If the late Neil Postman was the prophet (Amusing Ourselves to Death - 1985) of the media-lobotimization of America, Charlie Pierce (Idiot America - How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free) is the outraged guy driving the money changers from the temple - a Howard Beale for our time. I was surprised no one had taken the time to diary his new book. While it is hardly as "important" or intellectual as Postman's writing, Mr. Pierce's book has the virtues of being accessible, topical, and scathing.
As the corporate media gives undeserved airtime to every right-wing hack (despite the Democratic landslide), it is impossible to avoid the rampant imbecility of political "argument" and "discourse" in our country. Some people argue that, after eight years of being trampled upon, the left should simply fight fire with fire. But, Mr. Pierce, like Dr. Postman before him, points to the infrastructure behind the idiocy, and we would do well to pay attention. My "review" is below the fold.
Mr. Pierce's book seems to have been patched together from columns and magazine pieces - whole paragraphs get reused. It really needed tighter editing. This style works, though, because it makes the rants self-contained. (Just FYI, the rants include creationism (twice), pontificating non-experts, conspiracy theory, environmentalism, dying with dignity, war, and the political primary process.)
The most important thing that Mr. Pierce does, between rants, is to parse out the distinctions between cranks (i.e., eccentric characters), charlatans, and celebrities, and to explain how the media has destroyed those distinctions to the detriment of our politics and culture.
Its vital to the book to understand Pierce's definition of cranks and their unique role. Pierce points out that cranks were an integral part of the development of the American experiment. In the past, they might spend their entire lives howling at the moon in some out of the way place. Infrequently, cranks became mainstream; but they were always pushing back against the mainstream, which was a good thing.
The American crank is one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas...The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie....American cranks did not seek out respectable opinion. It had to come to them...As the margins (of respectability) moved, the cranks either found their place within the new boundaries they'd helped to devise, or moved even further out, and began their work anew. That was their essential value. That was what made them purely American cranks. The country was designed to be an ongoing and evolving experiment. The American crank sensed this more deeply than did most of the rest of the country.
Pierce identifies our current besiegement by idiots and "unproven" cranks, unsurprisingly, as the result of television strip-mining "crankhood" for raw material.
Television is the primary vehicle through which America first misplaced its cranks, to the everlasting detriment of both America and the cranks...Television has killed American crankhood by making it obsolete. Because television has become the primary engine of validation for ideas within the culture, once you appear on television, you become a part of the mainstream so instantly that your value as an American crank disappears, destroyed by respectability that it did not earn...
Now, the underlined passage immediately called to mind Neil Postman's critique of television:
We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word.
- N. Postman, AOTD
And, Pierce's title is implicit in Postman's essay:
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, 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 possiblity.
Postman goes on for an entire book about how television changes how we know the world, and how it changes which criteria we use to measure validity (i.e., epistemology). This is a very important subject; but Postman eschews entertainment - thereby being too boring for TV. Charlie Pierce does not:
Once you're on television, you are speaking to the Gut, and the Gut is a moron...The Gut...knows what it wants because it knows how it feels...
The Gut is as destructive to the value of the American crank as television is. While television undermines the crank by making the crank instantly respectable, the Gut destroys him by forcing him into the procrustean bed of commercial salesmanship... The Gut changes the equation by adding the possibility that the crank can be part of the mainstream without affecting any change in it...The crank then becomes simply someone with another product to sell within the unimaginative parameters of the marketplace; his views are just another impulse buy, like the potato chips near the cash register.
The Gut becomes the basis for the Three Great Premises of Idiot America:
- Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
- Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
- Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
Granted Mr. Pierce's insights here are not classic "proofs" or clearly reasoned academic arguments. But, to anyone who has suffered through the last twenty years of television, they have the nauseating feel of reality. We have all had enough of "gut feelings". Dr. Postman was writing before the pollution of the Three Premises had completely poisoned thinking in America, so his demeanor is more detached, more academic:
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether... Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.
- N. Postman, AOTD
Unlike Postman, Pierce has experience of a dying culture and is able to trace the poison back to its source:
...talk radio offers the purest example of the Three Great Premises at work. A host is not judged by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the ratings needle. (First Great Premise) If the needle moves far enough, then the host is adjudged an expert (Second Great Premise) and, if the host seems to argue passionately enough, then what he is saying is judged to be true simply because of how many people are listening to him say it (Third Great Premise). Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.
Talk radio was the driving force in changing American debate into American argument. It moved discussion southward from the brain to the Gut. Debate no longer consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other in between commercials for male-enhancement products.
Talk radio provides a template for the clamorous rise of pundit television and for the even swifter interactivity on the internet. And, because the field of play has moved from the brain to the Gut, talk radio has helped shove the way we talk to each other about even the most important topics almost entirely into the field of entertainment. In doing so, it has created a demand for inexpertise - or, more accurately, anexpertise - whereby the host is deemed more of an authority the less he is demonstrably polluted by actual knowledge.
Here is Postman's version of that:
television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As the printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that the total information environment begins to mirror television.
Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
...in America, everyone is entitled to an opinion...It is proably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week...in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform...I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well-informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge.
In many ways, Mr. Pierce and Dr. Postman "don't repeat, but rather, rhyme".
Mr. Pierce:
After an extensive study of talk radio, and of the television argument shows that talk radio helped spawn, Professor Andrew Cline of Washington University in St. Louis came up with a set of rules for modern American pundits:
- Never be dull.
- Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity.
- The American public is stupid; treat them that way.
- Always ignore facts and the public record when it is convenient to do so.
Dr. Postman:
There are three commandments that form the philosophy of the education which television offers...
Thou shalt have no prerequisites.
Thou shalt induce no perplexity.
Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt.
...the name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity, and exposition is entertainment.
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Here is the bottom line for me: all the impotence that thinking people in America today feel towards the political system will continue until we do something about the hideous media environment. People publish books (or write diaries) about what is happening. But those books and diaries are only taken to heart by the people who are not part of the problem. They have no effect on the toxic media conglomerates.
To fix politics, we have to first fix the media which gives the politicians the cover they need to flout the expressed will of the voters. In that regard, the increased prominence of writing (as opposed to pictures) on the Internet does help reason in its fight against organized stupidity. And, the internet allows real video of real events (instead of cleverly produced psuedo events) to go viral even faster than the corporate media can function.
But, along with Postman, we must recognize that control of the media gives control of the way problems are stated, and therefore, control of the way problems are solved. We must either have our own media - of equal stature with the corporate media - or we must re-regulate the corporate media.
One step along that road is to deal with the issue of the term/conversation-stopper "conspiracy theorist" - a term that has about as much meaning these days as "activist judge" - i.e., anyone who says something I don't agree with. Mr. Pierce has some good ideas about this subject, which I will relate in my next diary.
Until then, I leave you with Mr. Pierce's riff on "charlatan":
A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who's sold out.
Reminds me of an 1980s UK joke: a bimbo is a slag with a press agent.