CNN's Freudisn Slip

CNN’s Freudian Slip

“X-ing Cheney”, or “Cheney X-ed”, the headlines should have read. Who couldn’t get a chuckle out of the glitch, they called it, that blacked out Vice President Richard Cheney’s live picture on CNN, even while he was quoting John McCain saying those who called the president a liar are liars?

Divergent reports of what happened have emerged. The Drudge report said “a large black ‘X’ repeatedly flashed …appeared each time less than a second, creating an odd subliminal effect.” In other words, flashsing “X Cheney” as a subliminal message. “Is someone in Atlanta trying to tell us something?” one top White House source complained.

That was Tuesday, reporting what happened at11:04:45 AM ET Monday. Wednesday, Reuters, under the heading “CNN explains ‘X’ glitch over Cheyen’s face”, referred only to “the wayward graphic, which CNN said lasted for about 0ne-seventh of a second.” As if it were one bleep only.

This difference makes a difference, I argue, in deciding whether it was deliberate or not. Time Warner Inc, parent company of CNN, “issued a mea culpa saying an investigation by senior management concluded “this was a technical malfunction, not an issue of operator error” and expressing regret for the incident.”” What happened was this: “The “X” image, a place-huolding marker used by technicians to cue up graphics, is not supposed to be visible to viewers but was inadvertently projected onto the screen by a malfunction in a “switcher” device, they explained.” Yippur. The old “switcher device” malfunctioned. Is there a blinker on that switcher?

I think the public has the right to know! That is the only way to lay to rest the suspicion that it was attempt to sabatoge the Vice President’s point. Call it “The Torturer’s Revenge.” Cheney is reported to be vehemently at odds with McCain over the latter’s anti-torture rider to a Senate bill; with Bush pinned in the middle. The situation is succinctly described by Elisabeth Bumiller thus (NY Times 11.l2.05 A 19): “Mr. Cheney, who wants to exempt clandestine C.I.A. activities, was so strongly opposed that Mr. McCain finally picked up the phone and called Mr. Bush. “I said I wanted to see him because I wanted to discuss this issue with him,” McCain said “and he said, ‘I’d like for you to talk with Steve.’” Referring to Steve Hadley, who promptly called and said “the president wants me to talk to you about this and see if we can’t reach a common ground.” Considering that “White House officials say that Mr. Cheney is still with Mr. Bush in the president’s most crucial early morning meetings, the C.I.A., F.B.I., hurricane and communications briefings,” one can only draw the conclusion that the atmosphere in those meetings must have grown a bit stuffy, to put it mildly. McCain, meet the WHIG’s.



EXPLORING THE ALTERNATIVES

If it was a glitch, it amounts to one helluva Freudian slip, group-consciousness wise. The metaphysical implications are stunning.

Here is the Vice President of the United States (proper tokening is required in order to reproduce the transcendental template of apperception)l in the process of lying^2 – reversing the charge that the president lied; at the very time in the juncture of events flowing through the channels of cable news TV networks, the very heart pumping the blood of group communications (topic for the WHIG situation room in those crucial hours after dawn) … saying “X CHENEY”. That would be the text of what Freud called the “unconscious thought”.

It is a subliminal death wish, if there ever was one. There is one stunner.

It occurs in the context of punishment for sexuality, as if it were God addressing the problem of Original Sin, again (as (s)he should have in the first place?). The CI.A. is the agency that carries out America’s group-unconscious. In current historical group-fantasy, torture is associated with the pictures of Abu Ghraib; these, with anal rape fantasies; these, with (perverse) homosexuality; and these, strongly anti-cathected in the last presidential election, wind up being defended against, at the broad, group-political level, in: aversion to Pictures on Card on on TV of dark, sinister, look-alike Muslim-Arab psycho-killers, “terrorists”. (Milosevich, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Zaqawri,..)

The figure of Cheney is “Father”, even to the president. He is credited as being behind Bush’s policies; Rove was only Gobbels handling domestic propaganda.

The “X-ing of Cheney” expresses the unconscious thought of killing the father/torturer. In Freudian terms, this expression would appear, as do dreams, in fulfillment of a wish. We are looking at what we want to see.Seeing Cheney get the X is the unconscious wish stirring in the group, repeating the situation whenever children suffer abuse. “We”, citizens of America – our group – were lied to, (Chinese) tortured (by terror threats), degraded, turned into objects of despicable hatred by this cadre (cabal). “The Unconscious”, as Jung would agree with the early Freud in calling it, recognizes no restrictions to finding instinctive outlet for expression of death wishes toward the father, as consciousness is bound by. What it wishes for it gets, one way or another, which includes displacement, as in Cheney’s attribution of calling the liar-claimers liars to McCain. This is but one symptom of a general psycho-anatomical condition.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN? -- The Hand of God (hyp.)

So much is happening in TokenSpace, as I call the container of conscious content under sign-use (communication) of a genuine weird, but decipherable, construction, it is worthy of note for the sake of comparison. “THE WORST DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY” appeared on a prominent channel news picture under President Bush speaking to an audience after hurricane Katrina. Picked up on the Original Dissent Forum, with blogs. Such a striking message goes beyond the ironic, folding many levels, or loops of associations into the situation, but not inviting an Invisible Hand explanation. The description did in fact apply to the terrible disaster. George W. Bush just happened to be seen speaking above it. A glitch in PR planning, no doubt, and surrealistic, given the way the New Orleans situation went down. But not an occurrence that strains the hypothesis of ordinary, if unusual, coincidence, via cause and effect.

The instant case, however, goes further. The “meaning” it communicates, as a sign-use, is complicated along different lines; the hypothesis of mere coincidence to account for it is more strained. For one thing, there is millennial, classic, Archetypal vastness, and aptitude in the message. Why did the switching device malfunction in just that way, then and there, with that effect? How probable is that? – that exposure of the unconscious message so large can be written off as the unintended effect of random causes. It hardly matters how many actually saw and were affected by it. What is relevant is THAT it occurred, at all, given its symbolic enormity. Just because God sends a message doesn’t mean every one, or even very many, will get it.

So are we saying that “something” got into the computers? WWII had its gremlins, little fantasy-entities that brought about bad coincidences. How do ideas get translated into language, anyway? Can super-sensitive micro-electronic machinery pick up patterns of brain-waves flashed out as desires it somehow manages to satisfy? -- in the way the nervous apparatus in the body delivers dreams, on Freud’s theory, to fulfill unconscious wishes.


OR

The other hypothesis (from above), is that it was just plain old sabatoge. Funny. Instant karma.