There was a time when the mass media was one of the main headless behemoths that fucked up life for everyone. This was not a politically derived concern for only one ilk in America. We all hated advertising (even though we understood we were getting TV for free) and we all made fun of different programs. We also tolerated quite a lot of dumb television — from Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies to Days of Our Lives and Falcon Crest.
Back then, almost everyone read the local paper and watched the evening news. Many families received a second more national or at least more regional paper like The New York Times, Washington Post, or, for our family anyway, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I remember in college living in Oregon we received The Oregonian every morning, and one person in our household got three-day-old copies of The Boston Globe in the mail every few afternoons. Our resident New Yorker had a secret source for what was then called the national version of the New York Times. We shared and devoured all of those papers and had great discussions about numerous weird articles in them.
A lot of households back then clicked the morning news “on” daily in the form of the Today Show or Good Morning America. The nightly news would also get clicked “on” around dinnertime. And the late news was the basic signal to get ready for bed. A lot of folks might watch The Tonight Show as well after the news, where Johnny Carson gently made fun of the headlines. You were always well-served with Johnny’s humor because you’d watched the news at least three times that day — along with the majority of your civic-minded neighbors and fellow taxpayers. You’d also read at least one newspaper. I’d guess about half those who watched Johnny Carson did so from bed. There used to be a lot of well-informed procreation going on in the bedrooms of America. It might also explain why the name John was so popular back in the 20th century.
We didn’t think about it much, but mass media allowed for a society that was being fed the same basic data–more or less. Still, sometimes I would be baffled by all my classmates in elementary, junior and high school who were clueless about the civil rights movement. A lot of them also thought the Vietnam War was a good thing and important. Good folks everywhere in America found Richard Nixon an upstanding patriot with nothing but the best interest of his subjects–er–fellow citizens to guide him.
That there irony is the interesting aspect of life in America in the 1960s and 1970s: we were all being fed the same media information more or less, but a huge swath of the country — Nixon called them “the silent majority”– was either blissfully ignorant or willfully contrarian and hostile to reality. What the hell was going on? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
There’s so much going on below the surface for Americans. That’s why this site is called “Deep-Fried America.” These days, we don’t talk much about mass media. If there is still a “mass media” it’s very likely that thing you would call all of us linked together on our phones, laptops, and tablets, non-stop and all the time — the social and the anti-social media combined.
That weird term (from a 1970s perspective) bandied about these, specifically for radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and a bunch of Internet sites, is mainstream media. In weird ways, that mainstream is still working hard to offer up truth and reality. But then there is a whole set of indie tributaries: from the straight-up irony of faux news shows like The Daily Show and Full Frontal, to the twisted, weird, Orwellian cynicism and hostility of the Fox News channel. Or how about Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, and others like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.
Here’s my take: everyone still gets the basic data/news. But it’s like we all get a decent dose of what’s actually happening out there and then we go back to our separate corners to order up mockery, judgment, filters, interpretation, hate, comedy, disdain, and paranoia. As many kinds of tricky emotional and logical puzzles as possible in order to process everything from hurricanes, immigrants, and North Korea, to the current asshole president (which, apparently, they all are), nudity, sex, gun violence, and the Sadness of American Romance.
All that said, then, I honestly don’t see much difference between 1970 and 2020. About a quarter of us are assholes by choice, and a quarter want to see this country develop and progress towards a form of utopia where everyone’s civil rights are protected, we are no longer required to act as a global enforcer, education is our biggest investment, the climate has settled down, health care for all is a fact of life, and the idea of so-called “white people” is something that everyone laughs about (!). Yup, I said a quarter of us want that kind of a world.
Then there’s the other 50% of the country. They’ve always been out there. They float. Sometimes they float from one extreme to the other. Sometimes they make up what we call “the middle.” Sometimes they’re pathetic (the vast majority don’t vote). And sometimes they are this human fractal run amok — all chaos and full of excuses. There are reasons that Top 40 radio songs, super hero movies, and companies like Nike are successful. Hell, where would everything that’s disgusting about America be if not for that 50%? If it’s popular, they’re on it!
Which brings me to Donald Trump of all people. We know he isn’t a utopianist. But, honestly, I don’t think he’s an asshole either. He pretends to be, but that’s just because he wants to eat at the cool kids’ table. Nope. Donald Trump is one of the fifty-percenters. That’s why he’s been successful. He got enough of them to vote for him (their guy!) that he eeked out a win in 2016.
What is interesting about him, though, is that he’s clearly spent a lot of time watching TV — especially nighttime TV with all the gentle standup hosts. That’s so obvious if you watch one of his rallies. He sees those events as an opportunity to do improvisational standup commentary. The Floating 50 eat that shit up. His schtick wouldn’t work if he was a utopianist or an asshole. That’s how I know he’s in with the floaters. They get him. They even say, “He’s one of us.”
I’ll close now. The reason the media is so hilarious (title reference here) is because I don’t think they realize what Trump is doing with everything they offer up. The whole country, actually, is doing the same thing. Some are pros at it (like the shock jocks, Fox commentators, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, and Samantha Bee, etc.). But most of us are just trying to keep ourselves entertained. The news and all that political rhetoric, American Carnage, the sturmunddrang, our collective insanity, it’s basically all becoming fodder for cacaphonic national comedy. We’ve blended the ludicrousness of situation comedies with the funkiness of everyday news. It’s all food for fun and jokes from our president on down.
And the funny thing, which is also very sad, is that news journalists don’t understand yet what we expect out of them. I love so many of these people, from Hallie Jackson to Chris Wallace. But they don’t realize that they are no longer providing serious information to anyone. They’re providing us all with our “material.” America’s not going down the tubes. Far from it. We’re fine. We are now a nation of smartasses, wisecrackers, and wannabe (most of us) comedians. All things considered, maybe that’s okay.
My only worry is that we’re all going to die laughing if we’re not careful. Then the only people left may well be the newscasters. Chris Wallace and Hallie Jackson will need to start a new breed of American. That will definitely not be funny, but who cares, since most of us won’t be around anyway.
Ain’t life in America weird?