THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

And space for an imagined healed reality

ONE THING I noticed while my husband and I lived in Paris in the 2000s—and I got it consciously and unconsciously in big bold neon impressions—was that we were watching the dumbing down of America. It’s a topic that has now interested me for decades, in terms of why it happened and what it has meant to our culture, its significance in our lives today. The answer to that is, in short, nothing good. And I blame reality television as one of the big catalysts.

Unscripted television existed before this, but the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike began the onslaught of Reality TV that has killed American brain cells with a mass IV of meaningless drivel. While the writers were striking, networks and studios couldn’t wait to jump onboard with cheap programming that only fed their bottom lines. Typically corporate, they couldn’t have cared less about what it meant to our society and culture—to you and me.

So about the same time that I began noticing that Americans didn’t know how to use correct grammar or write correct sentences, the Kardashians were being relentlessly covered by the media—but why? The answer is, a sex tape—oral sex and sexual intercourse—of Kim Kardashian was “leaked,” making her famous and enabling the whole Kardashian family to begin their ascendancy to celebrity-hood and billion-dollar empires for being, well, celebrities. Their talent was being celebrities.

Where, I wondered, was the deeper thread, the life below the surface, the content that carried deeper meaning? It didn’t exist. No one cared, especially the execs who stuffed money in their pockets. Exploitative Reality TV producer Mark Burnett approached Trump to do a reality show, and Trump was skeptical, stating that reality television “was for the bottom-feeders of society.” That is one thing in his long corrupt life that he had right. NBC’s Jeff Zucker signed Trump for The Apprentice, which gave him name recognition throughout the country for 14 years, when otherwise no one in middle America would have known or cared about Donald Trump.

So I largely blame Burnett and Zucker for the fact that a huge chunk of American citizens came to believe that Trump, the reality star, had the knowledge, wisdom, and leadership abilities to be President of the United States, instead of seeing what he actually is—a common greedy conman. Oh, the magic of television.

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I REMEMBER WHEN education was desired, personal accomplishments were celebrated, and worldly sophistication was a goal of Americans who wanted to live well and have consequential lives. I’m also going to throw in integrity, respect, and honor as desired qualities of character that people once aspired to. Organized religion was what counted for spirituality for a lot of people, though not for others, who intuited mysticism of a more personal nature.

Despite all the declarations of “Christianity” that abound, it seems to me that our country is soulless. We are empty. We are void. And no one could be more soulless than Donald Trump, despite what these Christian nationalists have made him out to be. They made a deal with the devil, and so did he.

And what has filled this desolation inside us? Not reality TV. Not hate-centered Christian nationalism, and not Donald Trump.

The aspirational lifestyles that these Reality TV celebrities constantly market make us feel bad about ourselves—that we haven’t been successful enough or rich enough or beautiful enough to have all the things they have. We see their multi-million-dollar houses and designer clothes, hair and make-up, cars, yachts, and other toys that don’t bring anyone happiness in the end, and that we can’t take with us when we die. I once took Yale’s famous Happiness course, The Science of Wellbeing, taught by Dr. Laurie Santos. One thing I learned is that studies suggest happiness peaks at an income of around $75,000. As an astrologer I follow always says, happiness comes from the inside out, not the other way around. But that takes inner work—facing yourself and your shadows, as well as your light.

Yet people in Podunk, Anywhere, looked at Trump the TV star as if he were actually something, when he never was. In an interview with VF, former NBC chief marketing officer John Miller regrets mythologizing Trump’s business savvy and recalls the host’s “racist tendencies,” creepy pageant behavior, and how he could be manipulated with compliments.

We have lost our connection with Nature and the Natural order of things, with spirits, and with the deeper meaning of life that grows within us and truly nurtures us, that connects us to ourselves.

Make no mistake about it: Reality shows highlight a slice of life that most of us are unfamiliar with. Another wildly successful reality program, 19 Kids and Counting, about an extreme religious cult, also sucked the life out of thoughtful people and gave a wide viewership to the Radical Christian Right and the growing Christian nationalist nation. The Duggar family became celebrities covered by People magazine and the rest of the media.

This show had direct ties to the political world that was shaping up to be what it is today. Here are a few paragraphs from a previous piece I wrote for Buzzflash after Josh Duggar had first been charged with molestation of five young girls, including two of his sisters, and later was arrested for child porn. You can always count on evangelists who proclaim their intolerance the loudest to be the ones found to have multi-affairs, to be gay (not that anything’s wrong with that except their sermons about hating gays) or pedophiles—something:

As it turns out, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins goes way back with the Duggars. When he put Josh Duggar onboard his organization, he said that by hiring the then 25-year-old, his organization hoped to appeal to more young people by tapping into the popularity of the Duggar family’s series. The point was to further Christian Right positions with opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and divorce.

Ditto Right-Wing politicians who wanted to advance themselves with a connection to the Duggars and their show. This was a fine opening for Josh, who did his job well. His photo was all over social mediawith politicians Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, and more.

What about now? Are they still his friends?

This happy conjunction of Right-Wing Republican politics and manufactured pseudo-celebrities from bad reality TV was made possible by The Learning Channel, otherwise known as (TLC). This pay television channel discovered that if it took particular slices of the American pie—one could rightly interpret this as freaks—they could build an audience and make enormous profits. Voila. Bad reality TV was born. (Apologies to those with reality shows.) Then came the dumbing down of America in the name of corporate greed. I lived in France at the time and could see this happening from across the Atlantic.

Of course, TLC isn’t the only one, but it was one of the pioneers. It’s a shame since The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as well as NASA to actually be an educational tool. (If you have any interest at all, it’s worth reading about.) The Discovery Channel, which was known at the time for nature and documentary programs, bought it in 1991, rebranded the channel TLC, and began building this lucrative, vapid market.

In 2015, after the Duggar news broke, TLC eventually was shamed into cancelling its “19 Kids and Counting” cash cow reality show. It took them two months. A little later in 2015, TLC found a way to bring back the moneymaking misfit Duggar brand with a new show called “Counting On.”

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GROWING UP IN rural Arkansas with Democrat parents, I learned to show every single person dignity. Unlike many Southerners I know, there was no racist talk, no go-to-college-and-find-a-husband or enter beauty contests like some of my female friends had to endure. I did not get training to be a Southern matron. I was expected to achieve and do my best and get college degrees. And today I pride myself on being able to relate to people of all kinds, classes, and persuasions.

So it has recently been disturbing for me to read what MAGA addicts—people I may or may not actually know but are from the geographical area where I grew up—are saying on Social Media, especially Facebook. At first, I didn’t bother responding to the offensive memes and misleading posts loaded with disinformation because what was the point? No changing True Believers. But closer to the election, I jumped in more and more to try to set them straight with actual facts. My husband said, why bother? And I agreed, but I reached a point where I couldn’t stand the BS I kept seeing.

One of my characteristic strengths is Truth, and it is one of my strongest values. After my initial depression and horror that Trump won, I realized I had to resist. So I started jumping in, commenting about his ridiculous cabinet picks and the deceptions he kept repeating. I was trying to enlighten the MAGA faithful by pointing out that they didn’t know actual facts. I respectfully asked people to go to independent news sources like the AP or Reuters to see what real journalists were reporting. My idea was for them to have access to what they’d never see on Fox News or any of the other Radical Right media outlets.

But as we’ve all seen, Trump knew exactly how to counteract real journalism—by calling the AP and Reuters liars and fake news, and then disallowing their reporters to attend his press conferences. And so Trump’s supporters’ response back to me was to repeat exactly what he'd told them—that the AP and Reuters were liars. I gave up.

Lies are a good way to make and keep people dumb so that authoritarians can control them. I have seen in the populace a flicker of unhappiness with Musk dancing around the Oval Office and stealing our private information, but I now realize there is no way to get through to the hard-core Trump believers. They’re too brainwashed. They haven’t heard honesty and authenticity in so long that they don’t recognize it when it’s whispered or shouted. They don’t understand what a fact is, and they no longer know the difference between right and wrong. Whatever Trump says is Gospel, and that’s the end of the story.

As NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie just said in his perfectly titled piece Trump’s Revenge Tour Finds Its True Target: This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.

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SO A LOT of terrible and shocking things are happening in our country. And even when we know the point of what Trump, Musk, and Vought are doing is to overwhelm us with chaos, it’s hard to feel okay within ourselves, to believe that the damage will stop and our democracy, with the freedom we all want and deserve, will be there. One thing I’d like to do here is to create a community in which we are together, and we feel safe in this space. We feel understood and heard. It may be that Americans currently can’t count on the institutions we thought would always be there for us, but we can be there for one another. We can nurture ourselves within our own community.

My dear friend B.C. Barton is a ray of light and a healer. One thing she always tells me is to “imagine healed reality.” We all must imagine this chaos as healed, and there is love, compassion, peace, and good will for all in our healed reality.

Please send any questions or comments that we can all address and respond to.

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Activist Of The Week: Stella Parton Official

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