RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) I have had a real problem during the past fortnight. I couldn’t decide which dystopian ‘spectacular’ to watch on my TV?
And channel-hopping only made it worse. What I was seeing seemed more ‘reality shows’ made for television than the window on real life it was supposed to be showing.
There was, of course, the war in Ukraine, complete with real explosions, heart rending interviews with child-in-arms refugees, and endless Super Bowl blow-by-blow coverage of which team had gained or lost yardage and the rising number of casualties.
I was forced to wonder: has our ‘real world’ been reduced to a media landscape of carefully curated sound bites and echoes of George Orwell’s ‘1984’?
When the ‘Economist’ quotes Russia’s communications regulator, saying that Russia wasn’t at ‘war’ and would restrict access to domestic websites that refer to the war in Ukraine as an “attack, invasion, or a declaration of war”, is it purveying a government-authorized alternate reality?
And when a frustrated and angry President Biden said Putin “cannot remain in power”, was it necessary for the White House minders to ‘walk it back’ to better fit the ‘approved’ script?
The war is a truly awful reality show, complete with commercial breaks. Unlike any earlier war, seeing it day after day is an unintended invitation to numb from the horror of it all. It’s the first time a terrible event of this kind can be watched in real time.
Yet leaders from both the Ukraine and Russia are happy to be paraded in front of the news cameras to bask in what artist Andy Warhol called their “fifteen minutes of fame” and deliver not-surprisingly one-sided reports.
Concurrent with the war, there has been the opportunity to see unvarnished American democracy at work in the confirmation hearings to determine whether or not Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson should be elevated to a seat on the Supreme Court, the first black woman to be so honored.
For two long days in the witness chair, the gracious and brilliant Judge Jackson amazingly kept her cool, answering some of the same questions over and over again, ignoring racist dog-whistles.
She had to endure tirades and irrelevant questions by senators more interested in garnering extra TV time and desired invitations to pontificate on Fox News than in learning anything about Jackson’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
Is it a sad sign of how far social discourse has fallen and given way to our growing obsession with ‘ratings’ that during his rude and aggressive questioning of Judge Jackson, the junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, was seen checking his Twitter mentions?
If the war and the confirmation hearings dominated the daylight hours, over the weekend, there was, by contrast, the annual super self-indulgent Academy Awards ceremony and all the PR-induced breathless speculation that precedes it?
There may be a war raging on our doorstep and a tawdry display of American congressional procedure in Washington, but for many, that could hardly rise to the level of who would win which Oscar and who would wear what on the red carpet.
That the Ukrainian tragedy received no more than a passing nod from the Hollywood community – a moment of silence and the flashing of the hashtag ‘#StandWithUkraine’ on the screen – is a sad commentary on its scale of values which appears to put box-office ‘success’ way above compassionate involvement.
Activist actor Sean Penn had called for a boycott of the Oscars if President Zelenskyy was not invited to speak. His call went unanswered.
There was more ‘breaking news’. We learned that Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had been exchanging urgent ‘stop the steal’ messages with Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff before January 6.
That this was at the same time her husband was hearing and deciding related cases which had come before the court and might hear more in the future has caused more than a little concern. Not a great day for democracy.
Surveying this mad dystopian world that surrounds us, it’s getting harder and harder to know what’s real anymore and what’s just reality TV. And whether there any difference?