In America’s imperial twilight, one technology stands above all others in its perfected power: television propaganda. Indeed, the politics of TV-drugged America have been defined largely by the progressively more audacious use of the medium to propagate increasingly pernicious untruths. Pick any outrageous claim – flat earth, creationism, alien abductions, the kindness of health insurers, or Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, and the TV spinmeisters can have 60% of America believing it in a week. This technology of disseminating falsehood dominates modern American society, and the Internet has managed to counter-act it only to a slight degree.
It is a distinctive feature of American innovation that advances in one field are rapidly applied to relevant problems in others. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the Government’s expertise in “winning” wars by declaration was extended to the current economic crisis. The spin doctors are now flooding the TV media with declarations that the recession is over and that a slow recovery is under way. This is exactly analogous to how the Iraq war was “ended.” The average citizen believes that America won the Iraq war by means of a “surge” in troops that defeated the opposition.
But the “war” in Iraq continues to smolder in that ruined nation, and unemployment in America continues to increase, with most indicators of economic welfare sharply depressed. Yet the average citizen is being persuaded that the recession is over, because that message is pumped out with Orwellian regularity through the almighty TeeVee. It is a matter of survival for the American plutocracy to keep civic unrest at a minimum. A reordering of economic power is not an option that will ever be presented to the TV audience. The great mystery of the moment is how much can TV propaganda addle the wits of the American people. Just how bad does reality have to get before it can’t be concealed by smiling TV “personalities?”
Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined a nation that watched an average of five hours of television a day. TV is much more than an opiate; it is crack cocaine, and like the cheap and destructive crack, it is deadly. It has wrecked our politics, mired us in absurd wars, destroyed public health, and crippled the very essence of public discourse. Instead of a shared search for the truth we have duelling cacophanies of lies.
So behold our economic recovery by declaration: a miracle of propaganda levitation, defying the gravity of actual experience, and confirming that engineered falsehood can conquer simple truth through the black magic of American television.