For a long time, it felt like people - particularly here in the United States - were getting dumber and dumber.
Also for a long time, it felt like our collective celebrity worship had gone way too far, and was strongly contributing to making us dumber. These days, what passes for "news" often has a rich helping of fluff stories on celebrities. Too often, that is what passes for news these days. It's just a sign of these times that we recently elected a man into the Oval Office with absolutely no qualifications or political experience, except that he was famous. At the time that he was elected, I thought it must have been some kind of an aberation. Before long, however, I thought it was fitting, and even an inevitability, really. That such a man as this would be elected to be the face and voice of the nation completely obsessed with fluff "news" stories and celebrity culture, and by now having a serious difficult time differentiating truth from fiction, seemed indeed fitting.
Like Leeja Miller, the host of this video, I also am perplexed by the fascination of many Americans with the British royal family. After all, didn't we fight a war for independence specifically to end the tyranny of that same family? Didn't we get rid of the whole idea of a monarchy here in this country? Yet it seems to me that many of the same people fascinated with everything to do with the royal family almost seem to dream of having one here.
On some level, I can understand the fascination with celebrity culture. Most of us are lonelier than we could care to admit. So it makes sense to rely on entertainment to get us by. I remember Kurt Vonnegut once suggesting that shows were comforting, because we become so familiar with the characters, that they feel like friends or even family. We grow attached, and we care about them. And celebrities in general tend to be beautiful people who live glamorous lives - often the lives we ourselves dream of.
Like everyone else, including Miller herself in this video, I also watch some crappy shows or allow my brain to focus on some entertainment, when it could just as easily be concentrating on more serious issues. But like her, I also believe that we need a break every now and then, because yeah, we're not machines.
However, when too many people in a society begin to rely too much on escapism and fluff stories, and pay less and less attention to stories that actually matter in their lives, it can produce a real rot. These days, most Americans would acknowledge that there has been some sort of a real decline. The left blames the right and the right blames the left, but the reality is that we are all collectively responsible. And I suspect that our collectively excessive fixation with celebrity culture and fluff news stories, at the expense of actual news stories that have an impact on our lives, has opened the doorway to this decline. We are all so disgusted by the seemingly endless proofs that corruption is at an all-time high in government, particularly in the marbled halls of Washington. But we have to get beyond the disgust, and acknowledge that, at least collectively, we are in fact responsible for allowing this problem, this rot and decadence, to have grown so out of control in the first place.
Just like Miller, I don't know what happens next, or how to fix this. There problems are so numerous, and now so serious, that it feels overwhelming, and most of us probably would not even know where to begin. But I suspect a good place to start is by recognizing that there is a problem.
Please watch this video, and see if you do not agree. Miller makes some very valid points. It is not the first or the second time that I have heard many of these arguments. In fact, some people (like Jello Biafra) have been warning about some of these same things for decades. However, Miller not only rails in general about our excessive fixation with celebrities and fluff stories, but illustrates specifically how this leads to powerful people specifically relying on us to be distracted in order to get away with horrible policies and controlling the narrative in our popular media, which as she points out, is controlled by six major corporations, all with a vested interest in how the "news" is portrayed.
Below is the link to the video:
Our Collective Distraction Is Bad For Democracy
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