Day 33 - The "Now This" Conjunction

Long ago, Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) & Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) engaged in some skirmishes that they called "She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!". Here's what Postman said about TV in an interview:

...human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn't take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it...in this century, as you must know, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several enemies: ignorance, superstition, cruelty, cowardice, neglect, moral fervor.

Television is the principal instrument of this disaster, in part because it is the medium Americans most dearly love, in part because it has become the command center of our culture. Americans turn to television not only for their light entertainment but for their news, their weather, their politics, their religion, their history, all of which may be said to be their furious entertainment. What I'm talking about is televisions preemption of our culture's most serious business. It is one thing to say that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter. It is quite another to say that on TV all subject matter is presented as entertaining and it is in that sense that TV can bring ruin to any intelligent understanding of public affairs.

...And stranger still is the fact that commercials may appear anywhere in a news story, before, after or in the middle, so that all events are rendered essentially trivial, that is to say, all events are treated as a source of public entertainment. How serious can an earthquake in Mexico be or a highjacking in Beirut, if it is shown to us prefaced by a happy United Airlines commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jeans commercial.

Indeed, TV newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech altogether. What may be called the "now this" conjunction. "Now this" is a conjunction that does not connect two things but does the opposite. It disconnects. When newscasters say, "Now this,' they mean to indicate that what you have just heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no bombing so devastating that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, "Now this." The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the matter, let's say 45 seconds, that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it, let us say for 90 seconds, and that you must now give your attention to a commercial. Such a situation in my view is not news. And in my opinion it accounts for the fact that Americans are among the most ill informed people in the Western World.