O brave new world, that has such media in it

Wed Jan 14 2004

howard-beale"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." -- Walter Lippman

I'm about three-quarters through Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman, and it's been a truly depressing, if not surprising, read. Postman's thesis is basically that it's Huxley's hedonistic Brave New World, not Orwell's totalitarian 1984, that was the more prophetic. Huxley's world is here now, brought about by the power of television which has reduced public discourse, and even the quality of thought in our society, to only what trivialities can be squeezed in between commercials.

I've already decided to write an essay about this topic soon, but there's a couple pieces of media that spring to mind immediately as predictors, propagators and products of the trivialization of that which should be serious

Paddy Chayevsky's Network, which is frighteningly timely in this age where Michael Jackson's CBS special and 60 Minutes interview air in the same ratings week. In that movie, Peter Finch isn't saying anything that Postman (w/r/t television) or CNN's Lou Dobbs (w/r/t American business & culture) aren't saying now, but there's two very important lessons to be learned from his character. One is that in the movie, Howard Beale is clearly a lunatic. Second is that lunatic or not, right or not, Beale's value both to his audience and his network is that he discusses very serious matters in a way that gets people emotionally involved and keeps them entertained. The only plot point in that movie that I've never quite bought is that Howard Beale could move people to actually send thousands of telegrams to the White House. What seems more genuine is the studio audience that watches him silently until he passes out, upon which a stagehand rushes out and motions for them to applaud. There is no concern for the person of Howard Beale, only for the feeling he has produced, momentarily, in the mind of the viewer. He may as well be a crack pipe.

Then there's the current state of coverage on CNN, which seemingly gets a bit worse every day despite their self-proclaimed status as America's most trusted news source. CNN has developed the schizophrenic, capsulized style of network news to a new level, repeating the exact same thirty-second stories several times throughout the day, expanding on that coverage only to give their pundits a chance to express an opinion, which (as observed by Postman) isn't so much a true argument or counter-argument as it is a kneejerk emotional response, intended to evoke in the audience (guess what?) a kneejerk emotional response. It's like a sideshow, where the Paul O'Neill allegations are the fire eater and the pirated Oscar screener that ended up online is the bearded lady. Such a situation is preferable only to the strip club that is Fox News -- what good is the lesser of two evils if they've managed to completely annihilate that which is good?

I would not begin to suggest any kind of corporate conspiracy to prevent Americans from getting a full picture of what's going on in the world, but rather express the concern that thanks to television, to be constantly starved for the newest thing and depressed because one's own life pales in comparison to the perfect fictions coming over that tube is now the American condition. Our worship of technology has reached a frightening new level, we are more blind to what is real and human than ever before, and my worry is that sooner or later this most fatal weakness will be exploited.

Hitler, it is said, once remarked that people will believe any lie so long as it's big enough. Right now, people believe that whether Michael Jackson -- a profoundly screwed-up man most of us have never and will never meet -- groped a 12-year-old boy is more important than what's going on in our own lives. That sounds like a pretty big lie to me.

Someone pass me the soma.