Teets, 9/13

Saturday Night Live reached new heights with their coverage of the 2008 election. The video with “Sarah Palin” and “Hillary Clinton” was the most downloaded video of 2008. SNL mocked the two women by using a lot of real dialogue in a comedic way. This video is disturbing because it shows that our society would rather watch and download a mockery of the election, and not the election itself. To me this demonstrates that our society has somewhat of a grip on realism. People know that a lot of what politicians say is simply false, so they decide to not tune in. However, people will oblige to watch comedy playbacks of speeches on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. While most people would argue that our society has a shallow view of reality, I would argue that our society is becoming increasingly more cognizant of what is real and what is not.

A statistic that is laughable is that more people vote for American Idol than for the the President of the United States. To me this shows that America has become centered on Entertainment. People choose to view what entertains them, which coincidentally is more advertised than anything else. The entertainment business on the whole has become our version of reality. “Reality” TV shows are viewed on a week to week basis by millions of people. I don’t have a statistic, but I can only imagine that more people watch Television “fluff” than world news. Our view of reality has changed from global to national. While some people know what’s going on in the world, those that don’t aren’t missing out on much. American society has the power to elect officials to run our country. We do not, however, have much more power in terms of what goes on in the world. We do not collectively have the power to change the world.

The world is so corrupt and full of lies I posit that we are better off living in the reality that entertainment has created for us.