What Dystopia?

What you're seeing and reading is not what's happening.

-Donald Trump at a rally in Kansas City

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

It was their final most essential command.

-George Orwell, 1984

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned.

It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged...

-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

I doubt Donald Trump has ever read 1984.  By most accounts he is not the bookish sort. So I sort of doubt that he really has a Big Brother-esque vision what Making America Great Again looks like.  In an important book, written during the Reagan administration, Neil Postman argues that television was moving us towards the vision of Aldous Huxley rather than George Orwell.  Generally I believe that to be true, but Trump has presented us with a rather troubling mixture of the two.  According to Postman, the totalitarian dystopia might take two forms, either the bleak vision of 1984 where people are controlled via fear and hate, or the vision of A Brave New World, where people are sedated and fed pleasure in order to control them.

Postman's argument is that Huxley's vision was more likely in an age where people voluntarily switch the medium by which they receive information.  Television news is fundamentally different than print, watching a talking head tell you things, with pictures and video is an intellectually different exercise than reading an Op-ed piece in the Times.  All claims to "objectivity" aside, your brain will handle what is said differently.  As a writer, Postman obviously has a preference for the written word.  I do too. Donald Trump does not.  The fact that the things he says get written down annoys him, because it means that people can see his mendacity and it reduces his level of plausible deniability.

But Trump came along at the perfect time, because while reading and writing are not his thing, Television definitely is.  Not only that, but his rise came after decades of erosion of a certain cultural institution that honestly had become sad and lazy.  Of course I'm talking about the press.  I'm not exactly sure what happened, perhaps it was just a deepening cynicism, perhaps it was more sinister than that even.  

In the beginning of what I will call the era of mass media, the first superhero emerged, Superman.  Superman's alter ego is Clark Kent, a mild mannered reporter for the Daily Planet.  Clark Kent's job was a natural fit for a hero, because it kept him tuned into things that were happening, and also it was respectable and admirable as a profession.  By the 1980's when Postman was writing, and Superman was being made into a movie starring Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, something had happened to the press. Kidder's portrayal of Lois Lane in Superman had become brassy, pushy and slightly unethical.  Reporters were regularly portrayed as shameless attention hounds like Richard "Dick" Thornburg in the Die Hard franchise, who you are famously glad to see Holly Gennaro punch in the face at the end of the first movie and use a stun gun on in the second.

Movies and television shows almost seem to have it out for journalists of all sorts.  Fictional plot lines find those who tell actual stories easy to cast as villains.  As a kid who grew up on this sort of thing, I admit, for a good while in my adolescence I thought reporters were absolutely scum.  In the real world I have actually had experience with the media on a few occasions, one was when the church I served was vandalized on the same night as several others in the area.  It was nothing but stupid teenagers, but in rural Pennsylvania it was a slow news day, so I got on the TV news.  They pretty badly edited my comments where I was trying to talk about forgiveness instead of vengeance and to top it off I was presented to the world as Rev. Mark Gaskilo, which honestly sounds kind of cool, but it is pretty lazy reporting when you can't even spell a guy's name right.  The other experience I have was in getting requests for interviews when I was dealing with a community tragedy involving a triple murder by a father against his wife and two daughters.  That time, I absolutely refused to talk to the press, for pretty obvious reasons.

The thing is, I get it, the press can be annoying, TV journalists especially are problematic creatures, but there is a pretty solid reason why the first amendment to our Constitution says that we need to protect the freedom of the press to do their job.  That's what worries me about Trump and his feud with the "fake news," it seems like he is setting up a very Orwellian scheme, where he is intent on having his "truth" be the only truth.  At the same time he is a decidedly Huxleyan character, much more of a sly huckster than a ruthless tyrant.  What worries me is that he seems to have a sort of inclination to buddy up with some pretty ruthless tyrants, who I suspect would very much like to rule like Big Brother.

Postman, whose book I highly encourage you to read, made the case that our dystopian future was trending toward A Brave New World rather than 1984, however, perhaps it's not so much a case of either/or, but rather a both/and situation.  What if we are vulnerable to being enslaved by both our hates and our loves?  Honestly I see plenty of examples of both at work in the world.  I would like to tell you that it's okay, we can trust Clark Kent, but honestly I can't really do that categorically, there really are some Dick Thornburgs out there. However, I know we need the mild mannered reporter around, actually we need him more than we need Superman.  What I believe more than ever is that we need to read more than we need to watch, there I absolutely agree with Postman.  Somehow or other we have to learn to see, hear and judge the truth or else we will surrender our ability to live as free people.