Drugs and circuses

Nov. 13th '88

Drugs and circuses

We have elected a new administration, and president-elect Bush will try to point this nation in what he hopes is a positive direction; but I think that certain problems are too intractable for anyone to solve, and I have a bad feeling about what is happening to Western Civilization, and to our country in particular.

Those who have read Aldous Huxley's 1932 satire, "Brave New World," will recall that Huxley envisioned a culturally empty civilization wherein cloned, or mass-produced people were given just enough mental and physical ability and education to do there assigned tasks, were kept happy through conditioning and drugs, and were incessantly reminded that they were the best, the happiest class possible.  From the Alphas, who ran the world through the Epsilons, who ran the elevators, all was controlled, society was stable, and everyone was content.

Well, in our new world, the collapse of education has left a void filled by television, and morality, that characteristic of social behavior that lets us live in relative harmony with one another, is replaced by the mindless acquisition of treasure and the numbing euphoria of drugs.  The difference between us and Huxley's society of half a millennium from now is that in "Brave New World," the Alphas controlled, whereas in our decade the rich and powerful are worked over by forces even they are powerless to affect.

The collapse of our educational system has caused the ascendency of mindless television, the lazy search for easy solutions, no matter how unworkable, and the loss of our faculties of rational thought.  We have a president who claims to have an open mind on the subject of astrology.  We are retreating from the real world into astrology, fundamentalist religion, political fanaticism, and professional wrestling.  We are Huxley's Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, and there are no Alphas, because the new education, TV, is directed not by scholars interested in keeping alive the best parts of our heritage, but by technology and marketing, and these are unintelligent forces despite the fiction of economics "invisible hand."

We are now saddled with an underclass (Epsilon) generation that can neither read nor write, not in any substantive way.  They live from game show to game show, sit bored in school looking forward to the Pablum of soaps, sensationalistic talk shows (did you see Geraldo mud-wrestle a bikini-clad woman last week?), and sports on the tube.

They live from snort to needle and in our inner cities terrorize each other with drugs as the driving economic force in their lives, because dealing drugs is, they think, the way to wealth.  Even those not hooked dream not of creating goods and services to aid their fellow man, but of winning a state lottery.

And because so many kids are themselves mothered by kids, they grow up with no moral sense.  If you're robbed on the street, you may as well fight for your property, because they'll kill you anyway.

Because TV is a medium of mass entertainment in our maket-run society, it must appeal to the untrained mind.  Hence, moralistic sit-coms and cheap cartoons drive out material that would be beyond the uneducated.  And those who program and run the television culture are in turn run by it.  They are cynical, after appealing to this lowest denominator, and have no incentive to raise the complexity of the culture. 

So car chases replace dialogue, and public affairs are made "Lite" and brief.

The producers of TV drivel are not so much venal as they are responding naturally to external stimuli filtered through their own training.  They desire survival as much as do the rest of us.  So we eat Jello and milk-toast because the bulk of us are not trained to enjoy more substantial fare, and those who are trapped by their own necessity to make money find they have no choice but to remove the spice and add more sugar.

To use television as a bootstrap to raise the level, the complexity of our culture, to substitute in some way for the deterioration of our schools, is beyond the primitive imagination of the young producers because they too are uneducated.

Is there any hope?  Or are we doomed to sleepwalk from crisis to crisis?  Nobody will know or care until childhood education is rebuilt, and vested interests will make that a slow, expensive process.  Well directed television, with it's memorable, striking images, could help, but in a country where public television is criticized by politicians for being too "elitist," I see no hope for that.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.

Oddly, this was written decades before the first airing of "Jersey shore."

Also, I realize that "sit-coms"  looks really odd, but it's what was written on the newspaper clipping I have.