It is at this point that most of us assert our personal ability to resist the Insidious Tube. The reality is that we are all physically contaminated by it, since it represents one of our pathetically few sources of "information." We are corrupted by television even if we have never gazed upon it, for we must live among those who have gazed upon little else. I admit that it is difficult to abstract from those tiny colored images, largely static, to the minds of those who watch TV eight hours a day. Watch Hugh Downs or Ed McMahon punch those Concentration buttons, as they organize the soothing pairs to yield prizes and bathe pasteurized viewers in the emulsified applause of the studio audience. You are conditioned. You must react with considerable dismay, therefore, maybe even impulsiveness, when They try to integrate Your school.
Then that night Mike Wallace waltzes up grimly to tell us about CBW warfare. I saw this one. I sat there (waiting for Shanghai Express of course) watching all these flashes of botulin and anthrax, hearing them described as more humane than bullets and bombs. A liver-spotted general emeritus told me how germs give me (us-US) a bonus area of death, and how we had germs because the Russians had germs, and how we would like to fall back on gems if that would prevent nuclear holocaust. At the end of all of this Mike lowered his script and reassured me that this complex, emotional, controversial subject (his voice now granitic and beer dark) was being subjected to a general review by President Nixon. Dubious consolation.
What a tragedy it is that astronauts have set foot on the moon before Nixon has set foot in a ghetto. That is what tears and burns: the invisible pain ignored, the visible pain ignored, leaders genuflecting before our conquest (Agnew raising a martini to Mars) of rock so far away, and the humiliating xenophobia which followed. There is no escape from the feeling that the war coverage is stylized and vacuous, that the painstaking objectivity is little more than censorship. Information is valuable only insofar as it educates and therefore changes and refines minds; but since TV will not offend its market with opinions, its objectivity is impenetrable conservatism.
TELEVISION, by pandering to America's absorbent cultural monocracy, makes obsessions of social problems, but produces an incapacitating delusion of anxieties. Arlen writes:
"Television's war" is a prisoner of its own structure, a prisoner of such facts that although TV is the chief source of news and information for the majority, the News and Information Act is still just another aspect of the world's greatest continuous floating variety show.
Intelligent viewers must draw their conclusions from the interstices between the impartial statements and the muteness of our antagonists.
The TV merchants realize that the floating variety show is the best way to maintain the integrity of the land. The fashionable theorists, particularly McLuhan, speak of the unprecedented-rate-of-apocalyptic-change. Yet after the Beatles, Che Guevara, the Civil Rights Act, and even the moon landing, social conscience may be developed so far beyond the power of people to change anything that the fiery political frustration is being mistaken for the reform. And television may be the cardinal source of this paradoxical feeling of unprecedented turmoil throughout an essentially sullen and unmoving nation. Arlen's most moving pages try to capture this sorrowful ambivalence:
People look at Vietnam... the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man's jacket (who is the man?), part of a face, a woman's face. Ah, she is crying. One sees the tears. Two tears. One counts the tears. Two bombing raids... I wonder what it is that the people who run TV think about the war, because they have given us this keyhole view; we have given them the airwaves, and now, at this crucial time, they have given us back this keyhole view.
His pessimistic conclusion is that TV may have even pitilessly deluded us into thinking that we are free to change all of this.
The best essay, Grief speak, touches lightly the days of the assassinations, the tedious reporting maligning what had been lost, the mediocrity of the industry in a moment of human want.
"The question," the announcer said, " is how much the train has been slowed down enroute from Newark." No, The question all along (we had known three days ago who was killed) was who was dead.
Then the Miami seance and Chicago bloodletting, and the profane act of seeing such things on such a mechanism. The dim realization wends upward that the blood on these domestic streets and the blood on those faraway oriental hills flows through common vessels.
Television does not suggest this. It gives us Eric Sevaried, that sallow Odin, reading one hundred sensible words as insurance against controversy, never mentioning that Chicago, or the capture of Hill 881 was an unconscionable waste of life. It gives us commercials of flagellating concupiscence so that, after twenty years of them, we begin to view the whole world as a commodity, the uncommitted and benighted as the greatest consumer product. As it crowds more harrowing specials into the week, we turn away with less and less hesitation. It is possible that if Jesus Christ had spoken only on television, Christianity would have died with the emptying coffee cups. Television neither informs nor entertains but inters us.
Still, perhaps one a year it inadvertently reveals what we need to see and hear. One example which Arlen describes was the irony of a Vietnam special by CBS newsman Morley Safer. As Westmoreland asks about basic training and remarks about the high morale, a soldier tells Safer that he dislikes riding down people's gardens. Safer then routinely asks him about the war. The soldier looks melancholy (did we see it?) and then, in one of those moments when everything comes alive in a gesture, tells Safer passionately: "The country's so beautiful, fertile, and everything."
Perhaps we have made a melodrama of television's effects on us just as we used to make a romance of its possibilities. Nevertheless, I feel that it reflects the contemporary human heart's division against itself, and divides that heart more seriously. Unless television's discreating capacities are stressed, social revolution may only stoop down to gather up the fragments of a shattered mirror.