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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/15/10

What's Wrong With America, Part I: We Like to Watch

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Message Bud Goodall

Doubt it?   Stop reading.   Look up from your iPad and then look around the space you are currently occupying.   Count the number of advertisements within view.   Note their diversity.   Or, if you are in a dull room using your iPad or laptop, open a portal on the virtual world.   How many advertisements are displayed?   How many clever attempts are there to win your attention away from the information you came for, that, in the grand scheme, er, pardon me, in the grand interests of greedy commerce, are relegated to less interesting visual status?   Furthermore, how much of the information content that you went to the website looking for is available, compared to how much advertising is displayed?   How much of it is free?   How much for sale?   How much is spectacle?

Jhally claims that so much of our cultural space is devoted to advertising that what is left over for real news, or for cultural critique, or for educational purposes about important issues such as global warming, or solutions to the economic crisis, is laughable.   And that fact alone is a major reason why despite being filled with a minute-by-minute flow of new information everywhere we turn, we are far less intelligent or knowledgeable about things that matter than we used to be.   Put simply, there is no time left to think about what we are watching.   And--here's the really sinister part of the society we have created--we are afraid that if we stop watching, stop being viewers of the spectacle, we will somehow fall behind in what we are expected to know.   Our value as a commodity will fall.   We will no longer be so cool.   Or hip.   Or sick.

If all we had to worry about on television was advertising, or the big money that fuels it, or how dumb we are becoming, that would be bad enough.   But George Gerbner and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication collected data over 30 years and discovered something far worse: The "Mean World Syndrome."  

Here's how it works.   Watching television actually changes our brain waves from active Alpha states to passive Beta ones, and in so doing, also significantly increases our fear of the public, especially racial and classed Others, and of public streets in general.   It's a mean world out there.   Why?  

Because news on television is dominated by bad news.   Fires and murders and crisis.   Spectacles, all.   Also because the most popular serialized dramas are police shows, or crime shows, or movies that feature horrific crimes, often those crimes perpetrated by cultural Others who prey on the innocence of ordinary victims.   More spectacles.   And because over time, as we age and our perceived vulnerability increases, we channel the fears of Others that have been cultivated by television into a political preference for a police state, even so far as being willing to give up our rights and to vote for anyone who promises to protect us from " those people .  

Those people could be terrorists, liberals, or murderers; these are important differences that no longer matter to many people.   Particularly older white citizens who watch a lot of television and who do, in fact, form the largest support group for the Tea Party and Republicans.   What television has done for these white people is to collapse categorical cultural and political differences into one convenient demonized Other.  

What the Tea Party and Republicans have done is cultivate fear as a permanent cultural condition, which is what I think Donald Rumsfeld really meant when he called the global war on terrorism our "enduring war."   What better for the future of spectacle?   What better for raising big money?   Or for the core message of Republicans?

In 1979, Hal Ashby directed "Being There," a film based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski. The main character, Chance, a.k.a Chauncy Gardener (portrayed by Peter Sellers), was a politically connected wealthy man's gardener who, more than anything else, "liked to watch" television.   The wealthy benefactor dies and Chance becomes, through a series of oddly plausible if highly comedic events, a serious political figure whose simplistic pronouncements are treated as profound by other wealthy individuals.   They eventually determine that Chance should become the next President.   He's photogenic, he will do what he is told to do to protect their vested interests, he says pithy things they already believe, and besides, he really likes the watch television.  

When the film was released it was praised for its metaphorical qualities as well as for the fine acting of Peter Sellers.   It was applauded as fiction.   Today the star of the film would be likely be Sarah Palin and the film would be seen as a documentary.   But she's just one example of the same basic principle, or cultural theme.

One major part of what's wrong with this country is our unhealthy dependence on and cultivated obsession with entertainment, particularly the entertainment provided by the spectacle of television and its mediated offspring.   Its dominance over our cultural and political lives cannot be denied and has been thoroughly documented by scholars and noted by pundits.   It is as if we are daily and voluntarily ingesting a potent drug that will alter our minds, change our perception of the world, and make us less likely to leave our homes to engage in much of anything.   Because we like to watch, because watching has become a substitute for doing, we view some of the most important political events as if they were nothing more than television shows featuring celebrities posing as heroes.   We vote based on what show and which celebrities we want to watch for the next year, or two, or four.   In the end--which is now--we wake up from this mediated narcotic and gaze at the screen.   We find that nothing is on that we want to watch anymore.   But that's all we have left.

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H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. lives in Arizona where he is a college professor and writer. He has published 20 books and many articles and chapters on a variety of communication issues. His most recent books include Counter-Narrative: How Progressive (more...)
 
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