OUR INTELLECtUAL AND CULTURAL IMPOVERISHMENT

David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (New York Columbia U. Press, 1998) ("As our Western-American world culture complete its manifest destiny, we see literacy, colloquy, education ending, just as in another form of totalitarian state. "The Germans created and accepted Nazi domination in the name of self-determination; we create and accept ignorance and illiteracy in the name of information. "A television with seven hundred channels of 'choice' is not freedom but coercion. The machine we have created demands to be watched; it bleats at us. 'There is nothing I will not do to hold your attention.' We vote for lobotomized immobility and call it entertainment. Why? It is as illogical as the Vietnam War, the Belgian Orphans, Supply-Side Economics, 'Happenings. "That we call our intellectual and cultural impoverishment reasonable is mysterious, It must therefore cloak a deeper necessity. "For this censorship-through-information seems tone, like war, an intellectual hibernation, the mass equivalent of an antipsychotic drug, the exercise wheel in the hamster cage--a self-administered anesthesia." Id. at 55-56. "How different from the drugged individuals sitting in front of flickering television screens, trying to explain the lunacy of their activity to themselves by calling it entertainment or 'becoming informed.'" Id. at 61.).