Your observation made me think of the preface to Neil Postman's book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." A great book written when Reaganomics was ravaging the landscape, and I strongly recommend it. It explains very clearly why one hundred percent of the American people are not outraged by the mammoth abuses of power and evisceration of the constitution committed by this wretched neototalitarian administration. These are Postman's words from the forward to the book written in 1985. It would appear with the rise of our country's corporate driven news obsession over utterly meaningless inanities with no bearing on people's lives like the exploits of J-Lo, Tom Cruise, Survivor, American Idol et. al ad nauseum, Huxley's nightmare vision has been realized, at least for the present.
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
And so it has come to pass. Though I contend what is being created here is something that would frighten both Orwell and Huxley since it is an amalgamation of the two types of dystopian societies that each envisioned. We have the architecture of an Orwellian police state being constructed both physically and legally, and the apathy of large segments of the populace to the growing peril snce they are distracted by the corporate media's incessant focus on the banal and trivial and the obscuration of the important by the deluge of information about the meaningless.
The challenge facing us is whether we can break through the corporate media's desire to divert our attention from the felonious crimes being committed by this administration in plain view each and every day and focus our nation's attention on the matters of dire urgency that directly affect our lives and our individual futures.
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