REPETITION COMPULSION

The Mimetic Curse of the Ancients: monkee see, monkee do. 

1869: N.B. Forrest, recently a general in the C.S.A. disbands the original Klan.

1915: The Birth of a Nation is released. Super-salesman "Colonel" Simmons, mightily impressed by Griffith's mega-hit, starts cross-marketing the new Klan by running ads next to the posters for the film. It works. By 1920, the second Klan has 4 million members.

"The cross-burning ceremony, however, was a new wrinkle on the sheets. Burning crosses had never been part of the Reconstruction Ku-Klux. They had come from the exotic imagination of Thomas Dixon, whose fictional Klansmen had felt so much tangible pride in their Scottish ancestry, they revived the use of burning crosses as signal fires from one clan to another. The ritual of the burning crosses figures dramatically in Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake." 

(The human) gift of seeing resemblances
is nothing other than a rudiment 
of the powerful compulsion in former times 
to become and behave like something else.  

-- Walter Benjamin

An unstable situation: 

Everyone wants to become something else. 
Everyone is a vague metaphor looking to use anything to concrete. 
The blank image can produce us as we consume it.