George Saunders is a NYT bestselling author. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize and his short story collection the Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at Syracuse University and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
Here is a funny, insightful excerpt from his book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone.
To my way of thinking, something latent in our news media became overt and catastrophic around the time of the O.J. Simpson trial. Because the premise of the crime’s national importance was obviously false, it had to be bolstered. A new style of presentation had to be invented. To wring thousands of hours of coverage from what could have been summarized in a couple of minutes every few weeks, a new rhetorical strategy was developed, or—let’s be generous—evolved.
If someone has to lecture ten hours a day on a piece of dog crap in a bowl, adjustments will need to be made. To say the ridiculous things that will need to be said to sustain the illusion that the dog-crap story is serious news (“Dog-crap expert Jesse Toville provides his assessment of the probably size of the dog and its psychological state at time-of-crappage!”), distortions of voice, face, and format will be required.
The erosion continued through the Monica Lewinsky scandal (“More at five about The Stain! Have you ever caused a Stain? Which color do you think would most effectively hide a Stain? See what our experts predicted you would say!”), and dozens of lesser (?) cases and scandals, all morbid, sensational, and blown out of proportion, often involving minor celebrities—and then came 9/11.
By this time our national discourse had been so degraded—our national language so dumbed-down—that we were sitting ducks. In that hour of fear and need, finding in our hands the set of crude, hyperbolic tools we’d been using to discuss O.J., et al., we began using them to decide whether to invade another country, and soon were in Baghdad, led by Megaphone Guy, via “Countdown to Slapdown in the Desert!” and “Twilight for the Evil One: America Comes Calling!” Megaphone Guy, it seemed, had gone a little braindead. Or part of him had. What had gone dead was the curious part that should have been helping us decide about the morality and intelligence of invasion, that should have known that the war being discussed was a real war, that might actually happen, to real, currently living people. Where was our sense of agonized wondering, of real doubt? We got (to my memory) a lot of discussion of tactics (which route, which vehicles) and strategy (how would it “play on the Arab street”) but not much about the essential morality of invasion. (We did not hear, for example, “Well, Ted, as Gandhi once said, ‘What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?’”)
Am I oversimplifying here? Yes. Is all our media stupid? Far from it. Were intelligent, valuable things written about the rush to war (and about O.J. and Monica, and then Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson, et al.)? Of course.
But: Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn’t.
Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?
Here’s a vid of Saunders and Dua Lipa, discussing his book, Lincoln in the Bardo. If you like hearing about a person’s creative process, give it a listen!