WAS: What Adults are Saying about the Break with Reality
In America it has evaporated
Three recent events underscore how America has completely broken with reality, and so far at least, seems unworried about it. For a country approaching its semiquincentennial and having always been affirmative and accountable on the world stage, she has taken a stark turn where its citizens living an authentic reality has greatly diminished.
For the first half of the post-war era no country more reliably grew its economy or its standard of living than the US. Long standing worker productivity levels that made the world envious propelled much of this. So too were significant capital investments in technology, biomedicine, agriculture and a host of other areas. These ambitions were authentic and guided by planned, managed and ambitious activity. The professions flourished. The law, medicine, the academy, primary education, journalism and other areas all stood with leaders and followers who were earnest in their work. Normative diversity was understood and often applauded within a culture that was less splintered than today.
Just as that standard-of-living was starting to decline in the late 1970s political winds shifted sharply and the two unwittingly combined to make America a place where authenticity was shown the back-seat. Our “feelings” suddenly became paramount to all else but especially anything in the tangible world that might turn those precious feelings sour. This started slowly but put us on a path where today gaslighting and misinformation predominantly guide our daily plug-in with reality. Changing technology, more extreme politics, a declining standard of living (soon to hit 50 years), changing morality and an insidious self-serving mentality chaperoned a full-throated decline about authenticity. This was first a consequence, and now a cause of killing something both good and rare—a secular value that was broadly adopted across an increasingly diverse culture.
Being “real” for many was the pinnacle of how life was to be lived. Young people of the 70s embraced it wildly after watching the mind-bending events of Vietnam and Watergate. Both journalism and the judiciary felt good about their respective roles in the “correct” outcome of those events. That set the stage for being young or old, and real, or principled, or just well-intended while only being a covert larcenist, as aspirational states that lived long. All of that is no more.
First, the re-election of Donald Trump signals that some 75 million Americans were quite comfortable in completing their civic duty without any reality connection. Regardless of one’s politics, the behavior and flaws in Trump’s character would have easily disqualified him from running for even dog catcher in virtually any other part of the post-war era. Even earlier, for instance, his sedition is something that would have found him hanged, not nominated. But suspending all-appreciation of the real and tangible meant releasing the Trump phenomenon—especially Trump as free entertainment—was paramount to any messy, moral reflection on whether he should be the Executive leader for the world’s most uniquely democratic republic.
While its hard to know if Trump supporters have come from a position of ignorance, nihilism or just wanting someone in a suit to endlessly “talk shit” to important people, it doesn’t matter much for all three are the enemy of authenticity. Worse, in the personal device era many of these same folk, by simply being intellectually inert, have been convinced their ignorance is equal to the reams of knowledge pursued authoritatively by others. Its hard to think of a more perverse example highlighting authenticity’s death in America.
Similarly, the recent spectacle in Texas showing some form of “boxing” between a 58-year rapist and a popular Internet “influencer” was not lost reality because such a ridiculous thing could happen in boxing (have we all forgotten Don King?), but because too many came expecting something legitimate. The preening, promotion and new media form distributing the mess (Netflix streaming) looked very much like any big WWE event—or for old-timers—the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. These events were always simply recognized for what they were—entertainment exhibitions as spectacle that makes some wince and others salivate. For sure different tastes make the world turn. But never were these things confused with anything “real.”
Yet Tyson was roundly criticized for not showing more athletic skill—as though any 58-year old who was once a world champion can simply summon his magic at will so the unwashed could celebrate one more chapter of faux. In both conventional and social media familiar faces and people who we knew to know better, simply made fools of themselves with grievances that showed perspective, context and anything real was left far behind. The tawdriness of the event was like anything else tawdry in our culture—salacious, then icky and ultimately unsatisfying. But the popular response to it all was far worse, once again reinforcing that internet fueled ignorance is massive.
Lastly that America’s premier political satire publication The Onion, made a legitimate bid to purchase Alex Jones’ Infowars as part of a court-ordered auction to satisfy legal damages, tell us the life strands of real and satire have fused nearly to one. (At press time a judge has paused the purchase while reviewing auction terms ). The monies are due to families with children from the Sandy Hook disaster. You may recall they saw their 1st grade children slaughtered in a school room by an untethered gunman in 2012. Jones then slandered the families and their children’s memories by repeatedly assuring his large audience the event never happened—for which he was ultimately slapped with $965M in damages.
As an incredibly funny publication The Onion has long been a provocative balloon pricker. It is astoundingly original and as our culture has hurtled ever-more to an out-of-body existence, has found limitless material. But its intended purchase seems real toward a partial judgement payment for the Sandy Hook victims. Evidently The Onion will take Infowars’ assets and start another publication—perhaps aimed at America’s absurd gun culture. What makes this such a flight from reality is the known “satirist” wanting to enforce the “reality” of significant court damages!
Like some other comedy forms satire is one where clever is the seminal element. But clever comedy requires audiences bright enough to understand it all lest the joke be on them—which it seems—is yet another form of comedy. Nonetheless, broad absence of clever in the culture is bad for satire. In the extreme it suffers the same fate as obscure scholars—writing and speaking of things that too few are capable to understand regardless of interest.
That’s when the joke is on all of us and the above three things illustrate this is a regular happening. American culture has always had a superficial plasticity so deciding to be “bright” or alternatively, “dim” is not, and never has, been an either/or matter. Its always been a matter of degree. So to what extent have we become so collectively dim that 75 million of us vote for Trump, or bitch at Tyson for running up our streaming bill or can no longer find the joke in satire? That answer is bleak and tells us how far we’ve floated away from authenticity. What, if anything, can blow us back in the other direction?