Information war

Ignorance and no critical thinking. America is a would-be autocrat's dream.

A few weeks ago, American Pie appeared while channel surfing and I said to Elevator Girl: “No way this would get made today.” For years, I’d noticed the disappearance of sex in movies. As a red-blooded dude, I vividly recall movies of my youth with, yes, sometimes questionable depictions of intimacy, in films from Porky’s to Caddyshack to European Vacation to Sixteen Candles to Titanic. But lately?

“We crunched the data for 40,000 films, and it’s not just a fantasy: Sex is disappearing from our movie screens,” an article in The Ringer said last week, while noting violence and gore is booming. Blowing someone’s head off? No problem. Janet Jackson’s nipple? A national scandal.

I’d assumed this was just a result of America’s weird puritanical streak—this is, after all, a country where cursing remains banned on network television. Yet The Ringer cited a bigger factor: the increasing reliance of the movie industry on China and India, where different cultural norms rule. “It’s a matter of simple economics,” it said.

Studios want distribution in those markets for access to their two-billion-plus consumers. And while reducing sex scenes may seem a small price to pay—although I would argue there are significant costs in terms of the way art could normalize intimacy, especially relative to the way it has normalized violence—there are more pernicious effects.

Remember Richard Gere? I was the other day shocked to see him featured in The Agency, a new Amazon Prime series with co-star Michael Fassbender—because it felt like forever since he’d been in anything. Sure enough, Gere has barely been in movies for a decade, and the reason mirrors why intimacy is disappearing from our screens.

“There are definitely movies that I can’t be in because the Chinese will say, ‘Not with him’,” Gere told the Hollywood Reporter. A Buddhist, he’s long been an outspoken supporter of Tibet—support which has resulted in episodes “where someone said they could not finance a film with me because it would upset the Chinese.” The net result is Gere has been forced to shift to independent productions—he hasn’t been in a major studio film since Nights in Rodanthe in 2008.

If you’re wondering where I’m headed with this, stay with me.

Americans will tomorrow choose a new president. Like all elections, some voters will be well informed, having absorbed policy platforms and speeches and debates and made a decision based on a careful weighing of the merits of the candidates and parties. Others will just tick a box. Still more won’t even bother to vote.

We often enable our ignorance, of course. At a time when more information is at our fingertips than at any point in human history, many of us willingly narrow what we consume. That’s why viewers of Fox News believe they’re inhabiting an entirely different country to viewers of MSNBC. I’m as guilty as anyone: I can’t stand to watch Fox for more than a few minutes; I’m sure conservatives feel the same way reading the New York Times.

But only one side is pinning success tomorrow on ensuring voters are as poorly informed as possible. Only one side is actively banning books and removing topics from school curricula. Only one side is restricting personal freedoms to impose its narrow view of the world on all. Only one side rejects educating kids about sex. Only one side seeks to suppress critical thinking, both from Americans today and for generations to come. For Donald Trump and those who enable him, our ignorance is electoral bliss.

Today, we have avenues to overcome misinformation and disinformation. But what if Trump wins? We’ve already seen both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times refuse to endorse a presidential candidate, their billionaire owners reluctant to upset the Orange One. It’s craven self-censorship, but an easy risk-versus-reward equation for any shiver looking for a spine to crawl up.

“Endorsement-gate shows the beginning of the instinctive self-censoring by America’s oligarch class, a syndrome that Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw termed ‘working towards the Führer’,” former New Yorker editor

Tina Brown

wrote last week. “If Trump gets back into the White House, the US could gradually slide down the slippery slope of Narendra Modi’s India.

“The canny Indian prime minister always uses legal means to control press freedom. He deploys lawfare and bogus tax investigations against the few non-toadying news sites like The Wire and Newslaundry. Just weeks after the release of a documentary critical of Modi, which was banned by the government, BBC offices in India were raided by tax department officials. He puts pressure on the big brands to pull their ads from anti-Modi outlets, starving independent players in the media business, until the voices of dissent are steadily stilled.”

Trump is less deft and more brazen, because he’s dumber than Modi but more shameless. He’s openly floated pulling CBS’s TV license because he didn’t like 60 Minutes. Publicly spoken about exacting revenge on anyone who isn’t sufficiently toadying. And he has, of course, built his entire life around a false narrative of success, adhering to the tactic of repeating a lie so often it eventually appears to be the truth.

“I love the poorly educated,” Trump declared in early 2016 after winning the Nevada Republican primary on his way to taking the presidency later that year. He sure does. And if the US doesn’t find ways to puncture the information bubble he’s advancing—enabled by a lot of people and institutions who should know better—the road to autocracy threatened by Trump will only end up being paved by someone else.

I remain hopeful Kamala Harris will win tomorrow but my forecast it won’t be as close as predicted is, ironically, a guess. She’s run a close to flawless campaign given the limited time she had to galvanize the party and define herself. And I can’t imagine any woman voting for someone advancing an agenda so regressive and repressive; a convicted sexual assaulter declaring he’ll impose his will “whether the women like it or not.”

A vote for Harris is much more than merely a protest against the other guy. But I also couldn’t in 2016 conceive of anyone choosing a figure so obviously flawed as Trump. Even if you’re a Republican, I thought naively, there’s no way you could support his elevation to the office of the most powerful person on the planet. I was wrong then, and it marked the beginning of a long national nightmare. Here’s hoping tomorrow marks its end.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.