A Revealing Excerpt from The Colbert Report Illustrates Why so Many Americans Can Be Characterized as Intentionally Sheep-Like — when It Comes to Understanding and Reacting to What Is Going on around Them

© 2013 Peter Free

 

18 July 2013

 

 

Americans have forgotten what democracy is and requires

 

We metaphorically sit around, letting Government and Media entertain us with diversions that have nothing to do with the nation’s social, political, or economic problems.

 

When we occasionally do pay attention to our evaporating democracy, the media message is that the trend is insoluble.  And we go back to sleep.

 

Meanwhile, freedom and ethical responsibility slip out the back door — while powerful and self-interested people profitably feed on their carcasses.

 

 

First — the bad national situation

 

Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at the University of California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  He wrote:

 

 

I have outrage envy.

 

For nearly two weeks, more than a million citizens across Brazil have taken to the streets to protest political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, a crumbling infrastructure and . . . billions blown on sports.

 

Brazilians are paying attention to their problems, and they're mad as hell. So why aren't we?

 

Our spirits have been sickened by the toxins baked into our political system, which legalizes graft and is held hostage by special interests and a gerrymandered minority.

 

As a result, we are legislatively incapable of dealing with big problems like joblessness, climate change, gun safety, infrastructure, hunger or . . . immigration.

 

The public investments we're not making -- in schools, teachers, roads, bridges, clean energy -- are killing us.

 

Our tax code is the least progressive in the industrial world.

 

The most massive transfer of wealth in history, plus a cult of fiscal austerity, is destroying our middle class.

 

Tuition is increasingly unaffordable, and retirement is increasingly unavailable.

 

The banks that stole trillions of dollars of Americans' worth have not only gone unpunished; they're still at it.

 

© 2013 Marty Kaplan, Let's Be Brazil, Huffington Post (24 June 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

Second — resigned apathy

 

Bill Moyers, always an astute critic of America’s increasingly anti-democratic leanings, invited Mr. Kaplan to expound about why passive Americans are unlike the energetic and streets-demonstrating Brazilians.

 

Moyers & Company, Marty Kaplan on the Weapons of Mass Distraction, BillMoyers.com (12 July 2013) (25:12 minute video clip with transcript)

 

Professor Kaplan’s thesis — distilled and refined (by me) — is that:

 

(1) Americans pay attention to “infotainment.”

 

As Kaplan put it, in speaking with Bill Moyers:

 

We can't help loving lurid stories and suspense and the kind of sex and violence which the news is now made up of.

 

[T]he stuff that is being reported on the news tends not to be the kind of stuff that we need to know about in order to be outraged.

 

(2) Because the media are profit driven, they give us what we want — which is conflict for its own sake — rather than the informational substance that real solutions require.

 

 (3) On the rare occasions when the media do briefly focus on something real, the underlying take-away is that “the system is simply unresponsive and incapable of reform.”

 

People become despondent and passive.

 

 

Fortuitously, during the same week, Stephen Colbert (probably inadvertently) demonstrated our state of aggressive idiocy

 

The short Colbert Report video clip is something you will have to watch to recognize its symbolic significance.  Mr. Colbert demonstrates Professor Kaplan’s criticisms of America’s manipulated apathy.

 

See:

 

Michael Kelley, Investigative Journalist Jeremy Scahill Schools Stephen Colbert On America's Global Kill/Capture Machine, Business Insider (16 July 2013) (embedded Colbert Report video clip)

 

Mr. Colbert — who is never interested in allowing his guests to make a point — tried to walk all over fact-providing Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation.

 

Instead of coming out on top in their “combat” about drone murder and warrantless imprisonments, the fact-avoiding Colbert put on a probably unintended display — look at his face at the end of the interview — of what it is like to be a determined ignoramus, who vehemently believes everything the Government tells him.

 

 

The moral? — Self-interested cultural manipulators have us willingly blinded

 

When we:

 

(a) forget what we want out of our now failing democracy

 

and

 

 (b) willingly float down a river of intentionally substituted diversions —

 

we lose what America once stood for.

 

What’s left after that?

 

A nation of plutocrat-owned Fodder Fools?