Rules for suckers

P.T. Barnum, who said "There's a sucker born every minute,” lived before the population explosion and the present era of warp speed mass gullibility. Today, a sucker is born every nano-second. And all persuasions are equal opportunity suckers for exploitation by multilateral sources of propaganda.

Government, news media and the advertising industry especially take advantage of the fact that the former ideal of educating people to make up their minds based on objective information, rather than prefabricated opinions that fit an ideologically driven narrative. 

Bastions of integrity are few and far between. Like cemeteries that are still around, although disused and overgrown, the monuments to newspapers of record still stand.

I used to tell my students that journalists must keep their own biases to themselves when reporting what they represent as straight news. We always knew the editorial orientation of publishers, but rarely did newspaper and television network owners allow their stories to so massively and insidiously descend into partisanship as has become the norm.

The more that the means to discover the truth has proliferated and become quickly accessible to anyone with a computer or smartphone, the more lazy and less keen on doing the research has become for the citizenry backbone. 

People make up their minds with no intellectual involvement. Passions are set in stone and their marrow. They believe what they want to believe. Recent years have produced a new wave of activist egos.

W.C. Fields, who predated television, was an accidental prophet of modern advertising, when he counseled, "Never give a sucker an even break." He might as well have been identifying the current phenomenon on prescription medication advertising which targets susceptible patsies whose capacity for thinking for themselves has atrophied, due to educational neglect and calcified brain matter.

The cynically slick commercials for prescription medicine, which were banned from television until a few decades ago, are devised in consultation with ruthless industrial psychologists who know the tricks of worming messages into our subconsciousness and bypassing the firewall of discernment. Typically, there are scenes of "patients" who are laughing, partying and engaging in social bonding and vigorous outdoor activities as though they no longer have a care in the world, even as the voiceover tells us that side effects include sudden death, stroke, heart attack and a profusion of cancers.

At the bottom of the screen, the disclaimers about lethality are printed for a few seconds,  sometimes consisting of a hundred words in tiny, faded font. Maybe Robert Kennedy Jr. and other federal agencies like the FCC and FTC can look into predatory marketing. And the dozens of cockamamie ingredients that read like the inventory of a chemical factory on the back of a widely available lemon chicken wrap.

Perhaps the advertisers will get off the hook by citing First Amendment rights of creative expression, and the government can publish "Buyer Beware" in 200 languages. 

It is central to the entrepreneurial mission to make fools and guinea pigs of potential consumers of products and information. They will stop at nothing they can get away with. And because the level of consumer sophistication has hit historic lows, we are made-to-measure stooges for the kind of chicanery that showman P.T. Barnum used when he posted on a sign to attract paying visitors to his museum, "This way to the egress.” 

Of course, the "good old days" as we today reflect on the childhood that we think we remember probably were different from what we experienced at the time. 

But the commercials, which reveal so much about contemporary tastes, were not the Big Pharma elixirs for life-limiting illness, but with dire contraindicators. but rather for anodyne drinks like Tang, Ovaltine and Bosco Chocolate Syrup. There were cereals like Frosted Flakes and Maypo (with pitches by Tony the Tiger and Mickey Mantle, respectively), and over-the-counter remedies for aches of the head or stomach.

But it worked both ways. 

Although there was not yet a cornucopia of cringeworthy ads for attorneys angling for business for class-action lawsuits or recruitment lures by cancer doctors like we have to put up with now, tobacco companies were among the most ubiquitous sponsors until 1971. Cartons of Old Gold cigarettes were given out as consolation prizes to quiz show contestants and tunes for Winston and Kent were hypnotically catchy.

Exploitation has always been a moveable genre in the various iterations of the propaganda business.

Sheep are independent-minded freethinkers compared with much of our current polarized population. Most of us are convinced that our positions on world, national and local affairs and almost everything else are sacrosanct and unimpeachable, and that the movements, cults and vogues with whose racket we have chosen to affiliate ourselves have a monopoly on truth.

Among people on whom dozens of honorary doctorates have been conferred for lifetime achievement, and among winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, are some people who have subscribed to some extremist positions on crime and punishment and revisionist hypotheses on terrorism.

Where have the truth-gathering purists and presenters gone? If the recent allegations concerning CBS’ “60 Minutes” and Politico are accurate, they are just as seedy as Fox News and their kin and kind. The Truth doesn't do any nude modeling anymore. It is subject to the dressing of the dual-aisled tycoonocrats.

"I do not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," wrote Voltaire in the 18th century. Some of our contemporary free-speech advocates preach this enlightened tolerance in the same breath as they order SWAT teams against their adversaries, gag orders against political prisoners, firings of contrarian science researchers, and harsh discipline of upholders of traditional orthodox views.

"What goes around, comes around." That's not Voltaire, but karma. The past victims of free-speech suppression eventually get the chance to indulge in payback and they seize the opportunity.

It's not a Democrat-Republican thing. It's a human nature thing. It's got some ugly sides which are not curable, but they are treatable by a strong dosage of civic and moral education. It's medicine that must be spoon-fed from childhood and self-administered as needed thereafter. 

Its main active ingredient, given a not too indecent heart, was the intellectual discipline and clarity that still are the fruits of developed critical thinking skills. Tragically, these are no longer fused into school curriculums or embedded in our views of the world and ourselves.