Sidney Blumenthal has a great piece today at Salon, definitely worth watching one of those itless ads for!
He leads us through Bush's choice of paintings for the White House and into the administration's obsession with the TV drama, "24". The combination of kitsch, porn, and violence have marked this administration and have a background in the Reagan administration's wishful thinking.
"You are going to tell me what I want to know. It's just a question of how much you want it to hurt." Thus the lines between fact and fiction, reality and kitsch, and policy and entertainment are blurred.
The distance between the cowboy paintings Bush proudly displays in the Oval Office and the secret-agent torture porn that his administration officials not so secretly watch with envy reflects a yawning chasm in the sensibility of kitsch. Koerner's Western pictures depict an idealized past, where never is heard a discouraging word. At the Saturday Evening Post, he joined with Norman Rockwell to create the brush strokes of a warming nostalgia.
These enduring images infused Reaganism with its emotional culture. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been raised at the turn of the century in small-town Illinois and became a contract player in Hollywood's dream factory. Communicating kitsch was second nature to him. The perfect representation came in the TV commercial for his reelection campaign in 1984. As an American flag was raised in a small town, the voice-over intoned: "It's morning again in America." The past was present and all was right with the world.
Now, kitsch has been radically remade. No longer evoking nostalgic utopianism, kitsch releases the compulsions of fear. Under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality into sadomasochism.