“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our
ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in
contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to
the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”—Historian
and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004), The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel J. Boorstin—who died at age 89 on this day 15 years ago in
Washington, DC—-first came to my attention through a child’s history of the
United States, The Landmark History of
the American People: From Plymouth to Appomattox. As an adult, I consumed
(with varying degrees of enthusiasm) his trilogy The Americans and a later one on global cultural and intellectual
achievement (The Discovers, The Seekers and The Creators). In his 60s and 70s, he also performed admirably as
head of the Library of Congress by protecting his institution from the budget
wolves and know-nothings of Capitol Hill.
But these days, I think that I will have to read a
work of his more contemporary—and, it sounds from the above quote, more
farsighted—than even his cogently argued histories: The Image. That analysis described the first stirrings of the
celebrity culture that was already taking hold in the early postwar period, a
trend that, by being tied to news events created specifically for promotional
purposes, would color and distort American journalism and government for the
last half-century.
In particular, the “pseudo-event”—which Boorstin
described as a promotional tactic designed to elicit news coverage, with a
carefully choreographed “script”--has come to mark politics in the Trump Era, as
Conor Friedersdorf describes in this piece for The Atlantic in December 2016.
Boorstin’s definition of a “celebrity”-- "a
person who is well-known for his well-knownness"—can describe not only Kim
Kardashian but Donald Trump, a bankrupt builder who created a spurious
reputation as a great deal-making. Trump’s pre-Presidential career climaxed
with The Apprentice, “a program on
reality TV, the beating heart of the pseudo-events industry, where teams
competed in pseudo-projects to avoid being pseudo-fired,” according to Friedersdorf.
It bears repeating what Friedersdorf notes about the
start of the Trump candidacy: “Trump began the most consequential phase of his
political career by declaring his doubts about President Obama’s birth
certificate and sending or pretending to send a team of investigators to Hawaii
to probe the matter. Roger Ailes would reward him with recurring interview
segments on Fox News, each a pseudo-event in itself. On those segments,
pseudo-events were discussed by Trump and pseudo-journalists. Among actual
journalists, there was deep disagreement about whether Trump’s statements about
running for president should be taken seriously.”
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