A couple of clarifications:

We haven’t reached a “mountaintop,” we’ve reached a plateau. As Wallace said, and I’m paraphrasing, just wait until you can hook yourself up to your TV and have [insert person of choice here] blow/eat you.

Some Republicans are smart enough to know that the nutjobs are just that. Some Republicans see it like I do. No, there are not many left of any significance.

J

I have this vague and inarticulate thought racing around in my head that we have reached a kind of a mountaintop in terms of the power of the Televisual Medium (see also E Unibus Pluram) over its audience. People shouting “Hitler!” at Obama and his policies; bringing guns to political events, believing government=bad with no further contemplation, et al, ad nauseam.

I “watch” (! But have also met the man in a very intimate setting long before he became POTUS) Obama and see a pretty nice, intelligent, natural consensus builder with a lovely wife and two so far pretty normal and lovely little kids, who (Pres. Obama) honestly and sincerely believes that the government is not the answer to every problem we face; a man whose been around the block a little in terms of not having a whole lot to live on for many of his formative years and playing around on the edges of a Road Poorly Chosen in his misspent youth. Who plays basketball with some degree of seriousness. IOW, a guy I can relate to pretty well.

And 30% of this country sees him entirely differently, based almost exclusively on which televisual medium-channel they “see” him through, adding the caveat that there are some conservatives who more or less feel the same way. But the lunatics are running the agenda-asylum, I don’t think that is worth debating. And these people think what their own eyes are telling them just CAN’T be as valid as what Sean and Rush are telling them.

TV won.

I think this is a very important point. The book has a cyclical structure: its beginning takes place chronologically after its ending, so there is a structurally built-in temptation to go right back to the beginning and start reading again (ok, quit groaning), to find out more about ‘what happens’. Cf. the obsessive repeated viewing of the Entertainment by its victims. I suspect DFW consciously wanted IJ the book to be a kind of real-world instantiation of IJ the fictional Entertainment. Making the point that we seek that kind of addictive quality in our entertainment.

I know I got addicted to, not reading it sequentially over and over, but picking it up and rereading chunks of it, for a long time after I finished it front-to-back.

The other point I would add was that finishing the “brick” became an addiction in and of itself and added to the construct. I thoroughly enjoyed this masterpiece like few others.

Well said.