Slim Pickens riding a nuclear warhead to certain Armageddon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove

When media critic Neil Postman wrote his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, he couldn’t have known that the very week that the world’s two greatest nuclear powers lurched closer to full-scale war, much of our attention would instead be focusing on a spat between two famous actors at the Oscars. Right now, far more people are aware of the fact that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for telling a disrespectful joke about his wife than know that Russian generals have rebuffed repeated efforts by their American counterparts to speak by phone, even though the latter conflict has far more importance to life on earth. But here we are, and Postman couldn’t be more timely.

Postman’s point was that in an age of information glut, much of what we see and hear has no actionable importance to our lives. He wrote:

“You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself [a] series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? … I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. the last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into — what else? — another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

Thus, today, it doesn’t matter much if you spend your time obsessively scrolling to stay on top of the fighting in Ukraine or the fighting between Will Smith, Chris Rock and the Motion Picture Academy. Both are spectacles; we are just spectators. If saying this offends you, then ask yourself: What am I actually doing to help the people of Ukraine? What am I actually doing to try to keep the US and Russia from sleepwalking into war? Donating money or goods is a start, but is that enough?

The fact, reported by the Washington Post last Wednesday, that “Repeated attempts by the United States’ top defense and military leaders to speak with their Russian counterparts have been rejected by Moscow for the last month,” is the most worrisome news I’ve seen about the Ukraine war since it began. Without such conversations, the danger rises tremendously of localized events spinning out of control.

“A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border,” James Stavridis, who served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told the Post. “A local commander might respond immediately, thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons.”

What can we do about this? Almost nothing. At most, we could try to send our leaders a clear message: No escalation over Ukraine. Don’t do anything that increases the risk of a direct clash between NATO and Russian forces. A no-fly zone, which would require NATO attacking Russian air defenses? Too risky. Loose talk about regime change in Moscow, like President Biden’s emotional declaration that Putin can’t remain in power? Too inflammatory, because it feeds Vladimir Putin’s belief that the West is out to destroy Russian power and pushed his back to the wall.

But do such messages, like the call last week by the Dalai Llama, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and other Nobel Peace laureates to reject war and nuclear weapons, have any effect? Only if they are reinforced by local organizing that ensures that elected officials all the way up to the White House know that the public doesn’t want to sleepwalk into war. And as best as I can tell, none of the major groups in America that claim to speak for peace or alternatives to war are doing anything to organize such a mass movement. (Sharing updates and useful commentary is not organizing.) Thus two-thirds of the public can tell pollsters that they want a no-fly zone imposed, because they don’t understand the risks, and far more voices are calling on President Biden to be tougher on Putin than are warning about the danger of another superpower collision like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I’m old enough to remember when we had a mass movement for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, and also when people held urgent meetings with their Members of Congress and marched to try to keep the US from launching an unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2002–3. Groups like MoveOn.org, which played a central role in antiwar movement organizing twenty years ago, are still around. But for reasons I don’t understand, they are not trying to activate their millions of members. Maybe we’re just all too transfixed by the spectacle of the moment. Maybe we are just going to amuse ourselves to death.