White House Mario Brothers
In search of pure content
There is a mainstream narrative going around in America, and that is that there is a growing mistrust within society. There exists a widespread mistrust of media, government, corporations, official narratives, politicians, influencers, social media, financial institutions, doctors, vaccines, science, religion, Republicans, Democrats, online culture, offline culture, rich people, poor people….. I think you get where I’m going with this. This mistrust is mostly generalized, vague and all encompassing. The various solutions to these problems lead us only into silos and echo chambers augmented by algorithms and artificial intelligence. If you believe you are not being manipulated, it is soon revealed that indeed you are. Modern wars are wars of information and lives are being cast away like yesterday’s laundry. Corporate media use distortions and lies as a matter of routine. Everyone has their version of the truth, their own statistics and their own paradigms with which they fight in the new holy war of culture.
This is the premise, or at least it should’ve been, of the latest HBO prestige television show White House Plumbers. It presents us with an alleged deep dive into the Watergate scandal and the illegal wiretapping of the DNC at the behest of President Richard ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon. We should note however that White House Plumbers was released only a year after the show Gaslit took on the task of exposing these same crimes from the perspective of ‘lesser characters’. White House Plumbers focuses mainly on two major characters, the conservative right wing spooks E Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy, played by Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux. Both shows tell the same story that was exhaustively told in the 1970s grand conspiracy film All the President’s Men, but this time in an oddball mixture of comedy and high-stakes drama.
The question remains, why? What is the purpose of yet another foray into an endlessly charted territory of a crime that pales in comparison to the daily crimes perpetrated at the highest levels of American government? Hell, even the most benign corporate corruption scandal is still an order of magnitude worse than Watergate. Remember Enron?
Hunt and Liddy are interesting character studies, but the show makes it clear that it is not their crimes that are the most important subject in the story, despite the fact that it takes up half of the run time of the entire show. Instead, the show is witness to the producers’ will to reduce everything to content and media spectacle. White House Plumbers is pathologically wedded to the strained socio-political critique channeled through the most fashionable identitarian economy that is all too common and all too evident in contemporary streaming culture. Everything is content and content is everything.
It is a kind of reductio ad contentum that drives the story of two disgraced conservative intelligence operatives and their strange abilities to leverage attention and controversy to establish and solidify their media credentials. The show’s basic premise is that nothing exists unless it exists in its mediated form. Watergate would not exist had it not been a media sensation, the political proto-scandal from which everything emanates. At the very least, without media attention, Watergate would have been a footnote in the annals of history and Hunt and Liddy would’ve remained utterly obscure characters in a minor tragedy play. This is why it is crucial that the show spends so much time exploring the personal lives of Hunt and Liddy. They are the avatars of the modern media consumer, manipulated and helpless yet with a false sense of agency and belief in their powers to change and manipulate the world around them. They are the outwardly gazing abyss, locked within the bleak confines of their homes, populated by their wives and children, the nagging characters that animate and hinder their professional careers. Home for Hunt and Liddy is not sanctuary but a symbolic prison hindering their self-actualization as potential media men and influencers. The actual prison where the bumbling duo land after the scandal breaks is thus ironically the site of that self-actualization. Home is prison, prison is freedom.
After Watergate both Hunt and Liddy were able to transmute their infamy into prominent media careers, and White House Plumbers reminds us of this fact each time Liddy is on screen playing the clown for the paparazzi in front of the courthouse. Liddy, more so than Hunt, is the prototype of the modern intelligence media expert. In the 1990s he, like many of his generation who were tapped by the intelligence community as assets in its Quixotic fight against the rising tide communism and leftist ideology, moved into the media sphere with his own talk show that was on air from 1992 to 2012. Expanding his brand beyond politics, Liddy also appeared in many films in fictional and cameo roles. Fast forward to modern times and the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) all have in-house offices at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. It is a veritable alphabet soup of secretive demonic energy. Imagine if the FSB, the former KGB, had offices inside RT and FSB officers were reviewing all news stories and giving notes on all public news information and then these same FSB officers were routinely interviewed about foreign policy. This is the situation in the United States. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of G Gordon Liddys operating behind the scenes in media newsrooms, acting as experts in information wars and holding briefing sessions with CEOs. The Twitter Files are only a tip of this unholy conspiracist iceberg.
E Howard Hunt’s media career was more reserved. It centered around books and publishing. As a CIA operative Hunt had first-hand knowledge of the importance narrative and information manipulation play in perception management. He was variously employed in public relations, the government and intelligence. His earliest intelligence stint was at the Office of Strategic Servicess (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, during World War II. The OSS was formed and mandated tasks to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines, produce propaganda and engage in acts of subversion, sabotage and information warfare. After the war the OSS was officially disbanded, but old habits die hard and with the onset of the Cold War the CIA was formed under similar pretenses and began to employ many former OSS officers, including Hunt.
Episode four hints at the coming transformation of the intelligence alphabet soup into media cartels when Hunt, saddled with the responsibility of financially supporting both the Liddys and his own slowly deteriorating family, confronts Gordon with his idea of a tell-all book about their exploits in the Watergate debacle. Hunt, realizing the gravity of the watershed moment understood that it can be exploited for quick financial gain, an idea so repulsive to Liddy that he was willing to never speak to Hunt ever again. But Hunt knew a tell-all account written by the tale’s main actors had the potential of power washing their image by casting themselves in the roles of victims of an evil corrupt political system. Liddy, considering victimhood as a sign of weakness, rejects Hunt’s ideas, but is not above playing the role of the media stooge. Where Hunt is ok with looking weak to get what he wants, Liddy goes on to attempt and restore his power through classic media manipulation tactics, joining conservative characters William F. Buckley and Rush Limbaugh in front of entertainment cameras and behind microphones, anticipating our identity-driven era where image is everything.
White House Plumbers shows us just how far culture has moved into the realm of appearances. All the President’s Men was filmed in response to the events of Watergate and its most salient feature, the conspiracy itself. It dealt with the media from the inside and was not afraid to show reality for what it is. We get behind-the-scenes looks into the newsroom and real-time creation of a media sensation, but we didn’t get to see the effect it produced. In other words, what we get in the film is the substance behind the appearance. In White House Plumbers we get nothing but the appearance without substance. The series tries to get around this by allowing us to gaze into the inner circle of the Watergate conspirators and their handlers, only to leave us with half of the story, because the real conspiracy is elsewhere.
Yes, it is clear that there is growing mistrust in society. Media is most often blamed as are social media apps, but it is increasingly obvious that the culprit is the unstable ground on which history itself is built. If we are able to retell any historical account from multiple perspectives, we ought to get a better sense of the truth, a synthesis of all perspectives. It seems though that what we get instead of synthesis are varying degrees of antithesis, the notion that any account is as good as another and that all previous accounts are inherently suspect. History is thus exposed to the power and flow of consensus creation and becomes subject not to objective observation, but to an attention grabbing retelling that is able to garner the most interest and the most cultural cache. History thus becomes content.
White House Plumbers presents this not as a problem to be solved but as a method for producing more content. In the context of our modern ‘satanic’ content mills this is nothing strange. Content is in high demand. Nothing new gets created and no new information is brought to light. There is only the endless churn of already existing information, pathologically cannibalized for more content creation and presented in infinitely spawning book report podcasts. Despite all its hype, White House Plumbers is simply another algorithmically produced show that fits perfectly into the 21st century’s dead internet vibe. There is nothing to see, nothing to do and nowhere to go. We are forever doomed to live with the inner emotional pain caused by the failure of the internet to bring about utopia, while the solution to our pain is always presented in a product form. We are interpellated to assuage our inner emotional pain through the consumption of pure content entertainment – Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, DC Comics, etc. White House Plumbers, not unlike those content producers, lets us know there is nowhere else to go but back to our childhoods where restorative nostalgia reigns with an iron fist over the vestiges of American culture.
