Columns

We're the boobs in front of the tube

By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published June 3, 2007

Once again Al Gore is right. He was right about the dangers of climate change, even though no one wanted to listen until now, and he's right in his new book about the danger to our democracy of a citizenry that is underinformed and overtitillated.

"Wake up, America, " Gore calls out in his stuffed-shirt professorial way in The Assault on Reason. You are being manipulated by television news that is feeding you nonstop fear and infotainment. This empty-calorie diet is badly skewing our sense of national priorities and atrophying the "mental muscles of democracy."

Reasoned argument emanating from evidence-based knowledge is disappearing from our national discourse, exacerbated by millions of Americans discarding the habit of daily newspaper consumption, according to Gore. In its stead are the flickering lights of the boob tube that elevate image and aural stimulation over critical thinking and logic.

Gore quotes Dan Rather, who pithily said that television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up." We are bombarded with news 24/7. Yet never has so much been seen by so many to so little import. We know far more about Laci Peterson's disappearance, O.J. Simpson's glove size and Anna Nicole Smith's stomach contents than the financial crisis facing Medicare or the consequences of climate change and America's ongoing contribution to it.

Violent crime rates have plummeted over the last 15 years, but television news gives it outsized coverage, creating a climate of undifferentiated fear. Your probability of dying in a car accident is one in 83, compared with your one in 1, 300 chance of dying in a terror attack - and that's presuming a 9/11-style attack every year. Yet the drumbeat of ephemeral threats from jihadists is what dominates the airwaves.

The Manchurian Citizen emerges from his 4 1/2 hours of daily television, so overstimulated, fearful and flabby of brain that he is easy prey for politicians with simplistic messages.

This is Gore's other main point. A citizenry that abandons the dynamic exercise of reading and the reasoning process it engages, for the passive absorption of emotionally charged television images, is susceptible to choosing the worst kind of leaders. And it has.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney could never have held on to power and committed the wrongs they have against our constitutional system without a public too wrapped up in the happenings of Natalee Holloway in Aruba to care about domestic warrantless wiretapping.

Gore meticulously documents how Americans have been sleepwalking through their duties as citizens while this administration has been systematically destroying the pillars of our democracy. The Bush administration's torture of prisoners - an approach to war disdained by George Washington. The way it shredded the Geneva Conventions, and our international standing along with them. How it declared the executive branch supreme, emasculating the other branches. And how it used our national treasury as a piggybank for friends and supporters. Halliburton's stock price has doubled since Bush's election.

All this and the citizenry shrugged. I guess the destruction of foundational principles doesn't come with good visuals. Beyond abuses at Abu Ghraib - which the administration successfully blamed on some bad apples, when it was really an animation of its own interrogation policies -- television wasn't adept at telling these stories and didn't really try.

But finally, Bush did something spectacularly wrong, where the pictures could illuminate his arrogance, mendacity and incompetence. Iraq, of course. With television able to depict in a sustained fashion the carnage and chaos of a war without justification, the electorate discovered the real George Bush, calling him to account in 2006.

Right here, though, is the danger of which Gore speaks. If we have to wait for the pictures it's too late.

As if to drive the point home about the superficiality of today's media, Gore recently appeared on ABC's Good Morning America, where he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer. She repeatedly harped on whether the book was a campaign salvo. Gore, who says he is not a candidate for '08 at present and will unlikely be one, chided her on her focus on politics rather than substance.

But even after being admonished, Sawyer, like a drunk with a shot glass, couldn't let it go and asked Gore if he lost any weight, since that might signal entry into the presidential race.

"Listen to your questions, " Gore rejoined sharply, "the horse race, the cosmetic parts of this."

Touche. No one should care about Gore's body weight. Rather, our nation's future rests on the weight of his ideas and whether they can penetrate an anesthetized public. Read them; you'll be impressed. They will make you ponder what might have been.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 21:05:34]