A touch of wokeness, nuclear apocalypse edition

I’ve been re-reading Neil Postman’s essential cultural critique Amusing Ourselves to Death. On the 40th anniversary of its initial publication, it’s more relevant than ever. Postman died in 2002, and it’s a terrible shame we never got his take on the internet in all its present glory, since his criticisms of television seem even more germane to the cyberworld.

I’ll do a post about the book itself when I’ve finished, but I just ran across this nugget: On November 20, 1983, ABC had an eighty-minute panel discussion, hosted by Ted Koppel, immediately following its broadcast of the made for TV movie The Day After. Postman uses the occasion to drive home various points about how difficult trending toward impossible it is for TV to be a medium for serious intellectual discussion and debate, but I want to note a separate though related point, having to do with the identities of the six panel members. (Keep in mind that The Day After was an indirect product of the nuclear freeze movement, whose single most prominent member may have been an Australian woman, Helen Caldicott. )

The six panel members were:

Henry Kissinger

Robert McNamara

William F. Buckley

Brent Scowcroft

Carl Sagan

Elie Wiesel

A few comments:

(1) How wired for right wingers/The Blob has MSM coverage of war-related topics been in this country for the last generation or three? The “liberal” here among the politicos is Bob McNamara! Were no non-war criminals available?

(2) The level of sheer incestuousness is captured by the fact that Scowcroft replaced Kissinger as NSA in the Ford Administration, although Kissinger remained Secretary of State. Scowcroft would subsequently go on to be NSA again, under GHW Bush. Diversity! (According to Postman, Kissinger dedicated his allotted time to reminding America how much better off it would be if Henry Kissinger were still Secretary of State).

(3) The closest thing to an actual liberal here is Carl Sagan, a largely apolitical person who nevertheless did support the nuclear freeze movement.

(4) Today of course, you couldn’t have this sort of panel without all sorts of complaints from woke radical leftists that it it’s wall to wall white men. And you know what? Those complaints would be 100% valid, especially given that two thirds of the panel consists of hardcore right wingers, which is not wholly unrelated to the lack of other forms of diversity. Basically, Trumpism consists of people who just loved it when the whiteness and maleness of this panel were both completely unmarked categories, as indeed they were to network TV execs in that long-ago world of 1983. BTW the right wing moral panic term “political correctness” got its first big boost in mainstream discourse when the GHW Bush used it in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, just seven and a half years after this edifying little discussion regarding the possibility of nuclear annihilation.