jun Do, in North Korea: “And what choice did he have about anything? . . . It wasn’t his fault that all the boys in his care were numb with abandonment and hopeless at the prospect of being recruited as prison guards or conscripted into suicide squads.”
Too often, though, political commentary is running more toward this pallid tweet from NBC News about the involuntary North Korean cheerleaders. “This is so satisfying to watch.”
The American left has become increasingly theatrical in its politics. After President Trump suggested a military parade, activists quickly said they’d recruited 50 people who would lie in front of tanks on Constitution Avenue, like in Tiananmen Square. What matters most is making a cool elision between totalitarian China in 1989 and an American presidency they process through YouTube videos.
Donald Trump long ago saw the Warholian turn of things, recently likening Davos to the Academy Awards, “except we have more photographers.” He upsets people for a lot of reasons. But in these times, what it comes down to is that none of them would ever let Donald Trump or anyone around him be their Facebook friend. Get that, and everything else in politics becomes clear.
Write henninger@wsj.com.
