What brings this to mind? I've been asked three or four times now by fellow immigrants, "Why did you leave the US?", because to them the idea of wanting to leave such a nice place is unfathomable.
The only conclusion I can draw is that everything they know about the US comes from our entertainment exports. I think they have a sort of split understanding of how that works. On the one hand they understand objectively that most of what's shown on television and in films is pretend. On the other hand, they buy into it anyway and believe it is how things really are. That we live in nice houses and all wear nice clothes and have money to spend on whatever frivolous things we want.
I haven't managed to effectively communicate yet that things aren't that great back home in the real world. There's too much to get into. Like the people I know who are homeless and either live in their car or sleep on a more fortunate friend's sofa. Or like the people I know who got laid off from multiple jobs. Or the people I know who have had foreclosure and the loss of their home hanging over their heads since the housing crash. The people who have medical debt that they can never hope to pay off. People in the real world have lives that are nothing like television. They live in substandard housing and drive old cars and they don't all look like movie stars. Most of them are about one paycheck away from being on the street. They drink and they fight and they have family problems.
It made me think about how US entertainment exports have done such a spectacular job of convincing everyone in the world of how wonderful life is in America. How shallow and comparatively rich we are. What spoiled people with silly problems. And it's not just the rest of the world we've fooled, we fool ourselves too. We seem to believe what we see on television and experience frustration when we can't keep up with the standard of living of the people on TV. Why can't we look like them and dress like them and have their problems instead of ours? Maybe the worst is when we emulate them because this is the example we're being presented with.
Not even the "reality" TV represents reality. It's a complete misnomer, but people believe the false advertising. It's like professional wrestling. Everything is staged and made to look spontaneous. It's also overacted, which should have been what gave it away. This is where "average" Americans are over-represented in American entertainment and it is cringe-worthy to watch how we are being represented. From the Jerry Springer Show to Honey Boo Boo to Jackass, we see working-class Americans at their worst and most obnoxious. It's like a freak show of America's poor on display. It's a grotesque representation to be confronted with, and you start to believe that ordinary people really act like that and indulge in all of their lowest impulses without hesitation. And we believe it all because it's advertised as "reality". We're presented with people squabbling over $50, or feeding their kids "skettie". A lot of the poor people I have known didn't understand that shows like this are making fun of them. We're the joke. The entertainment value comes at our expense. At the one end we're presented with people to admire and on the other we are given people to look down on, and we are told that they all represent us. It makes us look ridiculous. It's making fun of "the poors" and making us out to be ignorant and petty. It also gives people permission to copy the behavior they see modeled for them. The lowest common denominator is being set much too low.
Sometimes I think American television and film have created a kind of alternative reality. They might have created more than one, the alternative fantasy world where nobody is fat or poor and everyone is beautiful and lives in a nice house and the alternative nightmare world where people are overgrown idiot children who can't manage their lives and are seemingly unable to comprehend how their problems are all self-inflicted. And it has convinced us that the world is fair in the sense that in movies and on television the hero always wins, good deeds are always rewarded and bad deeds are always punished. People always get what they deserve in the movies. It reinforced the "Just World" fallacy, and now a lot of Americans believe that if something bad happens that you must have done something to deserve it, and if something good happens to you then you must have done everything right. It's a worldview that doesn't account for the bad things that happen to good people who were following the rules or bad people getting rewarded in spite of their not following the rules. This divorce from reality leads to some powerful cognitive dissonance in people when they can't reconcile how things really are with how they believe things should work.
And then there is programming claiming to be factual and educational, like 24 hour news coverage and cable channels dedicated to history and science, but there's a lot of entertainment and exaggeration going on there too. It's hard to find enough newsworthy material to fill 24 hours every day, which led to sensationalism and dissecting every irrelevant detail in order to drag a story out and fill more time. Sometimes they manufacture controversy out of thin air just to fill time and attract viewers. Channels like the History Channel focus on things like the losing side in WWII and "Ancient Aliens", and encourage conspiracy theorists. Most of them are pretty thin on facts or educational value. This is how we learn about current events and history and the rest of the world.
And then there's advertising. I believe that the term "false advertising" describes so many things about us. There's the image we present to the world, the image we ourselves are presented with like a fun-house mirror. And advertising is something we've been inundated with since we first sat in front of a TV. Even the sitcoms are advertising a lifestyle for us to aspire to but never attain. We're bombarded with advertising telling us that we're inadequate if we don't use their products. You should be taller or cooler or prettier and wear nicer clothes. We should drive a new car and eat at restaurants and well....spend money. I think right now America is having a collective breakdown because they're being confronted with the fact that they can't afford to have that lifestyle. They never could and possibly never will, and the disconnect between reality and the fantasy has become too obvious for them. It's no longer escapism when it only reminds you of how your life is in comparison. For a while we were able to maintain the illusion, but the cracks are beginning to show and we can't do it anymore. Not just that, but it distracts us and keeps us from dealing with our real-world problems because we won't look at them.
All of it is pretend, and we've been taken in by it. We buy into what we see on television and believe that it represents reality. I knew that about Americans, but I hadn't realized that the rest of the world believed it too. I suppose it makes sense. It's all they ever see of us. Most of them will never see the average working class American because even if they visit America they never get beyond the tourist areas or the city. They never see how we really live or what we really look like. All they have to go on is television and film representations of us. They think we all have the lifestyle the people on television have. They don't get to see poverty or child abuse or domestic abuse or substance abuse problems. They don't get to see homelessness or people struggling to make ends meet. They don't get to see our reality at all.
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