The mass media continue discovering ways to distract the public from the core issues America faces. I use the neutral term “public” rather than “citizens” though we are citizens still, partly. What else could we be, subjects? Well, bad laws, capricious, post-modern application of laws, and, for decades Television has been directed toward reducing reason and, thus a sense of justice, of right and wrong; reducing too the ability to think or act with the result that most of us, to varying degrees, have been reduced to a glop one might term, “the masses.” Experimental psychology and the entire Pavlovian project, from advertising and ‘news’ to the classroom intertwine with this development but that’s another essay.
To television we can add computers and the various screen-experiences they provide from blogs to “games,” the worlds of X-Box and Play station. This is the world of see, push, point and click, of sense-and-respond, an animal world; or perhaps it’s a war zone in which emotions and hormones go wild. Do more people use the internet to study, learn history and write analytically or to “surf” for imagery, for various kinds of pornography, including simple voyeurism, if this kind of morbidity is ever “simple.” 
The main examples for the reduction of thought, feeling and humanity in this essay pertain to the “race for the oval office” which is meant to keep us in an odds-making frame of mind, that is, a dumb frenzy: yes, as Poe foresaw, modernism and progress are shams and traps [1]. But first a few words, not from our sponsor but about other major media that distinguish and have disfigured our age and our lives.
The distraction-and-reduction of humanity industries were present in film and radio but were not homogenous in their effects and had nowhere near the power to degrade our senses as do television and computers. Movie theatres of old always had a bit of neighborhood in them; most were used for vaudeville, concerts of many kinds and other public functions. Some still had pianos in a corner up front till the 1960s. The screen came down upon or was set behind a stage. There were lots of other people, pleasant or unpleasant as the details might be. The “virtual” quotient was limited.
Arguably, silent films conduced more to the sensate and human regression; they were mainly about visuals and movement although narrative development of plot still set the stage – surreal jump-cutting and absurdity were reserved for the rare “art-film” and viewers went to these expecting to see something odd and progressive: not exactly chainsaws and coeds shivering in a basement while Jason stalks dark streets. And the old “silents” had captions and legible lip movement. Radio and ‘talkies’ were all about conversation, often amazingly eloquent and witty, not least in comedies like Laurel and Hardy or the immortal Fields. So even when they were ‘racy,’ they used and strengthened literacy and interpersonal communication, faculties that contribute to (though they do not insure) community and humane dealings: television in its beginnings also had this quality: the black and white made it clearly a “fiction” even when it was news, a reproduction to be heard, studied and considered. Many of the shows (Groucho Marx, reality TV that still was real) were just radio with a few visual gimmicks filmed on an immobile stage.
Abstract elements, dissolves, fades, jump-cutting, cropping, strange juxtapositions first entered through ads and cartoons along with the color that bathed viewers in a sensual, not a literate experience. “Ooh, ah,” that’s the level to which it reduces our response, erasing the boundary between intimate and public experience. Those who produce television now are plantation owners; the hairstyles chattering at us are taskmasters and school marms: no thinking necessary class; yes, the curriculum has been dumbed-down. When you hear the cue (slogan), respond with the correct cliché. Otherwise there may be a ’sensitivity’ re-training seminar [sic]: corruption of language has stacked the deck, humans lose by being human.
Computers and the web appear to deliver the ultimate democracy. Almost everyone has access and what goes in reflects who puts it in, and why, matters only sometimes discernable and often by few. Human beings are not meant to sit in chairs or to look at screens in which so many, lowest-common-denominator distractions lurk and have been planted. A verse from P.B. Shelley, “the over-busy gardener’s deadening toil” pops to mind [2]. We indeed blunder toward death less, perhaps, like the aging Tory laureate lampooned than like the progress-mad, soon disillusioned radical. For us unfortunate moderns, part of the medium’s enslaving nature is in its analogy to a garden filled with Venus fly-traps. Consider: what creature spins webs? And what does she spin them for? And what does she do once they are caught?
When you next expound upon the “freedom” of the worldwide web, think of that [3].
Consider to that democracy, “people rule” inevitably means mob rule and that mobs are ruled by tyrants, and their paid enforcers. They inevitably destroy tradition and deference [4].
Enough for now about the media of entrapment, increasingly a byword for our time of cultural degeneracy for license leads always to tyranny and often is contrived by it (a good reason to proscribe license, and licenses). Let us turn to the horse race and to pertinent and quite descriptive comments on it made almost a millennium ago.
The evil genius of the major media shows impressive consistency; there is no way that the major developments re-shaping all our lives for the worse are going to be mentioned, much less discussed as the two Democratic nags, made to ride in tandem (Hillary, of course, wants to be “on top”) find infinite reasons to bicker. What to do about the poor, poor disenfranchised masses of Michigan and Florida? Let’s spend a few weeks nattering about that. How about Hillary’s tone in lamely imitating Obama’s vacuity? How about his hollowness, itself — “he’s a great speaker” the morons tell us. Which one of them has more momentum? Which has raised more money? What do the numbers say? Have we spent enough time enthusing about the 4500 votes Obama got in Wyoming, or has Hillary and the Emperor’s Club stolen his rolling thunder?
No truly human being can survive five or even two more months of this stuff, or of the twenty-three year old “political strategists” and “pollsters” the Demlicans, Repricrats and complicit media trot out before our protesting souls and dismayed hearts to spout their programmed talking points. In Ohio, the Demlicans say they are against NAFTA and will work to make it better, and people vote for them; no one talks about the real costs of ethanol, or of “health insurance” and its deadly triage; will either of the donkeys secure the borders, expel illegal immigrants, prevent America from being dissolved into the NAU by diktat of a President they profess to hate? Are they going to propose a set of workable measures to inhibit or stop outsourcing? Are they going to end the racism and sexism of “affirmative action” or the destruction of public education by the Teacher’s Unions and their sponsors? Since “choice” is their creed, are they going to support parental choice in education? How about choice for a father when abortion threatens or when “Mom” decides its time to divorce Dad? Will they liberate citizens from paying for the indoctrination, vaccination, labeling and spiritual disfiguring of their children or for the multi-faceted expropriation of the children by the State?
No, of course not; they support almost all of these end-game, triage, mentally and economically impoverishing problems. They represent the Corporate Collective that creates the problems, from feminism and all that follows from it to collapsed borders: as with the family, so with the nation. Will the media press them to address any of these issues? Of course not: they represent and are more directly owned by the CC than are the nags. Their job is to distract, benumb, and enchant us with sensational tit-bits, mind-numbing numbers about nothing, fake arguments, faked passion and even more faked compassion. The parade of moronic bimbos and feminized males marches on to victory uber alles.
A long time ago the Children of Israel, whose teachings long since have reached much of the world in one form or another were instructed against sorcery, divination, astrology, reading omens, or directing their behavior according to “lucky times” [5]. All these practices undermine and eventually destroy free will and responsibility as well as giving the soul-numbing impression that the Creator’s wisdom does not inform all things but that human mages can re-make the rules and re-model people. As the war on the Jews has accelerated and as Israel is submerged by foreign powers and their embedded clients all these forms of paganism are returning. It isn’t pretty or pleasant.
It is pertinent to note that the prohibitions against witchcraft which rules the regressing progressive West are near the admonitions noted above [6]. About eight and a half centuries ago, the great scholar, physician, and philosopher, Maimonides grouped them with the prohibitions against cross-dressing which, he noted, “is common among the nations and sometimes stems from a desire to arouse the passions to perversion” [7]. Maimonides examined the etymology of the prohibition against using “time deciders” and noted that its root also forbids “capturing the eyes” [8]. He emphasizes that this does not apply simply to conjuring in its physical sense. Rather, he explains, “’capturing the eyes’ is a form of necromancy [which] ‘steals the mind’ of men.” This “damage is inestimable,” he continues, for it disorders reason, the sense that the creation and Creator are rational, understanding bonded to a culture of free will, genuine freedom and responsibility. Perversion and conjuring are linked in necromancy as uniquely damaging because “the form of the soul is knowledge,” the same knowledge stolen by the conjurer and thief of the eyes [9]. So those who “capture the eyes” imperil the soul for they “make impossible things seem possible in the eyes of fools, women and children and their minds become habituated to accepting unreality as reality” (emphasis added). This is a functional description of virtual reality almost a millennium before our times and the attendant loss of personal, public and international life that is occurring as the world is “consumed with bewildering terrors” [10]. In the newly-pagan West’s house of mirrors and delusion, “reality TV” intermixes with a “virtual reality”: ‘nothing is real’ because all discriminations, boundaries in their most basic sense have been banned from speech and thought. Creation has been undone.
With the degradation and coercion of public schooling in which education has been wrecked (much as health insurance ruins medicine and health) added to the sorceries of the media and the modernist obsession with cults, augury and divination, with control, increasing since the late 18th century, then Hegel, Mesmer, Darwin, etc, “minds become habituated to accepting unreality as reality. Reflect on this,” Maimonides concluded his discussion of those dangers. Idolatry and witchcraft really are bad ideas, enchanting and disordering the soul and sense, a great negation of freedom; the war of terror against the Jewish people who brought freedom to humankind has naturally spread to homes and ‘theatres near you.’ The wheel will come full circle; a branch that attacks its root is a branch that will wither and die.
The next time you see or hear Wild Bull Malarkey, Heraldo, the “independent populist” on CNN, the bevy of hairstyles, the “liberal and conservative commentators” screaming at each other and their guests, creating their web of virtual reality; the next time you, doing a biopsy on our culture, listen to the hollow necromancy of the nags in the race, know that you are dealing with death magic and that the “vanity and wind” has long been long a-coming. Amid this storm one needs a clear mind buttressed by sound teachings and, as the Children of Israel have shown, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. People have a sad tendency to prefer magic to miracles, slavery-and-glitter to freedom [11].
1. Edgar Allan Poe, “the Man Who was All Used Up,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “the Devil in the Belfry” and “The Angel of the Odd” c. 1844-7; the last named tale shows that very strange things indeed do happen and are consistent with Providence, free will and the wisdom or laws of nature the Creator imparted into the creation. Only a dreaming drunk and skeptic finds scriptural exegesis soporific, the tale wittily suggests. For the idea of enlightenment as regression see Shelley’s last poem, “The Triumph of Life.”
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas” (1820), introduction Stanza 4, slight paraphrase
3. “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white / On a white heal-all, holding up a moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth…” Robert Frost, “Design” (c. 1920). And so it comes to pass, more than the agnostic might have guessed: we live among and are confounded by “assorted characters of death and blight” in a world where we are instructed to “stop making sense” and “just do it,” if it’s still permitted…
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman Major Molineux (1832) gives a view of colonial raw democracy.
5. Leviticus 19:26, Deuteronomy 18:10, etc. In “The Laws of Kings and their Battles” 11:4 Maimonices finds a silver lining in the war-alliance of Edom and Ishmael.
6. The prohibition against witches and witchcraft Deut. 18:10 and Exodus 22:7. In Maimonides’ the Book of Commandments, Volume II, #34
7. Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvoth [“Book of the Commandments”] arranged by positive injunctions, part I and prohibitions, Part II (Moznaim, 1993, English translation by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein). Maimonides groups many prohibitions against various forms of idol worship in #s 14-60, pages 11-36 of Volume 2. If legend and Sir Walter Scott are correct, Maimonides, who was the physician of Saladin, was the man who treated a wounded Richard the Lion Heart.
8. ibid. page 22, negative command II.32
9. Maimonides, Foundations of Torah, 4:8-9 offers what today would be called a biogenetic or DNA-based description of Genesis 1:26.
10. Sefer HaMitzvoth, op. cit. II. #32; see psalm 73:19 -28
11. See my archive on www.nwv.com & the essay, “Democracy, Tyranny and a Model of Ordered Liberty.”