David Corn: Amusing Ourselves to Autocracy [View all]

[babylonsister]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/rudy-giuliani-masked-singer-big-lie-autocracy/

19 hours ago
Amusing Ourselves to Autocracy
Rudy Giuliani’s role on the Masked Singer was a sad commentary on the fragile state of our democracy.
David Corn
Washington, DC, Bureau ChiefBio | Follow


In 1985, Neil Postman, a media theorist and cultural critic, wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. He contended that television—with its focus on visuals—reduces news and politics to entertainment, essentially transforming public discourse into a circus and undermining “serious and rational public conversation.” The book originated with a talk he gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair, while he was participating in a panel discussion on George Orwell’s classic 1984. Postman posited that the threat to humanity came less from a totalitarian state, as Orwell envisioned, and more from an addiction to amusement, as depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, in which citizens are constantly fed a happiness-generating drug called “soma.”

Postman warned that television, with its never-ending delivery of consumer entertainment, was the contemporary version of that drug. An endless flow of distraction and titillation—sensory input designed to entertain and sell us stuff—would turn us into passive and disconnected people unable to collectively grapple with the serious matters of the day. And this was before the onslaught of cable television, video rentals, DVDs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, the internet, social media, DVRs, streaming, and virtual reality. Postman, who died in 2003, worried that a visual media world then dominated by only three national broadcast networks and movie theaters was crushing our civic souls. What might he say now?

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He also provided this gem:

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; a culture-death is a clear possibility.

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If Americans would rather be amused than engaged and informed, what can be done about that? Giuliani’s appearance on this show should be a warning that the ongoing democracy crisis here has not fully registered with the mainstream and many Americans. That’s a positive sign for Trump and Trumpism. If the underminers of democracy can get the rest of us to chuckle at their antics, it’s a big win for them and a step toward Trump’s overall goal: amusing ourselves to autocracy.