Mencken's Prescience

How the Sage of Baltimore would laugh; or is laughing if he found, to his surprise, that there is an afterlife.  I've criticized him in the past in this blog for his elitism.  His dark view of American democracy is a part of that elitism.  But who can doubt, now, that what he said would take place has indeed taken place?

But I don't write to bemoan the lurching, baffling and often deplorable presidency of the current dimwitted occupant of the White House who, if what is alleged be true, suffers from dementia as well as he does from ignorance and incoherence.  Well, not to any great extent, in any event.

What with Oprah expressing an interest in running for president, and other luminaries such as Kid Rock being spoken of as fit for elective office, I wonder if "the inner soul of the people" of our Glorious Republic is as fatuous as Mencken clearly thought it to be nearly a century ago.  Are we, the citizens of God's favorite country, intent on trusting the leadership of our nation to persons not necessarily morons by the usual definition, but clearly--to put it kindly--unready to accept such responsibility, merely because they appear before us on TV or some other medium and appeal to us in some way?

If so, we are the "downright morons" if not those we elect.  One would hope that the average citizen would as a matter of self-interest if nothing else be interested in seeing someone with some experience in government and knowledgeable of it be elected, but the most recent presidential election shows that isn't the case.

It may be that many of us have swallowed, hook, line and sinker that silliest of claims, that a business person would know what to do as a politician.  But what reason is there to believe this claim?  What we expect of government is not what we would expect from a for-profit business; we can't conceivably be considered shareholders in the government of the United States, and certainly not directors of it.  Besides, those like the current president have never even run a business that is accountable to shareholders, or for that matter to anyone else.  His business experience has been as master of a privately run business, subject to his every whim.  Thus, bankruptcy has been his recourse more than once when things go bad.

Is it possible that we've begun to confuse reality with reality shows, or more correctly with what we see and hear on TV, or movies, on what we download, on the video games we play?  Why not?  Aren't they becoming more and more a significant part of the world we experience?  Perhaps even the largest part; perhaps for some of us virtually (pun intended) the entire world we experience.

We are what we know and feel.  We know and feel more and more what is shown to us, what is provided to us by others.  Little or no effort on our part is required to know and feel what is fed to us.  There's no need to think anymore, not really.  The problems we encounter are manufactured, and the way to resolve them is more and more a matter of mere expression, played out before us by others who expound and emote as publicly as possible, whom we imitate.

Appearance is reality.  This has been a kind of foundation of marketing for many years now, and politics more than ever is marketing, and money.  But not only products are being sold, now.  Reality itself is what appears before us.  We live more and more in a fantasy world, but it's not our fantasy, which presumably would be pleasant for each of us.  Who do we want to see, hear?  Who do we want to be on TV, on our tablets and phones and laptops?  That's the world in which we live.

Mencken presumably didn't anticipate where our technology has taken us, but he was a journalist and a critic.  He knew people and politicians.  Even with the limited technology available in his time, he understood that thinking was in peril, and morons thrive on thoughtlessness.  Thoughtlessness will be an essential element of our future.