Often the biggest changes emerge almost unnoticed, and in the 1920s a world-shaping change emerged in the new affluent United States in both the East and West. What do you do when you are rich and self-obsessed, when, In Jesus words, life has become pulling down barns and building bigger ones? Of course the elites of Europe built palaces and stately homes and dressed in finery and pranced about. And the eastern elites did the same. Their venue was the Waldorf-Astoria and their new sumptuous homes. But this was different. They were not nouveau riche, but just rich and the culture was that of the flappers partly divorced from the old culture of Europe. Indeed, many US writers and poets like Hemingway and T S Eliot fled back to Europe to do their work.. It was added to something else in the West, Hollwood, which would change the world. There is much more to Hollywood than this, but this – is big. ENTERTAINMENT – is so big, it dominates all.

What is it? It is something which engages, titillates, rewards the egos of those entertained, but there is nothing beyond it. You come out of entertainment with nothing but a warm feeling. You are rewarded for spending money. You feel good without doing good. You get rich and then you are rewarded by a plethora of forms of entertainment. That is the point of life, though those words would never be spoken, because the hollowness would be out.

Then, it spread. It consumed five, ten, twenty, thirty perhaps hours of everybody’s life. Instead of worshipping God, they were entertained, and the entertained person was often no more than the slightly flattered or exited ego lost in the shallowness of the moment. That was one of the biggest changes in modernism, the emerging on unending shallowness, superficiality and manipulation. Of course, the films, music, soaps, whodunits, cartoons, suspense, musicals, dancing and the rest were often far richer than this characterisation, but the flood tide of the entertained life which began in the 1920s in earnest, was the long slow drift to the trivial. This was the vast flotsam in the estuary of world history. It would dominate American culture and after 1945 much of the rest of the world, often with disastrous effects. The only real question of entertainment was, “Did you like it?”