Guilty Pleasures Take the Edge Off Reality: Inside the Entertainment-Industrial Complex

Eisenhower cautioned us against the military one; if only Orson Welles had warned us about the vastly more insidious assemblage, the Entertainment-Industrial Complex. Reality has become much less real (and important) in contemporary American society. America is a country that came of age with Industrialization and was accompanied by the creation of a mass media public sphere. More often than is desirable, people’s favorite binge show is more important to them than what goes on in the real world.

How does this retreat into a fantasy world evidence itself in our real world politics today? Let’s talk about how fantasy has bled into reality and try to understand what it means for the future of our country.

Teacher: Ward Regan

Nowadays

56-06 Cooper Ave, Ridgewood, NY 11385

Tickets $12

Ward Regan has a Ph.D. in Labor and Cultural History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He teaches history and philosophy at New York University Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies Program. He wrote and widely performed his own show, A Paranoid’s Guide to History.