Books in Brief: The Unreality Industry

The Unreality Industry, by Ian I. Mit-roff and Warren Bennis (Birch Lane Press, 207 pp., $17.95)

Americans are treated to vast doses of unreality, not to say aggressive rewrites of history, as any viewer of the morning news shows, or any reader of the news magazines, can attest. So one opens The Unreality Industry, subtitled The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives, with some zest. Television and other vehicles of mass communication, the authors write, “have degraded our general level of education and debased our national discourse.” Because of their falseness, society is “less and less able to face its true problems directly, honestly, and intelligently.” Not a bad premise for a book, certainly—but the authors rather quickly set out their own agenda, and the reader is treated to the spectacle of a couple of ex-rads pulling a temper tantrum, with Greed in Reagan’s America the object. “We haven’t had a real sense of purpose, as a people, since the Sixties,” they whine. “The fact of the matter is that the U.S. today lacks a true purpose to give meaning to people’s lives. There are no shared, grand causes for which we are fighting.” These are “mean, greedy times.” The authors’ prose is turgid and rambling, and they mistake complete opacity for “immense complexity” (their favorite two words) and muddleheadedness for revelation. How else to explain what the authors call the “quintessential essence” of the “new thinking,” the ability to “understand and to appreciate complexity and paradox”? Or—and this is a favorite of the more childish of exhippies everywhere—America’s “invention” of Ronald Reagan? “Ronald Reagan is the superconductivity of our minds.” Can anyone explain such blather? Not being able to wish away the past decade, Professors Mitroff and Bennis are content to stamp their tiny feet.

JM

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The Unreality Industry, by Ian I. Mit-roff and Warren Bennis (Birch Lane Press, 207 pp., $17.95)

Americans are treated to vast doses of unreality, not to say aggressive rewrites of history, as any viewer of the morning news shows, or any reader of the news magazines, can attest. So one opens The Unreality Industry, subtitled The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives, with some zest. Television and other vehicles of mass communication, the authors write, “have degraded our general level of education and debased our national discourse.” Because of their falseness, society is “less and less able to face its true problems directly, honestly, and intelligently.” Not a bad premise for a book, certainly—but the authors rather quickly set out their own agenda, and the reader is treated to the spectacle of a couple of ex-rads pulling a temper tantrum, with Greed in Reagan’s America the object. “We haven’t had a real sense of purpose, as a people, since the Sixties,” they whine. “The fact of the matter is that the U.S. today lacks a true purpose to give meaning to people’s lives. There are no shared, grand causes for which we are fighting.” These are “mean, greedy times.” The authors’ prose is turgid and rambling, and they mistake complete opacity for “immense complexity” (their favorite two words) and muddleheadedness for revelation. How else to explain what the authors call the “quintessential essence” of the “new thinking,” the ability to “understand and to appreciate complexity and paradox”? Or—and this is a favorite of the more childish of exhippies everywhere—America’s “invention” of Ronald Reagan? “Ronald Reagan is the superconductivity of our minds.” Can anyone explain such blather? Not being able to wish away the past decade, Professors Mitroff and Bennis are content to stamp their tiny feet.