The Plateau of Persuasion
Imperfectly Present, Part I - MET - Chapter 63
“It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
Jerry Seinfeld
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.”
George Orwell
The difference between advertising and the news is this:
Advertising tries as hard as it can to pretend that it’s newsworthy. The news tries as hard as it can to pretend it isn’t advertising.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), rightly known as "the father of media studies", didn’t make this connection explicitly at the time. But his most insightful and scathing comments about advertising are now applying ever more fittingly to the way formerly respectable and authoritative broadcasters and other news-mongers are haranguing us to buy a very specific and very pointed point-of-view regarding the unfolding events of the world.
Replace “advertising” with “the news” in the following two quotes and they make equally sinister good sense:
“Advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses, aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan
&
“Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion.”
Marshall McLuhan
In the 1950s and early sixties my father taught me to shoot fluffy, feathered and furry creatures with a point-22. My mother taught me to read the Victorians, the Edwardians and the English sop that went for literature after WW1.
I chose to be a writer who shot at two-legged creatures with words. There were only two ways to pay the rent with nouns, verbs and adjectives in those days. Journalism was one; advertising was the other. Both of them made just enough of a living to keep me away from the strong stuff.
I discovered soon enough that there were three obstacles that stood in the way of crafting a poetically pleasing sentence that would get past the senior sub-editor, the censor or the suit.
The third was to accept any changes made to my copy by a senior sub-editor, an editor, a creative director or a client without the merest murmur of a murmur.
The second was to refrain from hinting at the merest hint of bodily functions either pleasant or unpleasant; to strictly avoid any references to political philosophies that questioned the legitimacy of the biblical decree that the Sons of Ham were ordained forever to be hewers of wood and drawers of water; and to pay no attention at all to the rumoured existence of someone named Nelson Mandela. Which, as per the famously counter-intuitive effect of a tight brief, gave us licence to write about anything and everything that wasn’t the actual truth.
In the case of advertising, the Mandela omertà of news-writing was replaced by any mention of the existence of competing brands or companies.
But the first and most important, as per the instructions of the BBC’s little blue guide-book that had been adopted hook, line and sinker by the SABC as the sine qua non of persuasive broadcast journalism, was (on pain of excommunication or worse) to refrain from employing any tense other than the present perfect.
The latter was news to me.
I will explain it as patiently as it was explained to me by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the three most senior English-language news editors at Broadcast House, Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, in 1975 and 1976.
Whether those were their real names or not will remain a mystery until someone with a better memory than mine steps out of the shadows to prove me wrong. I clearly remember a Blake and a Stevenson.
But I remember too, even more vividly than I remember those ghosts of future past, waking up at my gloomy desk one night-shift at three o’clock in the morning and realising, with the clarity that only dreams can give you, that I had been transported back to Victorian England in 1849.
I rubbed my eyes to find myself working as a very junior bureaucrat and paper-shuffler in Charles Dickens’s Circumlocution Office in Whitehall, London, where every important matter of the land had been buried under mountainous layers of clerical cant.
It looked and smelled and felt exactly like the 5th floor of Broadcast House looked and smelled and felt.
Ibid, ditto, y ensovoorts.
One night, looking down from the south-facing window, I saw Little Dorrit standing in a pool of tears at the intersection of Nugget and Fox. She may not have been as white as the original.
The pluperfect had given way to the present, and here was Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a Michaelhouse tie tied in a perfect Windsor knot between his crisp white collars tutoring me in the art of making the past feel like the present, i.e., the present perfect.
Native English speakers use the present perfect everyday without thinking twice.
“Your order of five baby hedgehogs has arrived at the Post Office.”
“Jack has broken up with Jill.”
“Iran has launched a direct attack on Israel.”
According to Grammarly, “The present perfect tense is used to show an action that happened in the past that is directly related to the present…
And, “Don’t let the name confuse you—even though the word present is there, the present perfect tense deals with actions that happened or started in the past…”
Which all seemed innocuous enough until I began to question why it was the mandated tense of broadcast news.
The answer turned out to be simple and obvious. To use the past tense or the present tense is to assert that the matter in question is done and dusted:
Jack broke up with Jill. Your hedgehogs are at the Post Office. Iran attacked Israel with a bunch of drones that killed nobody.
The story is over. Or it feels as though it’s over.
Yeah. And so?
The present perfect, by contrast, is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat:
Jack has broken up with Jill. The hedgehogs have arrived. Iran has launched an attack on Israel.
Really?
Oh, fuck!
Now what?
In the present perfect, the past is continuous with the present. The present is unresolved. The future is felt to be infected with promises of the past’s consequences to come.
The effect isn’t rational, it’s adrenal. You can’t tick it off as a story finished and klaar. The tension won’t dissipate. Your nerves won’t unshred. Your heart-rate won’t sink to its normally boring average.
The present perfect is the adrenaline that keeps you glued to the story they want you to be glued to.
Which is one of the reasons most of us now find ourselves in programmed harmony rearranging the deckchairs of our epistemological comforts up here above the plateau of persuasion.
To get the perfect view.
Bang.
To be continued…