"For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing “Orwellian” about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil’s observation that “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody." ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, year 1985, page 111
Trump as entertainment, Howdy Doody. Tony Clifton acts entertain EVERYONE who mocks and joins the total mockery. Mocking is not resisting Trump. Mocking Trump is joining MAGA values. Mocking into a mockery of MAGA. Media addiction itself is MAGA Trump.
Entertainment President, Ronald Reagan, was second term in 1985.
"All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference." - 1985 (second term in office, sustained entertained society USA).
Texan Rick Roderick, Duke University, 1993
https://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-1993/
this is an important concept in Baudrillard. In Baudrillard, ah, we have already said that reality is simply that which could be simulated. Can’t be simulated: not real. But more real than real is a reality… ah, and I guess… again I could give you… again, I hate to use these movie examples if you haven’t seen the movies. But in A Clockwork Orange there is a great line that anticipates the postmodern. When, ah… the character played by Malcolm McDowell says “It’s funny how blood isn’t really blood until you viddy it on the screen”; until you see it on a movie screen. In real life it looks kind of brown and mucky, on the screen it looks, you know, more real than real blood. And this sense of the sort of hyperreality we get with cinema, we get with television and so on is another phenomenon Baudrillard wants to examine.
And I think that here we get – and, I mean, I guess my politics are showing again – but here we get the phenomenon of Reagan, the hyperreal president. More real than real. I mean he’s better at being Harry Truman than Harry Truman. I mean, the distinction about what he is is lost in the hyperreality of his smile, which like the Cheshire Cat’s, you know, just gleams across his face. And we get for the first time a phenomenon never known in polling which is the phenomenon of not liking a person, but of liking liking a person. This is a sign you are dealing with the hyperreal.
Let me go over that again: Reagan’s popularity was popular. When you went through the various traits of Reagan and what Reagan stood for and his policies and so on, ah, vast numbers of people disliked nearly all of them. What was popular was his popularity. And I don’t think that Reagan’s alone in this.