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Panic is the key psychological mood of postmodern culture. In pharmaceuticals, a leading drug company, eager to get the jump on supplying sedatives for the panic population at the end of the millenium, has just announced plans for a “world wide panic project.” In television, Vanna White - co-host of the Wheel of Fortune - can (finally) confess that she was chosen for her role by Merv Griffin because of her disproportionately large head-size. Af- ter all, in the age of the talking heads of television as the real world what counts is the sheer giganticism of media silhouettes.
Panic patriotism too. That is Donald Trump and Lee Iacocca as self-nominated American heroes of the market-place. Breaking with the old robber baron tradition of practicing primitive exploi- tation in the age of an equally exploitative primitive capitalism, they have discovered the secret formula of postmodern robber barons as that of merging the economic calculus of “let’s make a deal” with the political rhetoric of making America stronger.
And finally, even panic Elvis is invited to come on down for one last retro-appearance as a memory residue, made all the more nostalgic because Elvis’ disappearing body is like a flashing event- horizon at the edge of the black hole that is America today. Panic culture, then, as a floating reality, with the actual as a dream world, where we live on the edge of ecstasy and dread. Now it is the age of the TV audience as a chilled superconductor, of the stock market crash as a Paris Commune of all the programed super- computers, of money as an electronic impulse fibrillating across the world, and of the individual as a quantum energy pack tracing/racing across the postmodern field.
© Arthur Kroker
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