We -Americans - are amusing ourselves to death. Via entertainment.

The last Nail may have just been driven home with the release of Apple's $600 iPhone.

Neil Postman wrote a book by that name in 1985, though it was focused only on the impact of 'image' television on the decline of the 'written word' and a consequent decline of other things. A wikipedia summary of it said:

"Postman's best known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, a historical narrative which deplores the decline of the communication medium as television images have replaced the written word. Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning."

Now, with the Internet, Video Cell phones, Ipods and IPhones it has gotten - by orders of magnitude -worse.

While the world is going to hell, with wars, genocides, insurgencies, overflowing jails and spreading criminality and drug dependence, violent crusader religious wars, children killing children, famines, panics - scientifically justified or not - about carbon, emissions/global warming, and the cost of oil, thus car gas, the most important thing to millions of Americans is whether the Apple's iPhone is easy to activate with AT&Ts network or not and how fast web sites display.

When I was pioneering with the earliest 'personal computer' and 'acoustic modem' technologies in 1977 and examined the earliest home brew 'computer bulletin board' software created by Ward Christiansen, I saw a potential cultural revolution. And that was that the personal computer/communications revolution was going to make it possible for people to not remain - as they increasingly had become in the Television Age - just passive CONSUMERS, but also to become creative and productive PRODUCERS - of information, education, art, value, wealth, wisdom, and literature. And that "Electronic Democracy' might flourish. Everyone could debate and discuss public issues with each other laterally and NOT be just dependent on 'experts' or news anchors, or even the Political Publishers of newspapers or magazines. Or beinfluenced by gussied up 'images' of candidates who might look good on television or in online videos, had deep pockets to buy political advertising,but had empty heads.

But that has not happened. We have become, instead, a Nation of Consumers of Entertainment. Amusement. In which the devices pouring out of technology companies like Apple overwhelmingly are intended to let us reach 'entertainment' no matter where we are, walking, riding, sitting on the pot, in bed, in class, anywhere. Music, videos, movies - pirated or not - a 'little' text. News, not really about the world, but about the DUI's, marriages, divorces, drug overdoses, liasons, even the court appearances and jailing of celebrities - like Paris Hilton, where the jailing was but another photo op, to be surpassed by the next over-the-top personality.

All of which has made Celebrities our heros. To be emulated by our youth. Actors our elected officials. (Abraham Lincoln could not be elected today - too ugly) Work is for illegal Immigrants, not Americans. National defense is for volunteers. Education iswhat one can find on google, neither from school nor parents. If one even knows who their parents are. And even sports have become entertainment, more than healthy 'competition.'

The Romans, before the Decline and Fall of their Empire, were entertained and pacified by Bread and Circuses in the Coliseum.

Now the Coliseum is the iPhone.

I am glad I will not live to see the Fall (I'm approaching 80). Just the Decline, on the slope that is getting ever steeper.

I am just depressed that my children, and grandchildren, and now great grandchildren will the ones who have to pay the piper after I am gone.