posted: 11/4/2016 1:00 AM
No laughing matter
If
we can set aside the rapidly gathering angst, cynicism and disgust
sweeping the country this electoral autumn, is there one dominating
emotion we might discover lurking underneath?
FDR
famously said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but
this year, I am very much fearing that corrosive emotion -- fear! For
the first time, at least in my lifetime, there is the sense that we
don't know where we're going, and that somehow we can no longer grasp
and hold fast our most cherished values.
Perhaps
thinking back for a moment might provide us with some much-needed
wisdom. Remember the great 19th-century American writer Henry James, and
how he characterized America in his sad, revealing novel "Daisy
Miller." Remember the simplicity of the beautiful, but culturally
clueless, young American girl who swept through Europe, breaking every
social rule of the Old World -- not with her evil, but with her
innocence -- until that cynical world destroyed her.
Then
remember the great British author Graham Greene's novel about America
in the world, "The Quiet American," in the second half of the 20th
century. This time, it was not innocence but the arrogance of ignorance
that doomed the idealistic young CIA agent who thought he was planning
utopia, but instead plotted death and destruction in Vietnam in his
unworkable "third way" between communism and democracy.
If
those books characterized their eras, is there a book that might
characterize ours? There is, but unlike those two, it is not a novel.
"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business," published in 1985 by the late Columbia University professor
Neil Postman, is a marvelous book -- an analysis of the press and
society, and also, as it happens, of the changes that have come to
ultimate fruition in the events of this disturbing fall.
"Americans
no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other," Postman
wrote. "They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not
argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and
commercials. ... When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when
cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when
serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short,
a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville
act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear
possibility."
Ironically
-- or perhaps we should say, tragically -- the same day I got my
treasured copy of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" down from the shelf, Dean
Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, was quoted averring how
cable news networks have played a "ridiculous" role in the presidential
campaign, not by reporting endless emails or walls on borders, but by
blurring Postman's line between entertainment and news.
The
Financial Times wrote: "Mr. Baquet described the conduct of Fox News
and CNN as 'in the long run, bad for democracy ... This mix of
entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind
of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world
nominated as Republican presidential candidate.'"
That
same day, the papers were full of news of how CNN and its related media
businesses will approach the milestone gross profit in 2016 of $1
billion, while Fox News is projected to have its most successful year
ever, its gross profit topping $1.67 billion. Meanwhile, The Wall Street
Journal, Gannett and The New York Times -- actual newspaper companies,
where actual news is seriously published after being covered by actual
newspaper reporters -- all announced that print journalism was
essentially continuing to fail, in large part because of falling
readership.
In
Daisy Miller's 19th century, America felt relatively safe in the world,
its frontiers protected by the arms of two great oceans. That isolation
permitted it to nourish innocence. For the first two-thirds of the 20th
century, the country was fearful mostly of the communist menace, with
Vietnam the most obvious example of that fear; power begat military
recklessness.
But
now the problem is not so easily grasped. It is, as Neil Postman so
brilliantly pointed out, not only cultural but also voluntary -- we have
given up intellectual sobriety for entertainment, most dramatically and
dominantly in the entertainment "news" television that is forming the
reality of this election.
And
that dirty little secret is beginning to sneak out. In the Chicago
Tribune, for instance, Joseph Epstein, one of America's most able
essayists, wrote "that the culture of contemporary American life has
gradually but genuinely changed in the direction of coarseness and
instability ... is indisputable" and "our thwarted political development
and degraded culture (are) all too glaringly exhibited in the
Clinton-Trump election campaigns."
But
the cultural debasement that afflicts our society cannot just be voted
in -- or out -- of power. Once gone, intellectual and social cultivation
are immensely difficult to inject back into a culture. Daisy's
innocence has turned into willful ignorance, and the Quiet American's
errant belief that he could single-handedly change the world has turned
into national confusion and guilt where proud, prudent, productive
patriotism once prevailed.
Meanwhile,
every day, 24/7 cable TV and all those other vulgarians dominate the
American public square, amusing us to ... exactly what?
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
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