George Wesley Bellows:
Dance at Insane Asylum (1907)

"I'm confident it's coming."

In the late 1980s, a relatively new phenomenon entered America's media landscape. A disc jockey from Miami found traction as a political commentator. He was never knowledgeable. His superpower seemed to have been his willingness to say anything on air. He was not careful to distinguish between fact and fiction. Indeed, almost everything he said on air was provably fictitious, but the delay between utterance and rebuttal rendered his utterances most memorable. Ordinary people were attracted to this doubtlessly entertaining programming, and very quickly, the vocabulary of political dialogue changed on Main Street. What had previously seemed unspeakable became common vocabulary. In this way, formerly arch-conservative opinions slid into more of a mainstream position.

A decade later, a media billionaire from Australia started an alternative news service patterned after the worst of the British Fleet Street rags. This service included a cable television channel that didn't have to abide by the FCC's fairness rules because of its position on cable. This new outlet adopted the catchphrase "Fair and Balanced," by which it meant "Unfair and Unbalanced," as was the wont of the radical press then and now, to steadfastly misrepresent their positions. They were liars presenting themselves as evangelical truth-tellers. They'll probably all go to Hell, but later. The gist of their coverage was often that the world was pretty much the opposite of whatever they reported. They adopted the commonly-held conservative position that they were reporting from God's perspective, and a tenacious new double bind entered the country's media landscape. Fox News, or, as its critics insisted upon referring to it, Faux Snooze, dispensed a false, if reassuring, brand of entertainment. It didn't take long before people became addicted to its audacity, if never necessarily to its veracity.

When social media came along, its designers paid attention. What became known as Clickbait attracted attention. The more outrageous became the most popular, so what would quickly become the primary connection between individuals paved its roads with engineered outrage. The world, as near as I could ever tell, continued mainly inainly plodding along behind the raging headlines while the more easily influenced among us became addicted to a deliberately-engineered outrage. We'd had it much worse in earlier days, but to see the current headlines, one might feel moved to continually curl up in the fetal position. It wasn't long before a new brand of politicians began aligning themselves with this inanity machine. It had by then grown far beyond that British billionaire's wildest dreams.

I think of that machine as an Inanity machine. It distributes exclusively outrageous information, with essentially none of it in any way representative of the way anything but deep, dark, dystopian fantasies ever were. Those most easily influenced by such propaganda swallowed these messages whole and felt moved to presume themselves patriots for their unacknowledged gullibility, if for nothing else. Their media diet leaned heavily toward unfounded conspiracy accusations, far South of actual theories. They unconditionally supported the politicians who would unashamedly lie to everybody. The resulting Liar's Poker tournament lavishly rewarded those liars. It bestowed the presidency upon a misanthropic and unimaginative son of a former one-term President who sold himself as a born-again conservative. He proved skilled at starting unwinnable wars and crashing a formerly healthy economy.

Despite a blizzard of unfounded accusations, a decent man ascended to the Presidency next. He was sworn in amid a blizzard of racist innuendos. Faux News found a new speciality in thinly veiling racist commentary. They expanded into every possible form of what was formerly called broadcast news. They bought and converted former mainstream local news stations and began pumping their poison out into the world through them, too. They aligned themselves so closely with the Republican Party that it was an open question which one was driving, with the smart money riding on the Faux media. Obama's two terms were harrassed by ever-escalating misrepresentation. Questions about his citizenship, clearly racist attempts to disqualify the candidate, multiplied in ten thousand absurdly inane directions. If you listened to those Inanities, you'd be hard-pressed not to believe we desperately needed handbaskets. We genuinely seemed Hell-bound to those inoculated with the Inanities.

Trump's 2016 win was the result of lies and deliberate Inanities. The noise machine flourished, financed and encouraged by Russian influence, and otherwise decent people swallowed the disinformation whole. Faux later lost a lawsuit for promoting the lie that an upstanding and reliable voting machine company had stolen an election. That cost them $787.5 MILLION. Not even that judgment slowed down Faux. Alex Jones, a prominent conspiracy promoter from the darker corners of the media, lost his so-called empire in a lawsuit for promoting lies about a school killing. The courts took away everything he would ever own, but not even that judgment seemed to dent the average person's faith in the more inane media. Faux's founder proved successful in implementing his original intentions. Due to his work, the people of the United States became unable or unwilling to distinguish between truth and poisonous fiction. We find ourselves in this condition today.

It's not like this country has not seen venomous media before. The newspapers published over the fifty years following this nation's founding were mostly outrageous and more interested in selling copies than accurately reporting. There was no so-called profession of journalism then and no standards such professionals might have been accountable for upholding. The velocity of information, though, was much slower. Still, even at the speed of a walking horse or a speeding locomotive, the poisonous news cycles of those days managed to encourage a civil war. The transfer of information in the decades leading up to the hostilities proved increasingly alarming. The Confederacy was founded upon lies no less or more confounding than those Faux and its cohorts trade in today. The Southern plantation economy depended upon the broad acceptance of absolute fiction as the story of our nation, and there were no shortages of scoundrels more than willing to trade in that poison. The conservative perspective has likewise grown increasingly dependent upon equally absolute fiction: economic, social, legal, and moral.

The velocity of bullshit today seems lightspeed in comparison. A Faux News commentator can fart in the morning, and the smell will often permeate coast-to-coast before lunch. Much of the resulting Inanity involves dissenting color-commentary explaining alternate realities. Those who presume whatever Faux News suggests amounts to the whole truth and nothing but will be unmoved regardless of the truthfulness of any rebuttal. Faux News' founder succeeded in creating a subclass of people addicted to its lies. They willingly tune in hourly to receive booster shots, lest their faith fade. They've seemingly lost the ability to accept even simple facts because they don't reliably reinforce their pre-existing prejudices. The challenge with lies has always been that they're so damned easy to dispense and swallow.

It's not only the news but seemingly the entire media landscape that has slipped into the grip of Inanities. I find current broadcast series unintelligible. They seem infused with meaningless violence and vigilante responses. The storylines seem transparently manipulative and cartoonish: unserious. I find it impossible to suspend my disbelief long enough to finish a single episode. Or, I used to find it impossible. I haven't watched broadcast series in years. I stream, where I can choose without feeling as though I'm being forced-fed perspectives. Even the more expensive and exclusive streaming services and cable operations seem to deal in apocalyptic programming. Game of Thrones never seemed even distantly attractive to me. That it was broadly popular profoundly disturbs me. What happened to what I once considered to be the American character?

This story continues unfolding, and I refuse to conclude that it is over where it stands now, but Trump's reelection represents a new low in the American chronicle. It seems to have been invaded and poisoned by Inanities, nothing of any actual substance but flim-flam shit and outright lies. That the strategic application of absolute bullshit could undermine a culture of such subtlety and substance remains disturbing. Still, I'm reassured that the difficulty, as is often the case, lacks essential substance. One might seem to thrive on bullshit for a while, but it lacks a necessary nourishment. I imagine us somehow rediscovering substance and refusing to accept even the more popular substitutes. I understand that this belief discounts J. T. Barnum's infamous insistence that a fool is born every minute. I speculate that wisdom and understanding can move faster than even broadcast bullshit. I'm waiting on the catalyst, cowering. I'm confident it's coming.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz