FRIGHTENING OURSELVES TO DEATH

A Brief History of the Force Keeping Us From Effective Political Action

May 04, 2025

When you live on the thin ice of freelance journalism your survival depends on the ability to generate good, sellable ideas. Great ideas that need no selling come around rarely. Thirty-five years ago I had one of my best: a socio-cultural history of the post-war US called:

“Inside Dan Quayle’s Brain”

The premise was simple. In 1990, Vice-President Dan Quayle was the first American who had been born in the television age to get within sniffing distance of the Oval Office. This made the cultural inputs that shaped his understanding of the world fundamentally different than those of the President he served, George H.W. Bush

I teamed up with Keith Griffiths, an experienced producer of cultural television documentaries for Britain’s Channel 4. We came up with a concept: We’d film on a set that looked like the idealized homes where 1950s and 60 sitcoms took place. It would be surrounded by a white picket fence. I would present the piece starting outside standing by the fence, swing open a gate and invite viewers to step through the fence and “come on in” and sit on the sofa with me and some guests: people who study the intersection where media influences politics, television critics and proselytizers for network television: vast wasteland vs. harmless universal funscape. We would watch clips that match up turns of phrase on TV shows to the words coming out of Quayle’s mouth. People watching would be in no doubt about how different America’s future would be under its next generation of leaders because we all know the world primarily through television.

Channel 4 was interested but before it issued a contract wanted to be sure the footage of American TV shows of the 1950s existed and was available to be licensed for use in a documentary. Keith negotiated a development budget and we flew to New York to investigate.

My overcrowded memory of the earliest shows I watched was the key to the enterprise. At the Museum of Broadcasting we submitted a list of what we’d like to watch, a stack of video-cassettes was brought to us and by chance the first one we put on was of The Beulah Show. It was a sitcom rich in American archetypes — or racist stereotypes. Beulah was an African-American maid, a mammy figure to a befuddled middle-class white family, solving their amusing dilemmas while whipping up delicious meals. She was played for a while by the great Hattie McDaniel, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

We popped in the cassette and up came images of the Henderson family at dinner, Beulah walks in bearing a platter with a covered silver dish just like no middle class home you can imagine. The Henderson’s boy child asks, Beulah what’s for dinner? She whips off the covering to show a tiny bird:

“Quail!”

Keith and I looked at each other and high-fived. We knew we had the opening clip of our show from the first cassette.

We spent several days going through sitcoms and crime shows, all the basic formats of television, themselves re-treads of formats created for radio. There was something substantially different about having images added to story telling, we agreed. And it was possible to examine generational changes in American politics through this framework.

We went to visit with NYU professor Neil Postman, chair of the Culture and Communication department. Postman had written a book a few years earlier, in 1985, which had helped me form the idea for Inside Dan Quayle’s Brain. it was called “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”.

The book’s foreword began by noting that 1984 had come and gone and Orwell’s prophecy of totalitarian doom had not come true but that his contemporary, Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future seemed to be unfolding right in front of us:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was 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.”

Postman was one of the five smartest people I’ve ever met. He was an avatar of a new kind of radicalism in America, one to which I was being drawn. Fiercely critical of corporations whose product was made to be watched but also deeply conservative and prescriptive about what should be consumed. The professor was originally an educational theorist, his doctorate was in education and his appointment at NYU was in the Education department where he was the only “University” professor. He abhorred the idea of putting televisions in classrooms which was already established practice.

He was frighteningly articulate in conversation and a graceful stylist arguing his point on the page. He was going to be one of our main interviewees.

Postman’s essential point was that American television, the massest of mass media ever developed to that point in human history, succeeded because of its reductive ability to “amuse” i.e. distract/entertain/terrify through rapidly shifting, often uncontextualized images and not just the programs but the advertisements that peppered them at regular intervals. He saw commercials as mini-dramas designed to hold a viewers’ attention long enough to insert ideas of want.

He wrote about how politicians had jumped on the TV bandwagon from the get as a way to ingratiate themselves with voters:

We returned to London full of enthusiasm, once you started looking for echoes of Quayle’s idiocy in the television shows he very likely watched from the age of three onwards, the connections were constant and hilarious.

Keith outlined the proposal with a detailed budget — licensing all the clips was going to cost a bundle, my fee was going to pay me more than I earned in a year freelancing at NPR — and on the morning he was due to go into Channel 4 to sign the contract Keith got a fax from the commissioning editor saying words to the effect of, I’ve forgotten why I was enthusiastic about this project, so I’m saying no.

I called Postman to tell him what had happened. “I’m not surprised,” he said.

In any case, my thesis held except that it wasn’t Dan Quayle from the TV generation who got to the Oval Office first, it was Bill Clinton, six month older than Quayle. Today America’s president is the perfect exemplar of my thesis, he is only eight months older than Quayle, but clearly shaped more by television than any single occupant of the Oval Office the last 30 years. He is a master of television and its successor as the massest medium: social media.

My idea mocked Quayle but Trump’s brain actually is the one that needs to be studied. Although born to wealth and supported through massive annual cash gifts from his father, some estimates are as high as $400 million over time, Trump really does have a feral understanding of the average American because he is the pure product of television. So many of the profiles and books written about Trump have emphasized how rarely he reads books, or reads at all.

Postman wrote in 1985:

The Gerbner mentioned in the extract above is George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born Jew who fled Europe for America in his early twenties just after Kristallnacht. He during the war he returned as part of an OSS sabotage unit working behind the lines to fight Nazis. At war’s end, he did a doctorate at USC, essentially founding the field of studies that Postman furthered, ran afoul of HUAC, yet still ended up as the first dean of the Annenberg School of Communcations at the University of Pennsylvania. That was a neat trick for a leftist, as the Annenberg School was founded by arch-conservative Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan’s primary bank-roller in his long march to the presidency.

Gerbner, possibly because of his wartime service in what was not yet called Special Forces — three out of four men in his unit were killed — was particularly attuned to the presence of violence in the daily wash of images in American television. Starting in the late Sixties he set up the Cultural Indicators Project, a data base of 3,000 television shows with 35,000 characters. After analyzing plots and actions in the shows he came up with some fairly startling numbers

The average American child will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on television by the time they finish elementary school.

Multiply that over time and a person develops what Gerbner calls “Mean World Syndrome”, a sense that the world is a more frightening place than it actually is.

In the 21st century that manifests itself in the cognitive dissonance between the recorded criminal statistics that show violent crime is falling, while people’s fear of violent crime is rising.

Gerbner focused on violence and fear because he thought that it might lead people to accept simplistic, fascist solutions to difficult social problems.

Fear is a commercial strategy in media businesses. Horror/slasher/Alien/Predator films are “franchised”. They deliver a particular product that is consumed like cheap fast food. Both are unhealthy. Nutrition free, filled with chemicals to enhance taste, fast food makes people obese. Horror films incline people to fears that are not realistic.

Gerbner and Postman and many others’ research was done before the advent of social media and its primary delivery platform, the smart phone. The dynamic has not changed but has been enhanced. In the 1970s a heavy TV watcher might look at a screen 4 hours a day. With a smart phone people can be looking at a screen any moment they are awake. The messages of amusement and fear are even more pervasive.

When people speak of “doom scrolling” it is an acknowledgement of the primary reason people keep checking their feeds. What horrible shit is going down now? It’s all terrible. Anti-Trump people are positively addicted to it. This account has 1.1 million followers.

Is it true? Who knows? Homan’s a blow-hard well down the chain of command. But this account is saying to you be scared!!! It’s terrifying!!!!

Short, sharp jolts of awfulness. People love it. Are helpless before it. I am not immune.

The other week while doomscrolling I saw a ten second video of professional misogynist Andrew Tate violently demonstrating how he would beat up a woman who wouldn’t give him sex on demand and it stripped me of a lifetime of rational thought and reduced me to a murderous, protective, animal rage (I have a 19-year old daughter). And this despite knowing I was being manipulated for Tate’s financial gain as well as whichever of the people I follow posted the video, and also twitter which hosted it.

That is a commercial fact. The algorithm is programmed to keep feeding the doom so people stay engaged on the platform. Sad to say, too many prominent people need to feed the negativity as well to keep their followings up. It is a business strategy to get people to subscribe to their substacks, or to get their books commissioned. (Yes, twitter has from the beginning been the place where people go to be stupid n public but for some reason New York book agents and publishers all ask, “how big is this person’s following on twitter?” before they will consider taking on an author and his book idea).

And the thing that might provide armor against this fear: decent education, teaching people how to think without them looking at a screen, has been in decline since Gerbner and Postman first started publishing their major work half a century ago.

Media literacy should have been added to the basic high school civics course around that time. Mass visual media in the home, available 24/7 was a new phenomenon in 1970’s society and it would not have been wrong to educate people in how to avoid falling into the mean world trap, explain to them why a soundbite is not a fact, remind them that the world is more complex than the image which changes every 3.5 seconds whose purpose is to keep you hooked.

In the 21st century we could add homework assignments requiring students to explore and then define what “information” is.

“Information wants to be free” was the mantra of the first rush of internet life. It led to disastrous ideas like giving away newspapers for no money, bankrupting many of them. But no one defined what information is. Can a lie be information? Is a fact without any context information? In Trump World it certainly is. Neil Postman put it this way 20 years before Twitter launched:

AND NOW TO OUR DARKER PURPOSE:

How does this fearful world affect our political actions in this moment when America is facing its greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. People spend hours in social media telling each other how terrible things are — and things really are bad — but after 100+ days of Trump 2:0 perhaps it might be worth moving on from

To stopping the regime in its tracks

But somehow the anti-Trump grassroots haven’t. And I wonder if it is fear, or a constellation of fears, that keeps people from action.

Here’s one fear that I keep thinking of: are you afraid of prison? In a Gerbner-esque way I wonder how many fictional scenes of prison violence including allusions to and depictions of rape, as well as news reports about the carceral state, people see by the age of 20. Does this inhibit our willingness to engage in civil disobedience?

Are these prison representations part of the data base that undergirds “mean world syndrome”?

It’s a mean world for sure, but not like it’s shown on TV. Sometimes you need to confront the “real” things that are wrong and put yourself at risk of jail, of a crack on the skull, of an FBI file.

I’m posting this essay on the 55th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. This is a piece I made for the BBC on the 50th. It’s long. And if you don’t have time for the whole thing please listen to the first three minutes. Listen to what a real political confrontation sounds like.