The last thought of resisting that reality

 Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1985 [Visual Art Source] 

[T]he original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society's apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process, making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality. The liberation which amusement promises is from thinking as negation.  

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Dialectic of Enlightenment, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 115-116)