The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

In the movie "The Matrix," the blue pill is the one you take if you want to continue to remain content with your ignorance, whereas, the red pill is the one you take if you are ready, willing, and able to face the potentially disturbing truths of reality. Daniel Boorstin's book, although first published in 1962, is very prescient. He sounds the alarm about "pseudo events" (now called "fake news"), mistaking Hollywood and news media celebrities for heroes and heroins, and publicity stunts vs. real news. He even predicted selfies ("photography is becoming an act of narcissism). The world and especially the U.S., did not take heed or even notice his warnings. We need to read his book now and see its relevance. Take the red pill!

We live in a world of "pseudo-events' that is made worse by social media. The situation is worse today than it was when Boorstin wrote this book.

The words on these pages are, unfortunately, nearly impossible to forget once you realize how much worse Americans, specifically, have allowed themselves to become over the last 60 years. I’ve been alive since ‘76 and can say that I have watched it all get worse. I picked up a copy of this book in 1996 from a library in Iowa and read the first two chapters. I couldn’t finish it then because I couldn’t believe how accurately it summed up what I had seen in the, then, past 20 years.

There are plenty of summaries already available to unpack this book. So I'll stick to sharing my takeaway.The slow and careful demystification that Boorstin gives is a gift wrapped in warning. This text is a totem for the American citizen, especially post-election 2016, to realize the deluge of illusion in which we have so surreptitiously been coaxed into abiding for over a half-century. Somewhere along the path of America's pursuit of prestige, we slipped into our own magic machine and ever so seamlessly believed we were always walking in the real world. In a phrase, we fabricated a national lie and therein fashioned a pantheon of larger and grander lies by which we have ballooning debt that we call wealth, sickness that we call health, propaganda that we call entertainment, and war crimes that we call American Exceptionalism. While Boorstin steered clear of the geopolitical, economic, and sheer existential consequences of the mass proliferation and commodification of pseudo-events themselves, I will say that we are living out all of the consequences of his warning, unheeded or unnoticed, to their logical end in the ultimate form of collective suicide on par with with David Applewhite's cult, Heaven's Gate. They believed in some great salvation on a spaceship hidden behind Hale Bop Comet. Applewhite's followers were warned and pleaded with, but were reticently unresponsive to the reality that they were on a path to destruction. The last and greatest illusion is that the United States is not imploding by virtue of belief that the very things we create to overcome our problems are not themselves contributing to our extinction. At best, this is Sparta, we are surrounded by illusions and we are going out in a blaze of inglorious bluster. Or, we can stop and course correct our hearts and love people and this earth with a better way of life in a culture of life as opposed to mass selfish consumerism.All of our reaching for perpetual pleasure is built on one lie: that we can achieve greatness through infinite growth in a finite reality; that is, a world of limited resources. No one country can not should be so greedy as to plunder and colonize other nations to satisfy itself in the grounds of its self-proclaimed supremacy. Free-market capitalism is built on this lie. And all derivative "benefits" are merely temporary pleasures on the downside of a bell curve. At some point, some unfortunate generation of Lemmings--if not now--are going to be saddled with a bill that will come due. There will be no alternative planet or spatial salvation to thwart or defer what is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of manufactured apocalypse--a final and consequential pseudo-event.We have been warned.The mistake any reader can make is to read this book and only conclude that it was entertaining and to then simply walk away unchanged and, to borrow from Christianity, essentially unrepentant.

If much of what passes as news today strikes you as contrived, then this likely is the book for you. Although it was first published in 1962, it remains most relevant today as Boorstin's revelations are still at play half a century after he brought them to our attention, even after the newspaper industry has largely become outdated, as TV news has fallen by the wayside, and even more so as digital media flood every cranny on Spaceship Earth."In the twentieth century...we expect the papers to be full of news," Boorstin notes early on in the text. And, according to Boorstin, therein lies the root of the media's evil: it has to meet the bottomless pit of our demand for news, which helps explain why a local TV station in Washington this week devoted extensive air time to a 10-year-old kid who aspires to be a food writer and sponsored a grilled cheese sandwich tasting event at his home.The electronic media had not driven a stake through the heart of newspapers, although p.m. papers were being trimmed by TV and radio when Boorstin first published The Image. But the emergence of electronic media has accelerated the trend of producing contrived news to meet the public's insatiable demand.The pressure to create images of news events has resulted in the emergence of celebrity, Boorstin notes. We see that throughout the day with celebrities offering opinions on things of which they know little or noting, washed up movie stars hawking insurance to the elderly, and movie actors testifying in front of Congress. We have singing and dancing contests to birth the next celebrities in litters with a gestation period corresponding to the TV viewing season.But where I think Boorstin missed the mark was in thinking that celebrity would supersede the hero. The hero - with an annual extravaganza on CNN, hosted by their star hard news reporter, has adopted quite nicely to the demand for heroes, whether on the battlefield, the home, or the playing field, by fastening on the cape of celebrity.The ideals of American have been overshadowed by the contrivance of images of America that do not consider the consequences of their creation, according to Boorstin. No where have we proven this more than in our accumulation of wealth and consumption, which is contrived as a virtue.The downside to the age of contrived images, Boorstin concludes, is that it belittles all that it attempts to exalt.This is still an eye popping read. And, at less than 300 pages, it won't tear you away from the blogs on the Internet, or Twitter news' 150-character packets, for too long.

A text from my college days that made a big impression in me. Basically a guide to how consumerist propaganda works.

One of the best books ever written on media and politics. A must read.

This book has very interesting ideas, the only downside that should put this book to 6/10 is that it is filled with a lot of irrelevant and uninteresting dates, names and facts. The author sometimes begins to list every city name in which some random company had an event.What eventually transforms the rating 6/10 into 8/10 is the right assumption at the end of the book, the assumption that Walter Lippmann could not make in his book "Public Opinion", which is: "One of our grand illusions is the belief in a "cure". There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning."

Well, it's easy to see where Chris Hedges got his inspiration for "Empire of Illusion". Boorstin's book, "The Image", came out in 1962 and attempts to peal back the layers of illusion, self-deception and blurred reality that characterized the United States of fifty years ago and today. Touching on a diverse range of topics including the concept of a "celebrity", press conferences, the decline of travel and the rise of tourism, Boorstin set the standard for books which try to see what America really is, not what Americans think America is. Reading "The Image" is like sitting in a barber chair watching yourself in a mirror sitting in a barber chair watching yourself in a mirror, looking at yourself in a mirror, ad infinitum. Boorstin never does quite make it to the final mirror, but he made a very good effort and produced a very readable book, at least that's according to "Reader's Digest".All in all, this is a very good look at modern America and its self-obsession and, despite advances in technology, is not at all dated. I would recommend reading  Propaganda  by Edward Bernays and  Public Opinion  by Walter Lippman to get a fuller understanding of public relations, advertising and the whole empire of illusions. PropagandaPublic Opinion

Required reading if you don’t want to be fooled by our contemporary systems. And interesting and fun