Advertisers, news outlets and Trump all subscribe to superlatives:
The biggest, the best, the greatest, the worst, the smallest, the most …, the least…, etc. We also often hear expressions such as “never before” and “for the first time”. Grammatically speaking, these are not superlatives. Semantically, however, they are.
I would have liked to ask the linguist Noam Chomsky, whether this fascination for superlatives is universal, hard-coded into the genetic make-up of our species, or whether it is merely a cultural by-product of Western hubris.
There are some polite non-western expressions floating around to describe Western hubris (I repeat for the record that we represent only 12-14 % of humanity), among them: “US exceptionalism”, “US sense of entitlement”. Note that Europe and other US allies don’t count; we are just appendages to the US.
I am less polite. If you behave as a brigand, a brigand is what you are. The US is so riddled with debts that it has to attack countries to steal their mineral wealth!!! Having starved Venezuela with deadly sanctions for years and engaged in extra-judicial killings of its citizens in international waters, the US is now going to pilfer its riches. The US is preparing to engage in outright robbery in broad daylight. And its European minions are not going to interfere.
The dissenting media are not howling. They are merely shaking their heads. Why? Are they afraid? Or are they grieving? The corporate media are not even shaking their heads.
Maybe they are speechless for lack of superlatives. After all, this is not the first, nor the worst nor even the most…. not even since WWII. This is just business as usual.
I must admit that not until fairly recently have I realised how underhanded US and European foreign and domestic policy have been since WWII. Why did it take me so long?
After all, I read Manufacturing Consent years ago. I perused it as an intellectual, dispassionately, and with respectful interest. For me, the tide only turned when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, shuddering as I did so: So much of the novel was terrifyingly recognizable!
Novels address your gut. They aim to immerse you into the matter, forcing you to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in a way that a cool analysis is unable to. The same applies to the film format.
Today, I returned to Manufacturing Consent, this time as it is spelled out in a gripping 1992 documentary by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. The documentary explains what Chomsky refers to as “the terrifying aspect of our society and other societies, [which] is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events.”
Just so. As to why “such events” occur, you will need to watch another equally tide-turning documentary: The Corporation.
That’s why.