On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 9

In Chapter 9, “Reach Out and Elect Someone,” Postman turns his focus to politics. Although much of Postman’s attention throughout the book is American civic life, this chapter narrows to elections. It is one of the best in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

He starts with a nod to Joe McGinniss’ great book on Richard Nixon’s campaign, The Selling of the President 1968.

Postman finds though that selling politicians is just a starting point: “For though the selling of a President is an astonishing and degrading thing, it is only part of a larger point: In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial” (126).

He calls the television commercial “the most peculiar and pervasive form of communication to issue forth from the electric plug” and adds: “An American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well over one million television commercials in his or her lifetime, and has close to another million to go before the first Social Security check arrives. We may safely assume, therefore, that the television commercial has profoundly influenced American habits of thought” (126).

He notes that the television commercial — though literally commercial in nature — upends traditional capitalist theory in which people act with rationality in buying and selling. Commercials replace rationality with images and emotions.

The implications for politics are obvious. Politicians and issues too are sold through images and emotion, not rationality.

“The television commercial has been the chief instrument in creating the modern methods of presenting political ideas,” he writes (129) and has become the required form in political campaigns.

Postman provides some surprising personal insights here, mentioning his small role in the Senate campaign of Ramsey Clark versus Jacob Javits in New York. Clark, Postman says, put together a library of careful position papers. Javits aired television commercials.

“He built his campaign on a series of thirty-second television commercials in which he used visual imagery, in much the same way as a McDonald’s commercial, to project himself as a man of experience, virtue and piety,” Postman writes (129). Javits won the election by the largest plurality in New York history.

Postman looks carefully at the typical commercial. He notes its extreme structure: “the television commercial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, especially the printed word. For one thing, the commercial insists on an unprecedented brevity of expression. One may even say, instancy. A sixty-second commercial is prolix; thirty seconds is longer than most; fifteen to twenty seconds is about average” (130).

In our time, the commercial has grown even shorter with its parables, dramas and symbols. Negative advertising communicates its attack in just a few phrases or images.

Too, Postman writes: “The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry” (130).

In political terms, this translates into a remarkable insight. Postman says: “For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse” (134).

The reader of 2018 will want to take time to think through the implication of this insight: that the politician offers himself as an image of the audience.

Postman notes the then-ubiquitous AT&T commercial campaign, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” in which viewers were urged to pick up the phone and call someone. Postman says, “These are thirty-second homilies concerned to provide a new definition of intimacy in which the telephone wire will take the place of old-fashioned co-presence” (134).

And once again, Postman hits a note that makes the reader of 2018 sit up: “This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent” (135).

Image politics preserves the idea of self-interest voting, but it alters and transforms the meaning of “self-interest.”

Image politics also makes history irrelevant, Postman argues. Our interest is in image after image. “Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening ‘now,’ which is why we must be told in language that a videotape we are seeing was made months before” (136).

Like a moth to a flame, Postman returns to the Orwell-Huxley comparison:

“We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy — namely, to freedom of information. Orwell quite reasonably supposed that the state, through naked suppression, would control the flow of information, particularly by the banning of books. In this prophecy, Orwell had history strongly on his side” (138).

Orwell though was writing for the age of print. Again, Postman finds that Huxley better saw our time: “Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves” (141).