Ultimately,
the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society,
the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common
objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable
of taking an active role in the business of self-government.
by
John W. Whitehead
Donald Trump no longer needs to launch Trump TV.
He’s already the star of his own political reality
show.
Americans have a voracious appetite for TV
entertainment, and the Trump reality show—guest starring outraged
Democrats with a newly awakened conscience for immigrants and the
poor, power-hungry Republicans eager to take advantage of their
return to power, and a hodgepodge of other special interest groups
with dubious motives—feeds that appetite for titillating, soap
opera drama.
After all, who needs the insults, narcissism and power
plays that are hallmarks of reality shows such as Celebrity
Apprentice or Keeping Up with the Kardashians when you can have
all that and more delivered up by the likes of Donald Trump and his
cohorts?
Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,”
especially not in the world of politics.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998
film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an
elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and
procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has
devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how
to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
Indeed, Donald Trump may be the smartest move yet by the
powers-that-be to keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s
throats, because as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll
never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that
passes for politics today.
It allows us to be distracted, entertained, occasionally
a little bit outraged but overall largely uninvolved, content to
remain in the viewer’s seat.
The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are
to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers
rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events
unfold.
Reality and fiction merge as everything around us
becomes entertainment fodder.
We don’t even have to change the channel when the
subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us
by the programmers (the corporate media).
For instance, before we could get too worked up over
government surveillance, the programmers changed the channels on us
and switched us over to breaking news about militarized police.
Before our outrage could be transformed into action over police
misconduct, they changed the channel once again to reports of ISIS
beheadings and terrorist shootings. Before we had a chance to
challenge what was staged or real, the programming switched to the
2016 presidential election.
“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and
that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American
politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their
eyes shut.
As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people
watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV—the more
difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is
carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching
television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than
50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get
older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest
percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift
through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically
about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by
government agencies or foreign entities.
Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see
as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by
lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as
acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.
This holds true whether the reality programming is about
the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or
in the bedroom.
It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”
A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara
Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to
take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.
“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why
American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how
American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in
the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and
other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality,
surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state
as things happening to other people.
The ramifications for the future of civic engagement,
political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and
demoralizing.
This not only explains how a candidate like Donald Trump
with a reputation for being rude, egotistical and narcissistic could
get elected, but it also says a lot about how a politician like
Barack Obama—whose tenure in the White House was characterized by
drone killings, a weakening of the Constitution at the expense of
Americans’ civil liberties, and an expansion of the police
state—could be hailed as “one of the greatest presidents of all
times.”
This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded
by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment
news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the
trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a
language of force.
Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People, the reality shows, the
entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police,
and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us
divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active
role in the business of self-government.
If “we the people” feel powerless and apathetic, it
is only because we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the
duties of citizenship begin and end at the ballot box.
Marching and protests have certainly been used with
great success by past movements to foment real change, but if those
marches and protests are merely outpourings of discontent because a
particular politician won or lost with no solid plan of action or
follow-through, then what’s the point?
Martin Luther King Jr. understood that politics could
never be the answer to what ailed the country. That’s why he
spearheaded a movement of mass-action strategy that employed
boycotts, sit-ins and marches. Yet King didn’t march against a
particular politician or merely to express discontent. He marched
against injustice, government corruption, war, and inequality, and he
leveraged discontent with the status quo into an activist movement
that transformed the face of America.
When all is said and done, it won’t matter who you
voted for in the presidential election. What will matter is where you
stand in the face of the injustices that continue to ravage our
nation: the endless wars, the police shootings, the
overcriminalization, the corruption, the graft, the roadside strip
searches, the private prisons, the surveillance state, etc.
Will you tune out the reality TV show and join with your
fellow citizens to push back against the real menace of the police
state, or will you merely sit back and lose yourself in the political
programming aimed at keeping you imprisoned in the police state?
“There are two ways by which the spirit of a
culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture
becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a
burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred
by many prison-cultures…. it makes little difference if our wardens
are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the
prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous,
icon-worship pervasive…. Big Brother does not watch us, by his
choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes
distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual
round of entertainments, 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 possibility.”
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