Amusing ourselves to death in Idiot America

I just started listening to Charles Pierce's book Idiot America and cannot help but notice the similarity to an earlier book I've written a little about. In fact Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death could almost be a prequel or the other way around. Postman attributed the decline in seriousness and intellectual fervor in America to television though, while Pierce charts the American propensity for elevating cranks to an unknown status all the way back to the post-Civil War era.

One observation I can relate right away is how much talk radio, specifically the mouth-frothing right

winger kind, is responsible in Pierce's analysis for making "experts out of everyone, and when everyone is an expert no one is." I once wrote a paper on the use of radio by Nazi Germany, expecting to find Sieg Heiling Rush Limbaughs all over the place. What a let down to find that aside from occasional "radio alarms," basically breaking news alerts, there was little in the Third Reich to rile up the populace, just a steady diet of light music. Although I did find quite a few essays and diary entries praising radio by Goebbels, he went so far as to state that National Socialism triumphed through use of radio.

Sorry for the digression but what you hear on the AM dial is almost unique to America. Occasionally radio is used for good, as in FDR's fireside chats, but mostly the airwaves are abused to incite fear and anger or outrage among the gullible. Pierce argues that truth is what sells, assertions become true when enough people believe them and so forth. Orwell would have agreed. I am looking forward to Pierce's treatment of internet trolling.

If you have any interest in why we seem to be getting dumber, definitely check out the former if not the latter books at your local library. Before it is too late!!!! (Pierce even noted how there is no place in Idiot America for something as orderly as a library, where fiction is over here and nonfiction over there, theology and science do not get jumbled together, and cranks and con men have to pass the filter of professional librarians before they can peddle B.S. to the public)