Posted on 01/05/2015 2:13:17 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
".........In a segment that aired last July, Oliver griped that Americans were too “optimistic” about their prospects. Rather than attempting to maintain the circumstances in which they might eventually “make it,” Oliver proposed,voters should instead be looking to the state for their sustenance,requesting their lawmakers to take steps to close the “income gap.” To make his case, Oliver relied heavily on a Pew Research Center study that found that as many as 60 percent of Americans believe that they can still get ahead if they are willing to work hard. This,Oliver spluttered, was absurd. Thus did we see a man who has been welcomed into a new country and invited to lecture its people about their affairs for a handsome salary express palpable irritation that others believe that they,too,can achieve their dreams.
At the root of Oliver’s condemnation one can sense John Steinbeck’s asseveration that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat,but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”—a gripe that was celebrated for its perspicacity by all the “right” people at the time it was proferred but that nevertheless served as little more than a pessimistic and myopic overture to the largest economic expansion in the history of the world.(It is a time-honored tradition that those who make their fortunes quickly and relatively easily—Hollywood actors;the wildly talented;the seventh employee of the successful technology start-up-are inclined to conclude that all success in life takes the form of their own and that prosperity and celebrity are primarily a question of luck.) Accordingly,one can discern a certain sneer in Oliver’s form of anti-gospel—the inescapable presumption being that of course a man like John Oliver can make it in America but that the rest of the plebs are going to have a hard time getting on without help.........
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Good article. Cooke and Williamson are my two favorite writers left at NR.
I’m part way through this, will pick it up and finish it in a bit [published in Salon, seems related]:
“Meet the man who predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and reality TV”
“......Perhaps most central to all of [Neil] Postman’s work was the notion, which he shared with McLuhan, that technology is not neutral. “As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it,” he wrote. “Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.” Even more basically, he was concerned not just how we used our tools – gunpowder, the clock, the printing press, the television, the computer – but how our tools use us. And unlike theorists who took a detached, on-one-hand/on-the-other hand view of media, Postman made clear where his values were: “Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.”
Unlike McLuhan, who wrote in a dense, aphoristic style, embedded imagery from advertising in his texts and sometimes turned his pages into visual elements in themselves – or like contemporary communications scholars, whose work is often built on impenetrable theoretical language — Postman was a straightforward and eminently lucid writer in the tradition of Orwell.
In the ‘80s – as network news was dominant, MTV ubiquitous, and a Hollywood actor sat in the White House – the image seemed to Postman to be displacing print, a huge shift from the world Gutenberg made. It was, in a phrase he would use later, a collision of worldviews. The result of his inquiry was “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” (The writer Steve Almond recently quoted from the book to show that Postman had predicted Stephen Colbert: “the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.”)
The book’s foreword made one of his most famous arguments – that it’s Huxley, and not Orwell, who best foresaw contemporary America:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Postman, of course, was not the first thinker to look at the effects of visual culture on politics. Historian Daniel Boorstin described the process in his 1961 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America” and several ’60s journalists looked at how television shaped the Kennedy and Nixon races.
To Bai, though, “Amusing Ourselves” became “a kind of North Star” for his inquiry into how political coverage shifted away from ideology and issues and toward personality and scandal. (Near the end of “All the Truth Is Out,” Bai calls the Postman book “a brilliant, enduring work, and anyone who cares about the state of our public discourse should read it.”) Part of what struck Bai was Postman’s contrasting of political debate in the Age of Print – the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance – and what we get in the Age of the Image. “I was very struck,” Bai says, “by his idea that it’s very much about the technology we have at our disposal.”.....”
LINK to quoted material in Post #3.
Postman was a excellent critic/analyst, even if he was on the left. I recall his mockery of newscasters who would report on some great human catastrophe, e.g. 60,000 people killed in a tsunami, and then intoning “Now...this” to break to a wacky commercial for corn chips. In response to one of Clinton-Gore’s 1996 campaign catchphrases, he wrote that he wanted to “build a bridge to the 18th century”, i.e. restore a sense of Enlightenment rationality and literacy to public discourse.
It’s sad that there is no media critic of Postman’s caliber alive today.
That was profoundly accurate.
Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living.
He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn't keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.
On his deathbed, unable to speak due to advanced laryngeal cancer, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death[30] in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 a.m. and a second dose a few hours later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. on 22 November 1963.
Media coverage of Huxley's passing — as with that of the author C. S. Lewis — was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the same day. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.
Thanks for the insights.
I just finished the piece. The wrap up:
“.....Read almost three decades later, Postman represents the boatman he described. It’s worth noting, though, that his work is largely ignored in academia. Scholars of communications and media theory are often, though not always, enthusiastic about technological change; many of them team up against copyright protection and in favor of the cult of “free.” Since they don’t typically earn their living from their writing or music, it’s easy for them to cheerlead for piracy and digital “innovation” that leaves artists uncompensated. (There may be other reasons, too: A communications scholar once told me that her colleagues downgraded Postman’s work because it could be read by the layman.)
“His work was almost too prescient,” says Matt Bai. “Now it seems almost like a given, like it’s obvious. How rare that insight is in academic or cultural criticism!”
But as valuable as he’s been to his work, Postman’s name does not often come up inside the Beltway. “My chief criticism about the new generation of political journalism and media,” says Bai, who writes for Yahoo News, “is that they don’t have a broader curiosity about the world. They have to file 12 times a day; they don’t read novels, they don’t read history. So I think Postman has been a bit of a victim of the culture he foreshadowed. The technology is so dominant – for a lot of people, especially younger Americans, it’s year zero. What’s the point of knowing what happened in 1980? It’s ancient. But it’s hard to get a sense of what’s lost until you know what was.”
Jaron Lanier, who works in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, across the continent and several cultural divides from Bai’s Washington, gives an eerily similar assessment of Postman’s place in his world. “If you feel like all information is available, you know less and your thinking becomes narrower,” he says. “The tech world is fairly history free, so nobody comes up. The mystery remains how to get anyone interested in history at all. In a way, Silicon Valley thinks there’s only the present, and the present’s ideas about the future. Whoever’s alive now knows best.”
Oddly, he says, “It’s easier to get information than ever before, but people are much less informed.” Lanier thinks we’re still catching up to his work. “I think Postman’s day,” he said, “might not have come yet.” [end]
Bump!
I’ll read the article tonight- thank you for making me aware of it.
Another critic similar in many ways to Postman was Christopher Lasch. Lasch was a sociologist rather than a communications theorist, but his conclusions were similar about the direction of American culture.
Paddy Chayefsky was 10 years ahead of Postman. He portrayed the act of criticism itself being co-opted by television, with the character of Howard Beale in Network. The Howard Beale Show also foreshadowed the daytime freak shows so common today.
What, only comedians are allowed to get upset by the news? I'm upset by the news every day!
Christopher Hitchens. Or even Craig Ferguson.
On the other, there are wanderers who came here for a job but who do not quite seem to like or “get” the place, and whose broadcasts are in consequence tinged with a certain disdain.
Piers Morgan...
Huxley was right.
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