Donald Trump: America's Berlusconi?

[Odin]

(01-13-2017, 11:28 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(01-13-2017, 11:04 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:I hate to admit it--contrary to that last optimistic bone in my body--but you may be right that "the vast majority doesn't give a shit," that "they don't want to be informed, they want to be entertained."  Neil Postman, in his prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, predicted that American society was much closer to manifesting the dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World than that depicted in Orwell's 1984.  (We may yet succumb to both nightmarish visions, in that order.)  If citizens of this country can't pull their heads out their "technological escapism" long enough to see what's going on around them, then they--we-- may one day cede democracy in a time of existential crisis to some kind of totalitarianism. 

I came across this televised interview of former Supreme Court Justice Souter, commenting in stark terms about the danger of America's 'pervasive civic ignorance.'  About four minutes in, he issues an apocalyptic warning about where our civic ignorance--and lack of civic engagement--may take us as a country.  Chilling... 

I have Neil Postman's book on my list of books/authors to acquire, but in the meantime John J. Reilly predicted something similar in Spengler's Future.  We may simply be passing out of the age of the Republic and into the era of bread and circuses for the masses.

Another excellent book in a similar vein is Daniel J Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.  A summary of it I have cribbed from amazon.com:

First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of “pseudo-events”—events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported—and the contemporary definition of celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Since then Daniel J. Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.

The preponderance of "pseudo-events" in our body politic explains why--for the first time in my life--I passed on the presidential debates: there are plenty of print and online sources outlining the policy proposals and voting records of the candidates.  If I want know what the candidates said in those televised farces (not really debates at all, just free-for-alls where the candidates talk over one another), I'll read the transcript the next day.  And that's bad enough...

I quit watching the presidential debates years ago because I made this exact realization, there was nothing to be learned watching them. I suspect the last truly genuine presidential debates were the 1992 ones.