The cartoonization of society

Thoughts on the establishment of comic-book culture, and the subsequent taboo against reality in modern urban life, and how cubism, surrealism and Americanism joined forces to spawn this metamorphosis

It started when I was ten. In the schoolyard I noticed a kid talking and motioning with comic-book, superhero expressions and body language. Even at that age I caught myself wondering why he felt the need to quit being 'real' and adopt a new way of siphoning off reality into squares, circles and triangles in this way. I felt uncomfortable because it seemed so unnatural. In later life, watching the Marvel Comic master talent 'Stan Lee' explain how this mode of drawing was based on cubes, cylinders and cones - I recognised the connection - the comic style had come from Cubism, around the 1920's era - or perhaps vice-versa, that Cubism had come from comics, or, most likely - the two had cross-pollinated each other.

The next logical thread informed me that if I was already uneasy about comics - and their subversion of reality - then possibly the entire artistic family of Cubism, Surrealism and Futurism might be implicated. Directly after the first world war, with the memories of futile horror still fresh, the idea of a philosophical excursion into unreality had gained maximum currency - ie a reversal of poles then took place - and thus reality and unreality had now swapped places. Traditionally, the artists first struck out on this path, with the public not far behind, gobbling it all up.

The new world, America and Americanism all were a poster-child for this impulse. An entire world constructed out of the nuts and bolts of an unashamed, conscious, systematic search for unreality. Although this was certainly not the message we in Europe received at the time. While we admired America for being 'real' - a new, vibrant democracy which had thrown off the shackles of the class system, in actuality the situation was exactly opposite. This new society was being created to serve the super-elite, using newfound technological tools - the media - radio, TV and the press all simultaneously conspiring to indoctrinate on a scale never before seen. Whilst the Russian communist indoctrination model was extreme in the sense of jail, forced-labour and possibly death for dissenters, the USA model while accepting dissent within it's borders - was also extreme because of the fact that the indoctrination was being propogated globally, creating a gigantic labour force such that international capitalism might succeed in trampling on the third world for decades on end.

Fast-forward to today - where we have unreality on a scale never imagined. The war on terrorism is one example - Nato backed up by the Western media fabricating a war where we are not allowed to know anything about who we are fighting. After 10 years of war against an organisation called El Quaida we still do not know where their bases are. Yet such a war has played a large role in bringing America to it's knees, with the worst economic debt ever seen in any country in any year in the history of the world.

Did the marriage of comics and cubism somehow lead us to computers and the cyber-landscape of today? Perhaps not, yet they certainly represented a signpost - possibly a warning sign - as technology took legs and carried humanity through the industrial revolution. This warning signpost marked the point of no return, the point where tools and technology first began to create the agenda for us, rather then merely serving. Such a moment would require a new way of thinking. Cartoons, delivered by corporations, took care of the working-class on a global scale, reducing man, by analogy - to the status of a mouse, or a duck. The message of the cartoons was that man must wither in the face of technology, whose buttons were being pressed at the apex of the financial hierarchy. Cartoons were sarcastically and savagely funny. Comedy had become the prime weapon in the war against reality. Notice that almost the entirety of the comic and cartoon world - was comedic - the better to nail the subliminal point home. The proof of this was that cartoons, although potentially the greatest tool ever for imparting serious and conventional knowledge to children or adults - were hardly ever used in this way. So much for the working class. For the elite class, cubist paintings were offered.

How odd to understand that this amalgamation of magnificent paintings, including the works of Dali, Picasso and others - from the 20s onward - would play such an undercover role in the evolution of philosophical thought - through modern art, via Warhol, into conceptual art, process art and computer graphics - neatly echoing, copycat style - the carnivalesque retreat into unreality which America has finally experienced. This new technological explosion, the crucial, final piece in the jigsaw puzzle - has been the terminal knockout punch. For the world we live in today is a nightmare psychedic circus of the impossible, an orgy of unreality, where Google and Facebook and Myspace and Twitter collectively make wooly-brained mince-meat of our minds, where internet browsers gabble with cell-phones and I-phones text messages, and cyber-criminals viral-cast anime-porn across ethernets, and all these things have finally and seductively made our lives and thoughts and ideas and dreams into Disney-think and Disney-talk ... we are seduced by cyber-sex, cosmetic surgery and electronic implants, and dream of virtual property and internet fame. Just like miniature animated gifs bleeping and coding across the universe. All is videoed and broadcasted. Every event recorded. All surveyed by the Thought Police who we must learn to love, or be re-programmed. The comic-book hero has morphed into a computer-geek who flies across skycrapers performing super-feats with his mind - all from the computer chair.

Picasso had much to do with this outcome. To seek out and nurture the cartoon/cubist language and ideology under his monopolized protective blanket of so-called 'high art' as he did (whilst claiming a communist ethos on one day - then printing million dollar canvas-and-oil banknotes the next) - established the essential link or stepping stone - out of the old world of reality and real values - honesty, integrity, truth - which paradoxically had been the ideology of the colonial and imperialist era - into the ghastly and official hypocrisy of the cartoon reality we now endure. To suggest such a cartoonization of reality was an enormous paradyme shift for the 1920's and only a man with the build of an ox, nerves of iron and infinite talent, such as Picasso, could have pulled off this feat. In one fell swoop, just like a bull-fighter, he had pulled the carpet of dignity from beneath the human being. America responded. To recast, restyle and reinvent the minds of newly arrived immigrants into crazy-putty for trans-corporate imperium required that thoughts be reduced to common Picasso-esque denominators - the cartoon muted circles, squares and triangles - all driving the pastel cogwheels of drone labour. Worldwide culture must be compressed, processed, castrated and sanitized - music to dentist-waiting-room muzak, grand art to cartoons, Shakespeare to Readers Digest. Language itself rewritten by who-knows-who - then memorised and chanted, parrot-style in mantras ... 'Have a nice day' etc.

Women became plastified into Barbie whilst men lost beards, and climbed into short pants. Male pop singers evolved into castrati. Food became powder and banks, churches. Old people became illegal yet kids all-powerful, occasionally picking up the phone to turn their parents into the police. All of these things recognised as 'rights' of the beloved 'free world'. Superficiality was king. This modus operandi was now labelled 'American' and 'democratic' and Americans were told by the media to be proud of it, that it was something which must be protected and fought for, even to the extent of bombing and invading far-off nations who could hardly even surpass their own poverty-stricken conditions prior to such a holocaust - which we, the each of us, financed cheerfully with our taxation cheques, whilst conveniently looking the other way.

Finally, the cartoonization of America signified that a man today is only a mouse or a duck and therefore worthless, yet, if one peers behind the pages, the subliminal message is that, above and behind the content itself, the creator of the cartoon has achieved an immortal, quasi-divine status, and this creator is actually the corporation, rather than the artist, since quite clearly the 'artist' has now retarded to the level of a lackey or stooge, rather than remain the exponent of 'high art' as tradition had always implied. This is in fact the worlds first castrated artist who has depicted his personal, sterile, antiseptic landscape and society - a place where truth and integrity and social and political consciousness have all been neatly vacuumed away and the result piped directly into the eyes, brains and souls of - children! Not even adults, who might at least have rationalized.