Progress is Our Most Important Product

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

I’ll go out on the proverbial limb, the one I hate being on the end of, and state what some of you may tell me is the obvious.

In 35 short years, we’ve gone from “The Great Communicator” to, well, hmmm, “The Great Reality Show Host?” This pathetic slog we all endure (apparently; our existences are beset and so many of us have persevered through genuine trauma, nay tragedy, and death awaits us all, it’s true, but still, there are iDevices and a new Tesla model coming out…, but except for the whatever percentage it is, what is it anyway? 99% 98% as little as 95% Here on Amazon marked down for you today only to 78% I mean how many people are really truly and honestly suffering daily, fighting for subsistence, strung out, addled, stricken with stubborn and unresponsive diseases, living in poverty… well not here on Facebook, nay nay, we just come here to have shpilkes about all the actual people who do, of which any number is too many, and rail and get snarky with one another, and sling vulgarities or bloat ourselves in a superior way because those inferior specimens running for President are just, I mean, de trop when it comes to vulgarity; I even heard a joke, pretty lame, about how if he’s elected Bernie Sanders will be the first President to sign significant legislation into law or more likely yet another Executive Order that will go nowhere with a mustard stain on his shirt… where was I ? oh, at the pathetic slog we all endure), this “life” as we call it, is no longer what has always been understood by serfs and philosophers alike is no longer that, but a big reality show in which we’re all extras, with feature parts that are archived for as many people as you’ve indulgently allowed yourself to have as friends on your social medium of choice with photos, videos, and bad audio, some of which has probably been illegally pirated.

And reality tv was not really a genre until the 70s (discounting Allen Funt’s initial efforts with Candid Camera, which dates to 1948, when the number of tv sets could still be numbered in the thousands). PBS aired the groundbreaking An American Family, which let it all hang out, including the outing of their adolescent son, in 1973. Regularly scheduled prime time programming that falls solidly under the rubric began in 1979 and 1980 with the airing of “Real People” and “That’s Incredible” which, as the Writer’s Guild of America puts it, “took the camera fully out of the studio to capture people in their real-life settings.”

I’ll remind you at this point that Ronald Reagan had already been Governor of California, with his first term beginning in 1967, serving two terms. And more than a “great communicator” he had been and was, in actuality, a great huckster, being advertising spokesman for a number of brands, but most notably the major brands of Chesterfield cigarettes (back in the 50s, when smoking was still safe) and then, more famously, because he did it on television, for GE—kind of forming a complete circle, from the products that could give you lung cancer to the company that made the x-ray machines that could detect it in your body.

The Republicans invoke Reagan’s name with reverence, as if he did not do the things he did (raise taxes, legalized immigrants, and suborned illegal gun traffic, with some drug trade thrown in, with known terrorists), but did set a model for the modern major Republican candidate. And they repudiate Trump, because he is an enormous vulgarian—indisputably, and without mussing a hair on his lacquered head—as if that were not the cause of the reverence in which he is held by the “rank and file” (the term applied, in a headline, by the NYTimes, probably with a big grin on the face of the editor who cooked up that particular combination of words) despite the imprecations of titular head of the party until they settle on a nominee, Mitt Romney.

All this by way of solving the challenge of what do we do with a problem like The Donald. And all this, I would suggest—here I am, fully out on the end of that limb—in actuality a mere evolutionary cycle, kind of an attenuated one if you ask me, given that most politicians are ready to flip on their steadfast positions in as little as a 24-hour period since last asked to state that position for the record.

History is fun, so let’s backtrack a little further, a small bit of evidence to further anchor my indubitably trivial and unaccountable point.

I’ve seen no mention of it, as, I mean, it is four years ago after all, and who can remember what happened four days ago any longer—I mean long term memory is so yesterday, you know what I mean—but recall for a moment Mitt Romney’s “presidential” excursion to our closest ally (measured in terms of countries predominantly white, Christian, Anglophone, and of which we used to be a colony), and he proceeded to tick off the British hoi polloi, amuse the gentry and the establishment over just how “American” he revealed himself to be, and was suitably otherwise snubbed by the UK media. No one mentions that, and yet we have progressed. The British (I mean the people… apparently, who really knows?) have decided that it would be best if the UK immigration control simply didn’t even allow Donald Trump to cross the border (and that was long before the current cascade of vulgar trumpery).

It’s not a new era at all my friends, it’s what we like to call in the United States progress. Let’s just not call it Progressive shall we, otherwise both Bernie and Hillary might start getting some really bad ideas to try out.