The Tyranny of Real Time and the Intensification of the Spectacle

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5 word format

document in English

political science

term papers

published 11/12/2007

review : Completed

level : Advanced

requested 1 times

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Summary

While screening clips of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and analysis of the “insurgency” spews forth from the mouth of an “expert” on the conflict, Fox News’s scrolling news ticker reports Homeland Security’s terrorist alert level on loop, warning its viewers that “terrorism”, namely Islamic, continually threatens their daily lives. However, the term “terrorism” is ambiguous. Its sheer emptiness as an objective word is propagandized to cement the belief that the American nation is under siege. Of course, it was due to the belief in a persistent external threat, “terrorism” as in Saddam Hussein’s supposed potential ability to terrorize the United States with biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, that the public backed President George W. Bush’s decision to declare war on Iraq in 2003. However, the looping of the 9/11 attacks on television screens for the weeks after the cataclysmic event solidified the siege mentality, which had been compounding upon itself for years, in the United States creating a populace that was ignorant of their complicit support for the spectacle and the neo-liberalism it espouses. However, equally terrifying as 9/11 is the terror of the maintenance of the status quo through the forceful expansion of the spectacle and its neo-liberal values. The expansion of the spectacle has severed neo-liberal populaces from reality via instantaneous telecommunication promoting instantaneous fear and the subsequent desire to be sheltered from external threats. And yet, the people mechanically promoting the spectacle are unaware that through their support they are, in fact, caught in a perpetual cyclical terrorization.