Are You Amused?

Several people have written to me asking whether I plan to write about Sarah Palin. It seems to me unlikely that I would have anything to offer on that topic that others have not already written. Nevertheless, a couple of things that have been written have come to my mind in recent days and roiled around there. The first, a book written over two decades ago; the second, an essay published in the L.A. Times this past week.

Neil Postman was a NYU professor, a media theorist, and a cultural critic. In 1985, he published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. It was about the way in which the pervasiveness of television was altering the culture. Wikipedia describes it thus: “Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image.” I read the book in 1985, sensed that what he was saying sounded right, and kept it in mind. Part of the reason that I thought he was onto something was that I was teaching bioethics/’legal and ethical issues in healthcare’ to undergraduates at UCLA at the time and was comparing them to the undergraduate students I had first taught at UCLA twenty-five years earlier, in 1960, when I was teaching rhetoric/English composition to students of the same age.

The students of 1960 didn’t know how to write any better than the students of 1985, but no worse, either. What seemed to me to be different was the students’ understanding of the context they and I found ourselves inhabiting. In 1960, we saw it pretty much the same: I was the instructor and they expected me to teach them something. They assumed that I had something to teach them and, though they might not like learning it or might not entirely see what was the value of learning it, they expected to try to learn it. I, similarly, thought I had something to teach them and expected them to try to learn it. By 1985, I was still in the 1960’s context, but these 1985 students had moved on, for the most part, to a different context. And it was something like ‘education as a television program.’ Their question was not, ‘What have you got for me?’, as the 1960’s students’ question might be understood. It was more like, ‘Do I like this? Am I enjoying this? Is this class any fun?’ During those intervening 25 years, the students had transmogrified from students to audience, I had been moved in their view from teacher to performer, and the entire operation had been reconceived of as entertainment not education. Just as Postman said.

Now I didn’t think I was an entertainer nor that what we were doing was entertainment. But that didn’t really matter because a context is created by all parties to the activity. If I was to make any headway with my idea of what we were doing, I had somehow to incorporate their idea of what we were doing and lead them through it to my idea. I tried to be more entertaining and slip the education through where I could. I wasn’t unhappy some years later when I moved on to other worlds and no longer had to entertain people who wouldn’t mind being educated but only if it came through an entertainment context.

So, I now look at this campaign process and feel some sympathy for the people who thought they were going to be journalists but have ended up being performers in an entertainment endeavor. And I feel some sympathy for politicians who thought that they were going to explain their political views and policy goals but are instead expected to be star performers in an entertainment world. The American public appears, largely, to be interested in being entertained first, last and foremost, although it’s possible that the right person would still be able to slip in a little enlightenment here and there. But I don’t feel much sympathy for the audience that eagerly seeks out this entertainment extravaganza, pretending that it’s a political campaign or that it has any enlightenment or education at all, even as I understand how they got into audience mode. If we weren’t watching, obsessing about, writing about, and generally enjoying it as an entertainment spectacle, the politicians and the journalists wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. It takes two to engage in this. And it is here, alas, where I see Postman’s book title as prescient: We do, indeed seem to be amusing ourselves to death.

Which brings me to the second piece of writing, an op-ed by Sam Harris, in which he says, with respect to the press’ and public’s enthusiasm for Gov. Palin (and President Bush) as a 'regular guy’ (or gal), not some fancy-pants educated twit, but someone just like them (but with more money and political pull), someone who makes them cheer and hiss and boo as if they were at a wrestling match: ‘This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get.’

Amusing ourselves to death. I am surely seeing the death part, but I’m personally having a little difficulty experiencing the amusing part. But then, I’m an educated twit, I suppose, even if I’m just a girl who grew up in the potato fields of Idaho. Forgot to learn to shoot large quadrupeds, however.