-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.tryoung.com/dramasociallife/PART4.htm THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE PART 4 POLITICAL LIFE IN THE DRAMATURGICAL SOCIETY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Drama of False Politics Infused in this analysis of the development and dialectics of self and society in a dramaturgical society has been an abiding interest in the forms of power and the ways that power relations are structured. Most of this analysis has been, so far, more concerned with the micro-politics of everyday life that bend, twist, circumvent and negate the dialectics between individuals and more powerful others. I have emphasized the ways in which economic, social, moral and physical power are used to manage women, minorities, workers, consumers, and citizens in societies stratified in such a way as to give an elite great advantage in shaping the behavior of masses of individuals, taken one at a time. While the micro-politics of everyday life in bureaucratic offices, shops, schools, factories, prisons, hospitals, and banks are most important to a post-modern social psychology, macro- politics also limit and distort the social self. In the effort to contribute to a post-modern morality that finds patterns between the authoritarian states of bureaucratic socialism and the false freedoms of predatory capitalism, emancipatory social psychology must fit the drama of politics into its analytic schemes. This section will enlarge the scope of dramaturgical analysis to consider the use of drama in the macro-politics of the state and the multi-national corporation. It is at all levels of politics where the critical dramaturgical perspective offers the greatest possibilities for emancipatory insight, change and renewal in the 21st Century. For a praxis self to emerge, the great imbalances in economic power marked by the stratification of wealth must be moderated. The sharp discontinuities in social power emerging from gender and racial politics must be smoothed. The systematic cooption of moral power in religion, science, work and marketplace needs review and reconstruction. Recourse to physical power in war, crime, rape, and work disputes needs alteration. As we move into the 21st century, social psychology can add its weight to the glacial movement toward social justice by a wide ranging study of the way in which the drama of social life is used to reproduce such inelegant power arrangements--or it can contribute by exploring the ways in which emancipatory drama empowers and enables specific human being to come into the fullness of their morality. As the technology of information production and distribution develop, a dramaturgical social psychology can help create a knowledge process that makes visible the intricate web of power, the varying scales of power distribution, the great inequalities of power as well as the many tools with which power is concentrated and deployed against the human project. The sociology of politics is concerned with the social location, the forms and uses as well as the legitimization of political power. How power is socially distributed, used and legitimated often depends upon a variety of factors, one of which is the ability of the powerful to utilize the means of communication to generate the loyalty of the mass of citizens. Thus, politics inevitably involves drama of some form. However, the uses of drama become problematic since it is relative to the particular type of society. From a critical perspective, the problem of generating support and loyalty is intensified in those societies which have class divisions, gender oppression, racial exploitation and a mal-distribution of power. Under such circumstances political dramaturgy tends to become oriented toward the fraudulent generation of political loyalty. As the problems of poverty, pollution, crime and health care, of disemployment and poverty become internationalized, electronics and the media are used to fashion political consciousness which becomes frozen at the level of the nation-state. A false patriotism sets a nation-state against another in the war for markets, jobs, raw materials, and military power. In the age of the megalithic multinational corporation which has budgets in the billions of dollars, the capacity to buy the political process; to buy the technologies of human consciousness; to stage the dramaturgical impression of benign economics...all these are possible; all these permeate the knowledge process and bend it to the interests of those ever growing corporate conglomerates. Dramaturgy is captured to the unholy politics of corporate purpose. False Enemies Republicans and Democrats in the USA court the international corporation mirroring the political process in Italy, France, England, Brazil, and Korea. Multinational corporations move jobs and factories about the globe as nation states compete with one another; multinational corporations dump billions of tons of wastes into the air, land and waters of the world as the nation state invites them in to do so; multinational corporations decide in which lines of production they will invest...leaving the nation- state to provide low-profit goods and services; leaving the nation- state to deal with the fiscal crisis which comes which such a one- sided economic system. Yet in the frozen political consciousness of national chauvinism, it is the nation-state which is seen to be the class enemy to all other nation-states. In the magic of an alienated mass media news analysis, it is the Socialist Bloc which is seen to be the class enemy; in the afterglow of the golden age of capitalism, the poor and the disemployed in the 3rd world are seen to be the class enemy by the once prosperous workers of the northern nations. Everywhere the multinational corporation sets the terms of political discourse by its economic power to buy the political process directly through campaign contributions and indirectly through a hundred billion dollar advertizing industry. False Politics In every capitalist country...rich and poor alike...the technologies of drama and theatre replace the boots and clubs of the storm trooper in suppressing dissent and critical thought. Madison avenue firms spread around the world and provide their dramaturgical services to tyrants, despots, dictators and liberal presidents alike. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush join Mondale, Carter, and Dukakis in buying the information channels of radio, television, magazine and newspaper projecting an image of agency, an image of honesty, an image of integrity and an image of lawfulness. With such choices, Americans vote and turn back to God and Monday night football in an existential despair at ever setting things right through the political process...yet to do good politics is a Holy thing; and to do good religion, one must do politics well. The essays in this section address the issues of how political loyalty is dramaturgically generated as well as the social origins of the fraudulent generation of political loyalty. The first essay attempts to set forth the conditions under which dramaturgy comes to be used in the sociology of fraud. It lays out the rapid capture of the film and electronics industry by the state and by the private corporation to dramatize and romanticize the uneasy alliance between state and capital. It is a sad story of co-option; a sorry story of artists and scientists on the make; a pathetic story of frozen, twisted politics presented as democratic politics by half ignorant newspeople, academics and actors. The second essay is a qualitative analysis of the Watergate affair. For those who are too young to remember, the 1972 presidential campaign was subverted by CREEP; the Committee to Reelect the President...Richard Milhous Nixon. Members of CREEP, including the top law enforcement officer in the land, John Mitchell, organized a break-in...a burglary...of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building; an upscale apartment and office complex in Washington, D.C. The team assigned to the break-in was caught. They lead to several intermediaries who lead to CREEP, which lead to Mitchell, Colson, and other President's men. Two reporters on the Washington Post were able to break the case with the aid of an insider, Deep Throat...whose identity remains a secret to this very day. Someone in the Nixon administration did not care for the dirty tricks of the Nixon administration...and the Watergate Scandal was part of a vast effort on the part of CREEP to engineer the reelection of Nixon by subverting, bribing, compromising and lying about Democrats. False news reports were released; prostitutes were hired to seduce candidates; phones were wiretapped; offices burglarized for campaign plans and criminals protected by the White House. The Nixon team, a product of California, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood resorted to the tactics of theatre in order to protect the image of the Republican Party, of the President of the United States and the Inner Circle of the White House, members of which engineered the far reaching and unconstitutional use of political power. They covered up political reality as long as they could with the unreality of staged productions which, themselves subverted the public understanding of political life in the United States. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and sold again and go back to the nourishing earth for roothold. The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback you can't laugh off their capacity to take it. The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. ...Sandberg ------------------------------------------------------------------------ We are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems. ...O`Shaunessey ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the land of lost Content I see it shining plain The Happy Highways were I went and Cannot go again. ...A. E. Housman ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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