Amusing us to ... exactly what?

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If we can set aside the rapidly gathering angst, cynicism and disgust sweeping the country this electoral autumn, is there one dominating emotion we might discover lurking underneath?

FDR famously said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but this year, I am very much fearing that corrosive emotion -- fear! For the first time, at least in my lifetime, there is the sense that we don't know where we're going, and that somehow we can no longer grasp and hold fast our most cherished values.

Perhaps thinking back for a moment might provide us with some much-needed wisdom. Remember the great 19th-century American writer Henry James, and how he characterized America in his sad, revealing novel "Daisy Miller." Remember the simplicity of the beautiful, but culturally clueless, young American girl who swept through Europe, breaking every social rule of the Old World -- not with her evil, but with her innocence -- until that cynical world destroyed her.

Then remember the great British author Graham Greene's novel about America in the world, "The Quiet American," in the second half of the 20th century. This time, it was not innocence but the arrogance of ignorance that doomed the idealistic young CIA agent who thought he was planning utopia, but instead plotted death and destruction in Vietnam in his unworkable "third way" between communism and democracy.

If those books characterized their eras, is there a book that might characterize ours? There is, but unlike those two, it is not a novel. "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," published in 1985 by the late Columbia University professor Neil Postman, is a marvelous book -- an analysis of the press and society, and also, as it happens, of the changes that have come to ultimate fruition in the events of this disturbing fall.

"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other," Postman wrote. "They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. ... When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

Ironically -- or perhaps we should say, tragically -- the same day I got my treasured copy of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" down from the shelf, Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, was quoted averring how cable news networks have played a "ridiculous" role in the presidential campaign, not by reporting endless emails or walls on borders, but by blurring Postman's line between entertainment and news.

The Financial Times wrote: "Mr. Baquet described the conduct of Fox News and CNN as 'in the long run, bad for democracy ... This mix of entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world nominated as Republican presidential candidate.'"

That same day, the papers were full of news of how CNN and its related media businesses will approach the milestone gross profit in 2016 of $1 billion, while Fox News is projected to have its most successful year ever, its gross profit topping $1.67 billion. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, Gannett and The New York Times -- actual newspaper companies, where actual news is seriously published after being covered by actual newspaper reporters -- all announced that print journalism was essentially continuing to fail, in large part because of falling readership.

In Daisy Miller's 19th century, America felt relatively safe in the world, its frontiers protected by the arms of two great oceans. That isolation permitted it to nourish innocence. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the country was fearful mostly of the communist menace, with Vietnam the most obvious example of that fear; power begat military recklessness.

But now the problem is not so easily grasped. It is, as Neil Postman so brilliantly pointed out, not only cultural but also voluntary -- we have given up intellectual sobriety for entertainment, most dramatically and dominantly in the entertainment "news" television that is forming the reality of this election.

And that dirty little secret is beginning to sneak out. In the Chicago Tribune, for instance, Joseph Epstein, one of America's most able essayists, wrote "that the culture of contemporary American life has gradually but genuinely changed in the direction of coarseness and instability ... is indisputable" and "our thwarted political development and degraded culture (are) all too glaringly exhibited in the Clinton-Trump election campaigns."

But the cultural debasement that afflicts our society cannot just be voted in -- or out -- of power. Once gone, intellectual and social cultivation are immensely difficult to inject back into a culture. Daisy's innocence has turned into willful ignorance, and the Quiet American's errant belief that he could single-handedly change the world has turned into national confusion and guilt where proud, prudent, productive patriotism once prevailed.

Meanwhile, every day, 24/7 cable TV and all those other vulgarians dominate the American public square, amusing us to ... exactly what?

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years.