Neil Postman was right, even if it makes me sound like a snob to say it. That's the obvious, if painful, conclusion I reached after watching some of the television news coverage of evacuees from Lebanon last week. Especially the first few boatloads. As Postman warned more than 20 years ago, it wasn't George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Big- Brother nightmare that was dangerous to Western societies. It was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World-type scenario, in which people come "to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think," against which we should have guarded. In the foreword to his seminal...