Magic Fear Puts the World at your Command: Sleeping Through the Bifurcation of America

Nearly twenty-five years ago when my wife and I learned we were about to have (gulp) twins, we quickly started looking for ways to economize.   The list was pretty easily put together.  Fewer of those treasured evenings at our favorite Greenwich Village restaurant.   Longer time between purchases of new clothing for either of us, and more time at the local thrift shop.  We quit food shopping at our favorite shops and planned meals, shopping at the local grocery store.   There were a host of other things we added to our savings list as time passed.  However, the one “no-brainer” was cancelling cable television.   It was clearly a luxury we could walk away from with little regret.   So with one quick phone call it was done.  We cut the cable.  That was in 1994.

In the quarter century that has passed since we unplugged, we have never re-connected.    Occasionally, of course, I would get to thinking how nice it would be to have all those movies and TV shows at my fingertips.   Then my work would take me out of town and I would find myself in some hotel with the remote in my eager hands.  “At last,”  I would say to myself.  “A couple of nights of cable television!”    Pointing my device at the television I would rotate through show after show that I didn’t really care to see.   Instead of the paltry four or five channels of junk I got at home, my hotel television spewed forth over a hundred channels of junk.  It felt like being hip deep in some ooze that would not easily let me escape.   And with each sojourn to weary late night hotel rooms with cable,  the question would inevitably come.  “Why would I pay for this?”   And so it was that we remained unplugged for a quarter century.

Flash forward to the summer of 2018.   I went to visit some friends who have cable television, and have ridden the tumultuous tv wave through the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama years and now into the apocalyptic haze of the Trump regime.    They did not, like us, unplug.     Sitting at the kitchen table watching the tv on the wall, my dear friend was mesmerized by the spectacle.  Talking about it later, he shared with me how he simply couldn’t seem to turn it off.  It was, he remarked, “like watching a train wreck in slow motion.”   I had to agree.   I couldn’t stop watching either.  It was almost impossible to ignore the liberal “news”  station  bleating in a non-stop vituperative wave of hysteria,  all of which was condemnatory, divisive, and designed  carefully to make the viewer afraid; very afraid.      In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say that I agreed with many, if not most of the views articulated on this alleged “news” outlet.   Yet it wasn’t concurrence that was my issue.  It was the screechingly panicked tone of it all that caught me.  It was as though a button was being pushed inside me;  a button that switched off my capacity for logic and reason and turned on my reactionary, fearful, panicked self.   Indeed, it caught me so completely that I found my adrenaline rising to the level of what could only be called a panic attack.   I googled it just to be sure, and indeed I had all the symptoms.   My only choice was to leave the room as my chest was pounding and I winced at the acrid taste in my mouth.

Just to be clear, the equally alleged “news” of the folks at Fox and elsewhere employ exactly similar ranting, accusatory, divisive rhetorical style.   Indeed it could be argued that the right is better and more adroit at lying than the left, but they have both sunk to verbal trench warfare without a thought to the unity of nation or culture.     The soulless banlality of evil unfolds, less within the current of ideological rigidity, though that is certainly the script, but more with the deliberately stimulated fear that lives in our deeply primal reality.    Our people are kept at constant levels of fearfulness which renders them powerless.     Regardless of the level of lying, which is admittedly pervasive, all sides of this morass trade in a constant level of fear mongering that has rendered a whole people inert as the nation is systematically dismantled.   There is a line attributed to Bertolt Brecht which seems apt here.  “Magic fear puts the world at your command.”   

As I went for a walk to try to detach from my own raw sense of panic it dawned on me that I had  inadvertently missed the bifurcation of America by not having access to the pervasive and overwhelming presence of cable television.    In my cable-free quarter of a century,  television screens have becomes ubiquitous.   Not only do 85% of American homes pay ridiculous prices for the privilege of being propagandized and controlled,  television screens are now everywhere.   From a day when there may have been one fuzzy old tv at the end of the local bar, with denizens catching the football game, there are now usually ten, twenty or more screens in many bars and restaurants.   And they are loud.    They are on buildings and gas pumps, super market aisles and fast food drive through lanes.   Giant screens are even replacing bill boards along our highways.   Big Brother has arrived, and the results of his presence are not pretty.

During my stroll through the bucolic country-side where my friend lived I continued to  process all this.   I recalled that some years back, television networks were required to provide what reasonably passed for journalistic news as part of the price for using the public airwaves.    The “news” of those days was not permitted to be a profit center for the corporate giants.   They actually had to put in an effort to tell the truth.    Now, were they always truthful?   No.  Of course not.  But these were the days of  Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Morey Safer and others.   These were moments when there was an articulated  commonly held value in having a well-educated well-informed public.   But sometime during the Reagan years the powers that be started dealing from the bottom of the deck, and it quietly became legal for networks to make a profit from television news.   Suddenly the “news” was no longer about providing information.  It was about gathering an audience, and to gather an audience one has to “entertain.”      And nothing, dear friends, entertains like conflict.   And in the stormy stew of conflict and the accompanying paralysis of fear are the rewards of profit profit profit.

And so the allegedly polarized nation in which we live today is the creation of a profit-motivated media who has pandered to the fears and insecurities of people who may have once had liberal or conservative leanings but were still united as Americans.     These were people who tuned in to actual political debates moderated by the League of Women Voters.  Those have been disposed of quietly.    Today, debates are replaced with  hour long mash ups of sound-bytes and hook lines.   You see,  the truth of the matter is that our unity is not actually rooted in whether or not we agree on everything.   We won’t.  We can’t.  We shouldn’t.   The wonder of a functioning democracy is that in our disagreement and engaged conversation, we forge a way forward as a people.    We are not hobbled by disagreements but, in fact strengthened by them.  Even in my baby-boomer days of protest and anti-war activism, my commitment came through as an American who wanted the nation to live into its stated values.   The same was true of my Republican Uncle, with whom I would spend hours engaged in discussion and debate.   The conversations created depth, closeness and served to educate us both.  More than that, it fostered respect.     But today the shrill invective that plays to our worst inclinations is force fed to us through a cable tv system that we have been convinced is important enough for us fork over $100 a month on average.   Friends, we are paying for our own demise as talking heads purse their lips and point their fingers.   We are writing the checks as our democracy is dismantled in favor of a neo-tribalism.  

So the questions comes.  What to do?   Are we stuck in this paralysis of fear and panic?   Do we need to watch the train wreck in slow motion?     No, and no.   The first thing that comes to  my mind is that we are not powerless.   We are never powerless.  We do not need to be wallowing in the swamps of our fear. We do have a choice.    If we disengage from the propaganda whirlwind and shut off the cable tv we will gradually feel the manipulation of fear subside.  As we consciously pursue competent sources of news that have journalistic integrity we can be informed in the way democratic people need to be informed.   And, as rationality and reason return, we can claim the reality that our unity is not based in agreement on issues of one sort or another, but on mutual commitment to and for one another.    

I am an unrepentant fan of singer-songwriter John Prine.  And I close this brief missive with the chorus of a song he wrote called, “Spanish Pipedream.”   

Blow up your TV throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own

I don’t think explosives are necessary, but a quick call to your cable company could sever the collar and leash of media control.   Not only can you cast off the net of manipulation, you could, I’m sure, find better things to do with the $100 a month that you’re shelling to pay people to manipulate you.

Wishing everyone stimulating disagreements and ever closer commitments to mutual care and compassion.

sr