A Quote by Jay Parini

There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.
One of the things we've learned about Donald Trump is he totally obsessed by the media. He is like the media critic-in-chief. He watches more cable news than people who work in cable news do. And he's extremely thin skinned about it.
American people, what about the American people? I think the president delights in the fact that they have been roofied by technology and pop culture. They're not conscious to any expansion of power, which is why they're happy to exist in this dependant decline.
The country is polarized. And I think part of it - it is not just social media. We get our facts from different places. People self-select with so many different cable channels and so many sources. I think that is a huge problem.
It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.
North Koreans are irrational to some extent, but I don't think they're totally irrational. I think they watch American cable channels. I think they watch the European cable channels. I think they, their decision makers keep up more than we know. And I think they want us to think they're a little crazy.
I'm on the ground, I've been in swing states, I've been talking to the American people, I've been out there speaking on behalf of Obama's record, I've been in the trenches.
For many years, we have had these campaign finance reforms, and they have been failures. Money is more coursing through our system than ever before. Incumbents have used the laws to advantage themselves. And one of the reasons I think they have been failures is we have tried to crush down the money in places like the political parties, and it has squished out into opaque super PACs and sort of hidden channels.
I used to teach on a college level, and I've taught in schools where kids just wanted to be artists, and I used to be furious with them if they didn't read, because they just seemed so - their education seemed so thin if all they could do was pick up a paint-loaded brush and fling it at a canvas. I mean, there was nothing to express there, except maybe their own personal feelings. But if they're not - if they don't have a grounding in the way these things have been expressed by other people down through the centuries, then they're lost.
I've been in America for almost ten years. I've had many parts of the American experience. I've been all over this country and seen many different parts of it. It's just that I'm not an American. I've never become an American. I'm talking about the whole thing-psychologically, citizenship, the whole trip. Of course I've definitely been influenced by America-I'm definitely influenced by the music and the culture.
We've seen how the power of supporting women in media can deeply affect culture and inspire a new generation of courageous trailblazers and for the past 70 years, The Alliance for Women in Media has been doing just that.
There are fewer media writers in traditional settings. That is a beat that many legacy brands cannot afford. On the other hand technology writers are writing about media in ways they didn't before. As a consequence of the shift, there is less interest in many ways in the activities at some media. If you look at coverage of media as whole, the decision-making at the three broadcast networks and the cable channels, for instance, is much less of a focus than it once was. The guts of what goes on at Fox or CNN or MSNBC probably has less impact than it once did. It certainly gets less attention.
My goal is to try to weaponize the American people, try to weaponize the conservative movement, try to weaponize the underground conservative Hollywood movement, to weaponize as many people in the center-right country to try to rectify a generation-plus long problem that has been absolute media bias, absolute media used by the Democratic Party as a tool to defeat conservatives.
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I am the product of the American education system. It is a system that has always been on the lookout for bright boys and girls. It spotted me when I was 14, and I owe a tremendous debt to my alma mater.
Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.
I think HBO and a couple of the other cable channels in America are making some of the best television that's ever been made.
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