Mickey Mouse as Media Apparatchik

Blues for Brezhnev

The Mickey Mouse Law (MML) was offered by a famous Russian guerilla journalist and media-analyst Alexander Nevzorov, who stated in The Art of Being Offensive (2016) that any cultural representation of a celebrity is as close to reality as Mickey Mouse to a regular mus musculus — a rodent which spends the entirety of its existence stealing or spoiling human food supplies.

This can be elaborated through an analogy. After visiting Disneyland, Mickey’s fans take off the merchandised mouse-ears and on their way home buy zinc phosphide to carry out genocide on Mickey’s prototypes in the basement, because the mythical image of Mickey has evolved far beyond the rodent’s basic biology. Any culture has potentially unlimited capacity for media Mickeys, producing iconic characters when heroes and villains are called for. The distance put between reality and myth can be an effective metric of the memetic success of the latter, its “memability”.

Mythical thinking is what allows people to demonize and admire strangers at will. This is rooted deeply in human culture, as it is built on a myth commonly known as “history” with multiple heroic characters to glorify and adversaries to vilify, their role in history is never fully known or even confirmed, like that of Jesus or demi-god emperors of ancient China.

These myths are always tightly interwoven with the intrinsic cultural background. Although we cannot belittle a talent of a truly great human, there could not have been Mozart in the Early Neolithic Period, or Rutherford — at the time of crusades and inquisition.

However decisive and pervasive the role played by a certain character may be, every impactful historical personality can only be the bandmaster of the epoch’s marching orchestra, and by no means a one-man band. Certainly, without a leader, nothing would be possible, and the quality of the performance would suffer in short perspective. History, though, despite it being unreliable in detail, makes the general truth clear: the orchestra of human civilization carries on nonetheless, as a new bandmaster is bound to step in eventually.

This happened on multiple occasions when key scientific discoveries were carried out almost synchronously by two (or more) people who…

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