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The politics of banality: the ob-scene as the mis-en-scéne 197
sary from news producers and consumers alike in order for the story
of one rescued soldier to be privileged over the fate of hundreds of
thousands of less fortunate civilians. In the prior case of Afghanistan,
similarly distorted priorities led to the media’s disproportionate
reporting on the fate of Marjorie . . . the lion from Kabul zoo.
In his Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928), Jung argued that
an individual’s psychology could be profoundly, albeit unwittingly,
influenced by an underpinning dependency of the wider society
(cited in McLuhan [1964] 1995: 21). He used the example of the
average Roman citizen who was inevitably infected by a general
social atmosphere permeated by slavery and claimed the individual is
powerless to resist such an influence. Innis ([1951] 2003) and
McLuhan ([1964] 1995) used a similar argument to describe the
cultural impact of media technologies through history. This chapter
suggests that social porn now permeates media discourse in the West
and the Jerry Springer nature of the Abu Ghraib photographs points
to the validity of Jung’s analysis. The social porn of the image is a
fertile resource from which Bin Laden and others base their
media-savvy strategies. The true malevolent ingenuity of Bin
Laden’s 9/11 outrage thus resides in his knowing incorporation of
the West’s inability to see beyond its own Narcissus-like fixations. For
example, Osama Bin Laden’s image is now readily familiar to all but
a tiny proportion of Western populations but a similarly tiny
proportion of people are likely to be aware of the full geopolitical
context from which Bin Laden sprang. There is, for example, no
significant public discussion of the historical parallels and links that
can be made between his acts and the Royal House of Saud’s uneasy
yet perennially intertwined relationship with the Ikhwan bedouin
fighters and the Wahabi fundamentalist strand of Islam. The USA
was traumatized, yet fundamentally unenlightened, by the shocking
yet constantly repeated images of the twin towers being hit. Unac-
companied by significant efforts to understand, mere repetition of
the images reflected the fundamentally distorted perspective of a
society increasingly incapable of thinking outside the self-referential
media realm alluded to throughout this book.

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