According to a lengthy but worthy article in The Atlantic, “When scholars warn of the United States becoming a ‘post-truth’ society, they typically focus on the ills that poison our politics: the misinformation, the mistrust, the president who apparently thought he could edit a hurricane with a Sharpie. But the encroachments of a post-truth world are matters of culture as well. In 1961, Newton Minow, just appointed by President John F. Kennedy to lead the Federal Communications Commission, gave a speech before a convocation of TV-industry leaders. He was blunt. The executives, he said, were filling the air with ’a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.’ They were turning TV into ’a vast wasteland.’… In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called ’a vast wasteland’ in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a ‘vast descent into triviality.’ Postman saw a public that confused authority with celebrity, assessing politicians, religious leaders, and educators according not to their wisdom, but to their ability to entertain. These are Postman’s fears in action. They are also Hannah Arendt’s. Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators—the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century—Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists. … ‘Are you not entertained?’ Maximus, the hero of Gladiator, yells to the Roman throngs who treat his pain as their show.”
I will be brief in my comments since the quote is rather lengthy. Needless to say, this echoes what I’ve been saying for years: Americans are too stupid, and it’s a G.D. wonder this country has not devolved into utter dissolution — we’re on our way, though. I suppose this is just as much a humanity problem as an American one, but Americans do entertainment best! I found it fitting the author ended the article with a reference to the ancient Roman Empire, where the plebians were subdued by bread and circus. It’s what I have said countless times before; we are in the dying stage of a nation that must be entertained because democracy is too hard. Welcome to stupid America! The end is coming.