“As millennials, your voice is important,” begins a faux Hillary Clinton campaign ad from Saturday Night Live. After observing that there are “so, so many of you,” Mrs. Clinton (Kate McKinnon) assures millennials, “Luckily I, Hillary Clinton, share all your exact same beliefs — and I always have.” As the ad progresses, Clinton morphs in to Bernie Sanders and at the end, wearing a baggy suit and receding grey hair, declares, “I’m whoever you want me to be and I approved this message.”

Whether by coincidence or by design, the skit manages to tell us all we need to know about political ads. Those ads are designed to tell nothing about the candidate and everything about ourselves.

After reading L. Gordon Crovits Wall Street Journal article “Donald Trump, Celebrity Politican” in which he cited Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, I pulled out my copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Postman wrote in 1985, twenty-four years after Boorstin. By that time, television had become the dominant media for public discourse and politicking.

He began with a key observation: television — all television — is about entertainment. “Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”

While comprehensive policy documents, detailed speeches about political philosophy, discourses on constitutional and international law, and Lincoln-Douglas style debates all have their place, that place is not on TV. Why? Because they are not entertaining.

With Man v. Food just a click away, the networks and politicians know that if they expect us to watch political speeches, campaigns, debates and Congressional hearings those things had better entertain, amuse and please us. That is, politics has to become show business and the actors (pun intended) have to become celebrities and celebrities are all about image over substance. “Show business,” wrote Postman, “is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principle instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”

Television, he argued, doesn’t make clear who the best candidate might be. In fact, he said, television makes it impossible to identify the best candidate for two reasons: the focus on image and the obliteration of history.

First, television and now (to some extent) the Internet provide images rather than discourse. What’s worse, those images are not, argued Postman, images of the candidates. They are images of ourselves. “For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.”

If you’re angry, says the candidate’s image, I’m angry. If you’re worried, I am too. If you’re religious, pro-choice, pro-Wall Street, anti-Walmart, whatever, “I’m whoever you want me to be,” as SNL’s fake Hillary so aptly put it.

Second, television obliterates history. “For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia,” Postman wrote, “it requires a contextual basis — a theory, a vision, a metaphor — something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. … With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”

So it’s no surprise that bringing up the details of Donald Trump’s seedy past, rude outbursts and business failures has done nothing to derail his campaign. Nobody cares. In the same way, the endless recitation of Hillary Clinton’s deceptions, lies and scandals has failed to do damage. Her supporters, like Trump’s, are so enamored with the image they see in the mirror that history… well, there is no history.

The only hope Postman held out was that with the advent of computers in classrooms (remember this was 1985) teachers and students would become increasingly media savvy and would “learn to distance themselves from their forms of information.” But that would require teachers who are steeped in words, books and reason making Postman’s hope as unrealistic as it is quaint.

Christians, on the other hand, are not people of the image, but of the word — the written Word of God and the living Word of God incarnate. We of all people should resist being taken in by shiny images that lack substance, ideology, reason and history. We of all people should sort substance from image and perhaps (Please, God) inspire others to do the same.