The timing could not have been more perfect. Just this morning, I finally sat down with the 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, loaned to me some three months ago by a friend who recommended it as a “must-read” for my journalistic understanding.

Then, this evening, I turned on the news to hear about Hillary Clinton’s new YouTube video with husband Bill said to spoof the last episode of The Sopranos.

In writing about American politics’ inherent connection with the country’s “consuming love affair with television,” Postman observes, “Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an actor, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to speak for the virtues of a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.

“Political figures may show up anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought odd, presumptuous, or in any way out of place. Which is to say, they have become assimilated into the general television culture as celebrities.”

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Postman makes the point that because “drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems,” the implications for political discourse are that people will accept as normal assumptions derived from and amplified by television.

He writes, “For example, a person who has seen one million commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures—or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty. Such a person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life.”

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In an absolutely astonishing on-the-mark-for-2007 foreword to his book, Postman compares the fear of George Orwell’s 1984 coming true with the reality of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World being the real outcome.

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing,” he writes. “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.

“As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

“Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

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Toward the end of his book, Postman revisits this theme with, “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”