"These figures like Edison and Ford, who were fascists actually, represented an amazing elite of wealth. That kind of wealth is unimaginable now. Some executive shithead running MGM doesn't even dream of wealth like that. And they had a view of what they wanted to impose on the country, and they largely did. Out of this comes light at night, consumerism and rapidity of travel.
"This is early modern, the time of Pound and Eliot and Lewis and Ortega and Julian Benda. It was a very active period when Benda and Wyndham Lewis, who has a very great book from that time called The Art of Being Ruled, were stirring it up. And it was the period of the formation of the media elite. Indeed, the media is the elite. They are the masses in the way that Ortega y Gasset the Spanish philosopher said, "The media are the masses." But a lot of people were confused by that. He meant the masses were the technicians, which made it possible for the elite to exist and exercise itself. That's why he called the masses the technicians. The media that Ortega y Gasset had in mind was the efficiency of the police in tandem with the new electronic communications, which was still primitive voice and all wire. But that's what he meant by the clerkship that ran all that. In fact, Benda's book, The Revolt of the Clerks, was a kind of companion piece to Ortega's The Revolt of the Masses. Those were the people who scared the shit out of them, because they saw for the first time an elite that had an expert cadre of its own which would do its bidding, and would keep it to themselves."
– Ed Dorn, "Waying the West" (Ed Dorn Live, p 108)
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