THE MASCOT PROBLEM

Alex Ebert - a screed

As always, I drew a little piece for my piece. Then I saw a mask lying around and threw it in before snapping the photo, because why not. After all, it would only be right to begin an essay about the mascots of war with one of today’s premier mascots - the mask. Why would a PPE item that somewhat protects against airborne contamination become a mascot? Because “somewhat” implies nuance and humans (not you or me ;) don’t like that. Incidentally, this piece isn’t about masks, per se. Incidentally, also, I wear masks. And that is the last I will mention masks here. You’re welcome.

To utter hell with mascots.  Unstuff them.  Cast  their synthetic husks to the pyre.  Lay their contents to rude sunlight.  Awaken us to the multifarious scent. The simple complexity of life. Swim us in cognitive dissonance, quivering like so many ripples of the same ocean.

Observe the innards, now containerless, throbbing deep thickets of notion under moonlight.   The raw mess of living architecture expands before you!   The masterlessness of it unfurls you.   You wade into the expanse. 

No longer a chaos-complexicist or a Buddhist or a Punk.  No longer a Proud Boy or an Activist or a Liberal or a Conservative. 

It is possible, you know.   I’ve done it myself, even if just for a time…it is possible.  There is a sense of self beneath the treasured rows of slathered titles, behind the wasteful prick and sew of garish badgery, beyond our compulsion to take shelter within the categorical facades, our tribalism remote-controlling us from its archaic perch upon our future’s brow…  We are something other than what we say…we are something other than our associations… Don’t you be convinced of some erudite twist – you know yourself to simply be.  In some wee-houred moment you’ve seen your nudity peeled of armor.  

We are humans…

Let the mascots war.  Let them beg for importance.   Laugh at their lifeless hunt for calcified existence, their inane quest to kill the living, to embalm breath in a frozen husk! 

Sit across form the gargoyled partisan a human!  Speak of movement and necessity,  of life and spirit, of decency and respect.  Argue passionately!  Put your heart on the table! But leave the mascots to freeze in their own brittleness.   They are only the mascots of war.  

It occurs to me here that meaning and truth sit at the far opposite ends of the veracity gradient. Meaning is the unanalyzable obelisk, the unspeakable reduction, the simple. Truth is the multifarious plurality, the variegated granularity, the complex. Meaning is the sinthome. Truth is the total language… But this will have to make for another piece.

Where were we…

The mascot. The mascot (pushing disproportionate attention away from Truth’s side of the veracity gradient and towards Meaning’s side) poses an existential risk to freedom.  Yes. Freedom.

Albert Maysles famously said “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance”.  But the truth is that deliberation is utterly irrelevant – tyranny is simply the absence of nuance.  

The tyranny of mascots envelopes us.   The meme.  The party.  The term.  The state.  The religion.  The team.  The group.  The badge.  #status.   Tyranny, that bastard, was once conic, barreling from the narrow purse of the megaphone.  The megaphone got slapped from Olympian lips, smashed into 7.5 billion pieces and distributed, like some gift of Zarathustra, to all below like Broadway confetti.  Each of us catching a tyrant, these little rectangles of brittle fire. The weapons of the user.

We are in a war.  The reality with the most attention wins.   Forget the tedium of consent - that is old hat.   This is the rape of agency.  No honor. This war is no samurai.   Raw attention weighs itself in raw giantness.  Ethics rests no weight on theses scales.   The blunt automation of attention is that the less consent, the faster its power ascends.   Sorry.  Truly.  Memes, slogans, symbols – mascots – those which electrocute the limbic system best, most maniacally, those which seize the amygdala and short-circuit rationale – those are the winners.   We are the losers. 

This is the warfare of attention.   

…My child once observed, in frustration, that “adults don’t even read, they just memorize shapes.”  One was more correct than one knew. 

Yes, sir! I love my ideology, sir!  It’s good stuff, sir!  Especially like the title, sir!   My friends are all Such-and-suches too, sir!  That’s my team, sir! 

In its degenerate, cheap-jingled form, compressed to a hot button,  the mascots hijack us from the local collective.   Anarcho Collectivist!  Confederate Flag!  MAGA Cap!  BLM!  Q! Tampa Bay Buccaneers!

We are beguiled into abstractions of collectivism “out there”. This effectively atomizes local collectivity. Like cancer. The mascot to replicate itself fastest, most, wins.  Like cancer.   

As replication is what determines virality, the simpler the symbol, the faster the replication.  A child should be able to draw it.  Speak It.  Play it.  Say it.   The less nuance, the less need for analysis, the more fame, the more winning the brand. 

Naturally, this cannot but enfeeble the particulars - the innards.  

Because, of course, the competitive mascot cannot sprint on a full stomach.  His innards – the variegated content – must be reduced if he wants to compete.   The mascot with the most reduced and lightest guts wins the race. The ideas, once painstakingly granular and heartily meted out, once thorough and lumbering, must shape themselves to the elevator pitch.  30 seconds or less of crisp elucidation.   Then, in advert-readiness, the mascot must finally submit itself “in a sentence”.   If the mascot is to win, his weighty innards must be finally, utterly, disappeared. 

In their place, a simple, hot, button. 

Show us the bones and gristle of the tail we’re fed and it will ruin the tale.   Our obsession with memes concomitant with the decline of reading, after all, tells us we aren’t as compelled by nuance as we are by the mascot. Nor are we as compelled by the truth as we are by “meaning”.  That misinformation spreads faster than truth tells us something of the pressures to simply create the most “meaning”, regardless of its veracity. (I’m describing lying here, in case you weren’t certain.)

Reductionists (scientists) might proclaim, in their compulsive derring-do, that such mimetic reductions boil us closer to the essence of a thing – closer to their truth - and that essence contains all the vicissitudes that reduction intentionally jettisons. Nonsense. 

The more reduced, the more dead.   The more viral, the less vitality.   The more representative of essence – the less essence.    

It cannot be helped.  

Patriot, Capitalist, Free, Christian, Conservative, Liberal, Punk Rock.  Such mascotic terms, which purport to contain ideas, suffer the ignominious entropy of obscurity, no matter how supremely nuanced - even the erudite meme must set out to compete in the lowly battles of “pizzazz” and “stickiness”. 

And so it is that the mascot increasingly obscures its own contents as it competes at increasingly higher mimetic levels.   Until nuance is gone. Until analysis is no longer required.

You’re a this and I’m a that. And that’s that. And we pretend not to know why. But most of us do. We know this whole partisan thing is a LARP. A war of unanalyzable, fully reduced non-meanings aggressing our airwaves, selling us tickets to the Thunderdome: Civil War edition. Its just that we like it. We grab our popcorn. “Socialism” vs “Freedom”. The main event. (The event would be ruined if we took off the mascots’ costumes.)

When we get down to the issues, underneath the spray tan fur, we actually agree on stuff.

Most unambiguously, we hate partisanship - and yet we are more partisan than ever. Clearly there is some compulsivity at work. We know we’re being manipulated. We know the mascots we affiliate with are dividing us. And yet we know we actually agree on stuff.

And so perhaps the question really is “can we all get along”, emphasis on “can”.

As society has ceded the regional tribalisms of town and neighborhood to the digitized abstractions of Facebook groups, it makes sense that our once localized expressions of tribe now over-express in the decentralized abstractions of political identity. The mascots that once delimited our tribal affiliations to locales have lost out to simpler, leaner, more mimetic ones in the noosphere.

We seem to need these mascots. Like we used to need religion. Like we used to need family.

How many families have been broken up by partisanship? How many have “lost” a family member to QAnon? A lot.

I’m not going to pass judgement on the need to tribalize. I bash on humanity plenty. Have your little teams, wear their shirts and slap on their stickers. Belong!

I am going to pass judgement, however, on mascots. They are lazy, reductionist TOOLS - with two capital “O’s”. Give a little love to the other side of the veracity gradient - truth. You may never apprehend truth, let alone comprehend it. I know I probably won’t. But it’s still fun as hell to try. Sure, it takes a second to really enjoy the hurt of cognitive dissonance - just like it takes a second to enjoy working out your muscles. It feels a bit strenuous at first - it can even feel scary. You might long for the warm plastic fur of your chosen mascot to cuddle you up in its simple choke. But give it a moment. Push a bit past the pain.

You might just begin to see that what you thought was confusion is actually variation. What you thought was contradictory is actually complementary. Like the posts of a teepee, crisscrossing specifically, if you step back, for the sake of coming to a point.

All this mascotting is monocropping our minds, calcifying our erstwhile fertile grounds.

So burn your mascot.

(Just make sure there’s not a real person inside it before you do).