"America the Trivial"
August 29, 2013
Why is the country consumed by the trivial while snoozing through the essential? We have become a nation of instant electronic communications — Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, and the Internet — even as reading and math scores plummet in our schools, and newspapers and magazines go broke. We can communicate information at the speed of light but have trouble finding anything meaningful to send back and forth.
In prior times, writers, directors, and actors endeavored to present television drama characterized by good acting and engaging scripts. Now, it is more profitable and apparently more entertaining just to film pseudo-celebrities talking, eating, and agonizing over the day’s banalities, as with Keeping Up with the Kardashians.