Culture & Business

Listen
10 January 1990
(start at 15:54 for the Trump explanation but the whole 48 minutes is amazing as I explain my agenda)

When you get to hear the excerpt clearly from my Toronto radio show of 10 January 1990, I was responding to a question from the host of the show, Myke Dyer.

He was noticing, via an article on Donald Trump in SPY Magazine, the new prominence of the “businessman” in American culture - he thought that businessmen were now (in the Reagan Era) higher up on the celebrity food chain than music, film, TV stars, and politicians. He was puzzled by this.

So I referred to McLuhan’s statement in THE MECHANICAL BRIDE that “culture in America is business”. Then I referenced McLuhan's cliché-archetype pattern in the situation of the Global Membrane wherein every culture on the planet was threatened by the tactility SQUARED of 80s technology/environment.

Every culture was retrieving the chief feature of their particular “historical” memory in a defensive reaction to the NEW stresses from the Global Membrane. This became the biggest business of that time - tourism.

In the case of Don Trump, he was surfing the retrieval and archetypalizing of the “kinetic and manipulatory” bias (see p.136 of FROM CLICHE TO ARCHETYPE) of the American “ground”.

I proposed myself - whose iconic image represented a tactile, integral composite - as an anti-environment to the new American businessman icon. Therefore, I called Trump the “anti-Bob” and I made the astounding (in retrospect now) prediction that some day in the distant future I would have to confront the rise of Trump in the “Solar Government” (my term for the new virtual bureaucracy that was bypassing all the old “World Government” maneuvers as spelled out in McLuhan’s article, “The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, and Planets, in the Age of Spaceship Earth” in the Spring, 1971, Number 30, issue of EXPLORATIONS, University of Toronto Varsity Graduate, pp.110-1.

So lots of excellent, relevant McLuhan scholarship in my answer to Myke Dyer - as I presented regularly on CKLN-FM for over 4 years… and continued it on American radio from 1993 until now.

I don’t think anybody on the planet since 1984 has presented as much McLuhan material (both little-known and more well-known) as I have through electronic media in an educational, interactive format… for free.

And that experience has served me and the planet well.

Bob Dobbs

Facebook, 21 October 2019