D. Lithwick: Might This Finally Cure Us of Our Pathological Preference for a Television President?

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-donald-trump-and-the-wizard-of-oz-presidency.html

Might This Finally Cure Us of Our Pathological Preference for a Television President?
This pandemic is the best example yet that Donald Trump is a Wizard of Oz, and there’s nothing behind the curtain.
By Dahlia Lithwick
April 16, 20206:19 PM

snip//

The staggering irony is that somehow, after years of him attempting to force us to live inside his shiny dream world of ratings and endorsements and fabulousness, we all now live there, all day and all night. After four terrible years trying to escape the reality show of the Trump administration, many of us, and way too many of our children, are trapped inside screens that reduce each of our lives to the familiar Apprentice boardroom set landmarks: human, desk, lamp, water glass. Hours of screens within screens that might really be Zooms now force us into canned reality show tropes: “Look at me! I’m trying to talk! How do I look? Why did I agree to do this again?”

We are, almost poetically, the perfect sum total of the Zoom screen and the chat box and the set we’ve arranged behind us. How Trumpian.

My friends who work in the hospitals tell me that screens are the only possible means of connecting the dying among us to their families, for the purpose of saying goodbye, now. If you haven’t yet attended a Zoom funeral, you assuredly will. Faces. Screens. The centering of faces in screens, the focusing of faces on screens. And if all that weren’t the most tragic outcome of the age of Trump, there is yet one more: In order to attempt to understand what is happening all around us in real life, with real emergency equipment and real scientific research and real bailout funds, we are forced to tune in, night after night, to what any other culture in any other time would most likely dismiss as some kind of darkly impressionist puppet show. We sit at our screens, watching someone who delights only in standing in the center of our screens, as he attempts to program the world with his crabbed reality-show word parfaits: He’s perfect, everyone is awful, he didn’t come here to make friends, oh, and everyone should buy shit. Everyone should buy boxes and bags and buckets of branded shit. And all of these people who have lost their jobs and businesses, and parents and friends, are somehow shoehorned back into this deranged world of Tiger King, in which every performer is a narcissist mugging for the cameras, and all of the endangered cats are us.

When all this passes, and it will certainly pass, it would be good to craft a new way of looking at governance, expertise, and authority that is less bound up in looking at ourselves, and also less caught up in looking at other people looking at ourselves, and in the relentless daily performance of building a brand that those who are looking at us would maybe like to purchase. There is no doubt in my mind that if the response to this pandemic demanded great quantities of kitten heels, sheath dresses, and overpriced real estate, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should have been tasked with the authority to solve it. That we have somehow persuaded ourselves that unexceptional people who look like the kind of people who might pick up phones to call other people about catastrophic problems, possibly on a TV show, are the people who are most fit to govern, well, that is the result of a life lived entirely in thrall to screen time.

When all this passes, as we certainly hope it will, the poets and philosophers and scientists might step up to write (in truth, in words, in indelible black pen) the history of whatever the hell happened that damaged us so badly that we were willing to follow a bunch of character actors up over the embankment and down into a democracy measured in ratings and brand names and how we looked on camera. The revolution was, in fact, televised. And that was our first mistake.

[kimbutgar]

1. Not with a certain sector of Americans

The Fox watching poisoned people, hate radio listening and evangelical suckers who are in the cult and don’t believe in science will not wake up until they are on their deathbed as a result of CV19.

[lagomorph777]

2. But the Fux-watchers are killing themselves disproportionately. That is how Earth cleanses itself.

American politics will merely be a collateral beneficiary.

[abqtommy]

3. +100 Spot on!

[Blue Owl]

4. God I hope so

We've now seen proof of what happens when the morons get their king in office...

[smirkymonkey]

5. K&R