The Postprandial Hate

Orwell's prediction from 1984 wasn't grim enough

In the opening chapter of his novel 1984, George Orwell describes the ritual of the Two Minutes Hate. Every day, just before 11 AM, all the citizens of Oceania, including the employees at the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith (the novel’s protagonist) works, collect in front of public screens: “… a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.”

The Two Minutes Hate is a short but intense television show designed to manufacture hatred towards the party’s enemies, especially the Trotksy stand-in Goldstein, the detestable “renegade and backslider,” and enemy of the people who is always the central feature of the show. In the daily shows, Goldstein is portrayed as delivering against the party (and hence the people) a “venomous attack … so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. … He was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed….” By the second half of the program, it has become almost impossible for the viewer to remain emotionally unengaged:

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices …. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

At the conclusion of the Two Minutes Hate, the politically, culturally, and ideologically reassuring image of Big Brother appears, and the emotionally spent viewers rhythmically chant his name (B-B!) in a “deliberate drowning of consciousness.”

Orwell’s 1984 has easily moved out from the shadows of its immediate creation – the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Society Union of the 1930s and 40s – to enjoy a much wider resonance even for readers who have little idea of its historical grounding. (Orwell’s eerie predictions of an anxiety of power that produces the surveillance state, for example, was intensely resonant after the enhanced security measures introduced after 9/11 and subsequent revelations of NSA spying). But I am reminded of the Two Minutes Hate this week in the aftermath of the abrupt dismissal of Tucker Carlson from his perch at Fox News.

In particular, I was struck by a point made by, among others, someone named Katherine Abughazaleh, who is worth singling out because her job apparently is to watch Fox News every night (so think about that next time you complain about your job…). This has included, until last week, a five-times-a-week dose of the braying, mewling, giggling, just-asking-questions Tucker Carlson, which explains why of all the many people who were thrilled to find out he had been fired (including apparently many of his co-workers), she must surely be high in the running as most ecstatic. However, aside from her elation, the point she made was that Carlson’s removal from Fox News will almost certainly not presage some kind of softening of tone. There will be no abatement of the breathtaking mendacity, the relentless culture-war fodder, or the open-jawed, I-can’t-even outrage (a fixture of Fox News’ evening line-up generally) that is mainlined in especially high-grade and unadulterated form by Tucker’s weeknight performances into the veins of Fox News viewers craving their daily high.

Now, Tucker Carlson always struck me as an unlikely figure to be the instrument for injecting this potent 8-9PM cocktail of outrage (for one thing, he looks like a Cabbage Patch doll fucked a muffin top). However, the insight here is that Tucker’s success is less his peculiar brand of faux-earnest “quest for the truth” - via from-the-diaphragm dogwhistling and ideological screed-mongering - and more the vehicle by which it is delivered: the 8 to 9 PM timeslot.

Makes sense. After all the point is not the syringe of a man poking up from his Brooks Brothers suit that reads the teleprompter, but instead the sweet, sweet outrage that it delivers. Day after day, the largely gerontological demographic that comprises Fox News’ audience settles comfortably into their living rooms for a postprandial digestif of fresh outrages, knowing that the world in which they live is under constant attack, that their way of life, their very freedom to exist, is being compromised by a determined set of “liberal” or “progressive” enemies who hate them! Well, fuck them, time to hate back! Put on the Fox News channel honey.

This is simply the extended version of the Two Minutes Hate. Whether every morning at 11, or every evening at 8, the point is that the ritual of sitting down to really hate your enemy super hard (and all the more because of the absurd claims of these freedom-hating progressives – just like Orwell’s Goldstein – about justice, equity, or inclusion that can fool less-critical minds) makes the messenger secondary. As Marshall McLuhan didn’t say, the timeslot is the message. And, just like the Two Minutes Hate, although each iteration is slightly modified, the structure, impact, and emotional payoff remain comfortably predictable. To its critics, like me, Fox News does indeed sound like “a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil.” But for the Fox News habitué, jonesing for their 8PM fix, it’s a ritualized, defining moment of the day that maintains just the right level of shock and affront to propel them forward another day, powering them to stand stalwart against their enemies.

There is almost no news on Fox News after 8 PM. During the day, the channel does indeed deploy its reporters to discuss actual events, even if they often have a predictable slant. But after 8PM, and carrying through the end of the day, the news is replaced by a theatrical contrivance designed to showcase in absurdist caricature the malevolence of manufactured enemies, to elicit howls of outrage, disgust, and anger. No way that two minutes is enough – you don’t want to blaze up just to crash back down! You’re crunked and ready to go, til the lights go out on another day. It’s the ritual that forms the backbone of the intoxication.

I saw that the ratings declined last week after Tucker was fired, which has led to the suggestion that perhaps Tucker-muffin-man had the special sauce. But I highly doubt it. After all, before him there was the fragile-ego-in-a-suit, loofah-ninja Bill O’Reilly, who seemed to command similarly unstoppable powers to spur outrage amongst the Fox faithful. Yet when he went down, no-one cared after about five minutes. So I think the professional Fox News watchers are right. It’s the hate you crave, and you crave it when you’ve been programmed to expect it. At that point, who cares about the syringe?