It is and has always been a fact of modern American life that huge numbers of Americans pay little to no attention to news, spending their limited hours of life on entertainment. And even a lot of people who do watch or listen to some news spend a lot more of their time on entertainment media. I will leave out reading because the act of reading the news is nonexistent for a majority of Americans, certainly since the Reagan era when policy changes were made that crushed many local dailies and weeklies.
Entertainment is often discounted for the effect it has on the minds of those people who watch it, as if the very media that got them to buy things and take up habits in their own lives wouldn't have any influence on whether they vote and who they vote for, what political orientation to adopt. But since it forms most of the minds of most people who spend more time with entertainment than real life, it probably accounts for why things have gone so badly to hell.
If your'e smirking at me saying that TRUMP AS "PRESIDENT" IS 100% A PRODUCT OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AS REAGAN WAS BEFORE HIM.
The importance of entertainment in forming the thinking, the minds of those who binge on it for most of their waking hours, even for many of them as they are allegedly working or in school, is proved by the so-called news programming on the cabloids and networks adopting many of the conventions and formats of entertainment, that was something that grew steadily worse as, under the regimes of the liberal-libertarianism of the civil liberties industry and cult and hard-right libertarianism of Republican-fascism, the mass media were deregulated.
I thought about that as I listened to Rachel Maddow's A. segment discourse on the history of Trump's and Republican governors' criminal negligence and outright criminal insanity in the Covid-19 epidemic, noting that it is motivated from a similar ideological attitude which cause the Bush II disaster of criminal negligence and insanity after Hurricane Karina drowned New Orleans.
I suddenly had a fondest wish that the partner of Newt Gingrich and other Republican-fascists, Grover Nordquist would get Covid-19 and find himself struggling to breathe and chosen as one of those who were not going to be put on a ventilator. I suddenly wanted him to find himself a consequence of his fondest dream to drown the federal government in a bathtub after starving it of the resources needed to address a national catastrophe. I felt a huge desire to have those who put him on TV and radio talk shows to spread the poison of Republican-libertarianism which is the putrid, vulgar materialist substitute for morality that was pushed by the media, which the media found so brisk and entertaining for the past forty years, having clever people who could come up with entertainingly cynical lines about the federal government.
Any shame I had in feeling that way disappeared quickly. I have every confidence that many if not most of the Republicans in office, right now, were influenced by what Nordquist said, he was and is one of the most influential right-wing peddlers of exactly how they've acted in this crisis. He was hugely influential in the Gingrich and Bush years and I would bet that most of the people in power, now, elected and appointed nodded and smirked in agreement with what he or his imitators said then. I don't feel ashamed of wishing Nordquist to have time between gasps as he drowned in his own body fluids to consider how that was a direct consequence of the things that made him wealthy and powerful in the Republican-fascist establishment.
But that kind of thing has been common in both entertainment and the bleed through into alleged journalism for a long, long time. The same early-morning ruminations over Nordquist made me think of the George Kaufman Moss Hart comedy, You Can't Take It With You and the vaguely clever patter in which charming old Grandpa Vanderhof talks down an IRS agent who has come to talk about his refusal to pay his income tax. Which, I will remind you, those who could afford a theater ticket were chuckling about in 1936, as the Great Depression was still strong and as it was increasingly clear that the United States was going to have to face the Nazis and Imperial Japan in war. But singling it out isn't because Kaufman and Hart were the only ones doing it*, whining about having to pay taxes by wealthy asses in show biz was as common as dirt by that time. So was their whining that the government couldn't do things. Noting the discrepancy between demanding that government do things when you need them to and complaining about government doing too much is also as common as trash on Americas' crumbling highways and roads.
* I have read that George Kaufman was considered to be the more cynical of several of his collaborators, the one who wrote the most cynical lines. Even the crypto-fascist Morrie Ryskind was reportedly less cynical.
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