Dear Jason,

Thank you for taking time to think about this intellectual conundrum with me. What you bring up here (Troulillot’s recollection of “tittytainment” post cold-war) reminds me of some comments that I heard during my fieldwork several years ago from a person who was in the business of hooking of cable/satellite for homes in the U.S. Southeast. He said: “People need two things: food & tv. If they don’t have them, they will do anything to get them. If they have them, nothing else matters.” Their are also correlations in American Christian life where church pastors/evangelists will talk about going from the “milk” (and easy Christian life) to “meat” (a much more robust Christian life). Thought these definitely call for much nuanced conversations, they show additional evidence to what Trouillot was witnessing. Which leads to your last point…do we need a new critique of “enlightenment” rhetoric in the United States & globally?

At the 1995 closed-door meeting of the Gorbachev Foundation in San Francisco, members of what has become a global oligarchy calmly agreed that at some point in this twenty-first century only two-tenths of the world’s active population would be necessary to sustain the world economy. The middle classes as we know them are likely to disappear. Chunks of humanity will become irrelevant. John Gage and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems suggest the motto of that future: “to have lunch or be lunch.” And how will the prosperous fifth appease those who may not want to be someone else’s lunch? Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski, the very one who coined the word globalization, provides the most successful answer: tittytainment–titty as in tits and motherhood, that is, enough milk for the poor to survive poorly and plenty of entertainment to maintain their good spirits. (Trouillot 2003:56)

I discussed this in a long and too-sprawling post called Public Anthropology & Bill Gates. Which may be worth dredging up as Bill Gates declares Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” to be his favorite book of all time.