Has reality TV swallowed us whole?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 5, 2024 – In 1838, before an assembly of America’s highest achievers, at the pinnacle of new world learning, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered an address that is as refreshing and insprational today as it was then.
Then, it got him banned from Harvard for a generation, and eventually consigned to the dustheap of history by graduate seminar supplicants and textbook writers, who bury his brilliance under a tombstone etched Transcendentalism.
It’s a virtual hop, skip, and a jump from Salem to Concord in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but it is a light year journey from the old world creeds that led to witch trials in one place and liberation from dogma in the other.
Already a 7th generation New Englander in the early 1800s
However radical the establishment regards him, then and now, Emerson was a dutiful son who followed his father into the ministry. Being a seventh generation New Englander, made it as natural for him to cast off Old English beliefs as a snake sloughs skin.
Puritanism and other sects of Protestantism, plus Roman Catholicism, are not the only sects and creeds employed by a cornucopia of emperors, princes, queens, and kings to create western civilization, but they’re roster enough for the purposes of this argument.
It was the general ruin of western civilization that produced, first the trickle, then the flood of refugees from the virtual enslavement of English and European serfdom and aristocratic servility.
To one degree or another, all dogma flows from the premise that God spoke once and forever after sprinkles the population with anointed interpreters. “Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject;…”
Thus spoke Emerson, but what he said is neither to be titled nor entombed; it will not be codified, will birth no dogma, nor breed a clergy. It’s domain is the the individual soul and it’s meaning invites individuals to organize themselves into bodily kingdoms of equal queens and kings, princes and princesses. The only price of perfect liberty is the promise of personal responsibility.
With no way to monetize it, no money-centric organization has any use for what is to be learned from Emerson. Not only was he deemed a heretic by his fellow pulpiteers in the business of religion, but soon enough he won the scorn of friends like Daniel Webster and those who would preach an accommodation with slavery.
The poison of the Compromise of 1850 was injected back into the American bloodstream in 1964 when Strom Thurmond, the chief racist in the U.S. Senate was poached by the former Party of Lincoln, to aid in the design and implementation of their foul and cynical southern strategy.
In 1971, that strategy was spelled out in the Attack on the American Free Enterprise System, commissioned by Nixon and written by Big Tobacco lawyer Lewis F. Powell, Jr., in exchange for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.
The 2025 Project, which goes into effect January 20, 2025, is the codification of Powell’s memo, even if Daniel Webster isn’t available to sell you on it. Instead, on TV you’ll find a devilishly clever clergy of MAGA sycophants and supplicants ready, willing, and able to transform election day nightmares into a stainless steel prison whose warden is a serial felon escaped from reality TV land.