I have been watching "Brideshead Revisited" on DVD recently. I saw the series on public television about thirty years ago when I was still in law school and I bought the DVD set after the film came out. My wife and I saw it and she became as enthralled with it as I had been when I had seen it all those decades ago, so we bought the discs of the original series. It was a serialization of Evelyn Waugh's novel about the British aristocracy in the first half of the twentieth century, depicting them with many of the same personal and developmental problems that the rest of us suffer with a particular focus on the role that dogma, religious dogma in particular, plays in our lives. The reason I have begun to watch the program again is that I find it difficult to get interested in what is on television these days. There is no sophistication and depth for the most part in what passes for entertainment in the modern media. There is only the crudeness of "2 Broke Girls" and "2 and a half Men" or the apocryphal accounts of forensic science in law enforcement to view, and the ennui of those who provide that kind of "entertainment" is contagious. It's as if we have all been taught to expect less, and our expectations are then never disappointed. With few exceptions there is so little to watch on television today that when we returned the booklets to the Nielson Company that they sent us so as to monitor our viewing, they were almost empty. I find myself listening to jazz on NPR most evenings rather than turning on the television, and even my children, both in their twenties, don't watch anything but those "reality shows" about renovating real estate and finding antiques in old barns out in the hinterlands.
Similarly, the news has been diluted with continual booster-ism and chauvinistic tripe like ABC News's "American Strong" and their "Instant Index" in which instead of telling us what happened today in Syria they purport to bring us the news by informing us as to how to weather strip our homes so as to save money on utilities. Even on all the networks, it's the equivalent of Fox News all the time. Diane Sawyer led off her broadcast two nights ago by telling us not just that only 27,900 people had signed up for insurance on the federal healthcare website, but gratuitously adding that the total wasn't enough to fill Yankee Stadium, as if that was a legitimate metric by which to understand the new health care law's initially languorous reception. About the details of that issue, she said almost nothing, but her furrowed brow and grave tone were obviously intended to tell us what to think about it. None of this may seem sufficiently interesting to read on, but I submit that it is all part and parcel of the same decline in the quality of our thinking in this country. We settle for so little. There is the news on public television, and with regard to the Affordable Care Act, the subject was covered on the day of the announcement of the subscriber totals by the Obama administration with interviews of experts that lasted about fifteen minutes. We can see and hear the details of the news from a reliable source...ironically one that is half subsidized by the federal government...but by far most of us prefer the pap that the networks feed us. What this means is that we have become the thing that Alexander Hamilton claimed justified the creation of The Senate in our bicameral legislature: an institution that was necessary to mitigate the effects of mob mentality as would be reflected by the House of Representatives. And sure enough, we have John Boehner and the Tea Party dedicated to sabotaging the ACA while the American public is being allowed to forget their motives and how they are going about it, meanwhile preventing any significant legislation from passing not by voting it down, but by parliamentary maneuvering. All this might make one despair of us Americans, and in fact, people all over the world do just that. We are no longer the paragons of human political evolution that we were once, but more importantly, we represent a danger in that we have so much might at our disposal. The last time there was a confluence of this kind of chauvinism with the power of a nation of such comparative size as to be regarded as a super-power was when Hitler came to power in Germany and his Nazi Party aspired to rule the world.
I don't know how we can insure that everyone sees our problems rationally and seeks solutions based on reasoned analysis rather than finger pointing and name calling. Our politics have come to be stilted by dogma on both sides, but more importantly by internecine defamation of character directed at both the 47% and the 1%. People throw around politically charged words and phrases like "socialized medicine" without considering what would be wrong with it if indeed it eventuated, and it is all too easy to think of the relationship between government and big business as "fascism." Honestly, I don't have an opinion about where this nation is headed, but I have to admit, it doesn't look good to me, and I have no idea what we can do about it other than cast our votes based on what we know rather than suspicion. I've said it before and I still think it is a good idea. Each of us has to start thinking with his own head rather than someone else's...and rather than Diane Sawyer's in particular.
Your friend,
Mike
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