One answer of course is that those people have always been here. Remember the photos of Bull Connor hosing the Black teens on the streets marching for their rights and sending the dogs after them, and the photos of Southern Women dressed in flowery dresses and crinolines shouting vicious comments to a teenage Black girl walking to class. Those photos enraged the nation. Today their grandchildren are smiling for their selfies in front of “Alligator Alcatraz” signs in Florida.
I’m reading a biography of the attorney Carol Weiss King that covers a litany of violence against unions and workers and immigrants in the 1930’s just like today. So they were always here, just in remission. That cancer has now metastasized.
I think that television reality shows had a lot to do with it. As the fascist right has had a plan for dumbing down our education since at least 1980, and done a good job too, so have they used the media to dumb down the general populace and let them know that meanness is all right. “Candid Camera” from 1948 is considered the first reality show with “American Family” in 1973 following. I watched and liked Candid Camera because it was funny; I never even heard of American Family. The current type of show exploded in the early 2000s. I confess I have seen only one. I watched “Big Brother” with some family members who urged me to watch it because I had been criticizing the shows. They were sure if I saw one, I would agree they were good.
I watched; I didn’t agree. To me all it showed was that it was acceptable to lie to your “partner”, back stab everyone, cheat and sneak just so long as you “won.” I didn’t think that was a good message. I still don’t. I never understood the allure of “Apprentice” or “Shark Tank” to prostate yourself to a bunch of jackbehinds who denigrate you and then anoint one as a follower. In the book about “The Apprentice” most of the winners never learned a thing in their apprenticeship but were given impossible or insane or innane jobs and ran off. But what it accomplished was to make it appear that it’s all right to be denigrated by a panel of self-proclaimed big shots most of whom got their money by cheating, stealing, and abusing workers so long as you get to be like them.
Then there is Jerry Springer who at one time was a decent journalist but who money drove into a pit hole. He started in 1991 but degraded into staging conflict ridden shows where it made very bad behavior acceptable to carry out in public – on live television no less.
Then we learned to get our medical advice from television charlatans like Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil first appeared on Oprah in 2002; Dr. Oz appeared on Oprah Winfrey in 2004. The same relatives asked me to watch Dr. Phil because they thought he was great, and I do have a master’s degree in psychology and did work in the field for 2 years (it was not a good fit for me). I watched it and said, “the guy is a fraud.” That is still my opinion. As for Dr. Oz, we only need to look at who hired him.
In 1997 the FDA started allowing pharmaceutical companies to advertise drugs directly to consumers on television. I watch very little TV but when I do, the ads are saturated with ads for weight loss drugs, erectile dysfunction pills, help to pee or not to pee, take this for your depression and that for your anxiety and note that any or all of them might have side effects like blindness or death.
When my mother was alive, she watched a lot of TV (300 channels and not a decent show on). So when I visited her, I did too. Remember the potato chips that Frito Lay came out with in the 1990s that were loaded with olestra, a fat substitute? They were advertised as diet chips because they had no fat. But olestra cannot be digested and passed right through causing diarrhea, gas, and cramps. So the ads ended with that fast reading – side effects may include … uncontrollable diarrhea. My mother and I laughed ourselves sick to imagine being out at a party, stuffing our face with chips, and then having uncontrollable shitting the rest of the party. How fun is that? The chips were withdrawn in 2004. Of course we don’t need that now, we have the weight loss drugs to give you nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, and stomach pain.
Today we listen to those selling snake oil like horse medicine, or proclaiming false science like vaccines are no good, and the latest – sunscreen is bad for you so go get full sun exposure especially on your genitals that will make you a real man. So don’t be surprised if you see your neighbor naked out in the backyard spread eagled getting a sun tan on his genitals. In actuality, that will decrease their sexual adventures significantly. But people listen to this nonsense because we have been primed by charlatan doctors and crappy (I wouldn’t resist) advertisements on that 3.5 hours of TV we watch a day.
Even the law is not exempt. Judge Judy started in 1996 and showed the public that even law is not about finding justice or maintaining human rights standards or ensuring a democracy or settling disputes without violence but simply entertainment. The more humiliation one side can heap on the other, the more entertaining.
There are lawyers like that; they are the worst lawyers. They treat the Rule of Law as a game of “gotcha” or who can be the sneakiest or meanest person and win because decent people give up. Those lawyers can be beat. I have beaten them. But it takes an incredible amount of effort and patience to do so. There were three such known lawyers in the field when I started practicing domestic relations in 1980. All three were disbarred – eventually.
I think this is why the cancer of cruelty has metastasized through the public body. The public was fed cruelty as entertainment on reality shows; it was fed public humiliation and bad public behavior on talk shows, competition shows, and even judicial shows; it was fed anti-science rhetoric by charlatans and advertising designed only to separate you from your money.
How to fight back? Turn off the television. Get off the social media. PBS has decent shows especially for kids but of course it is on the ropes after the funding was pulled. Donate if you can. The fascists want to replace that media with PragerU videos. PragerU is not a university or any kind or a learning institute. It is a propaganda machine for Christian nationalism. Their videos are full of lies and dogma with little relation to reality or truth.
Read banned books because they are the ones that have humanitarian themes. Go to Union of Concerned Scientists for accurate information. Check Doctors without Borders and Lawyers without Borders for medical and legal information. Counter the public information with your own children or grandchildren. Play cooperation or learning board games rather than competitive ones. Remove misbehaving children from public spaces to teach them that there are rules about how to behave in public and with other people. Give them consequences for lying or cheating or being mean so they learn that is not acceptable behavior.
Studies show that kids have a fundamental sense of fairness by 12 months. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/do-kids-have-a-fundamental-sense-of-fairness/ Build on that. We are fundamentally decent. The Cherokee story of the Two Wolves tells it perfectly. There are two wolves in each of us and which one grows? The one you feed. It has taken 30 or more years for the fascists to feed the bad wolf. We need to recognize it and then drastically ramp up our feeding of the good wolf.