And a Picture Tube Shall Lead Them

Unwittingly, then, had I discovered an invisible Empire of the air.

--Lee De Forest, who invented, the Audion tube

The relationship between consumer and advertiser is the last demonstration of necessary love in the West, and its principal form of expression is the television commercial.

--Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

--Fred Allen

It was a dinner party in a handsome apartment in Brooklyn Heights. The view was handsome, and so was the food, and so were the people, with the sorts of faces usually to be found stamped on Roman coins. Even the sullen surreal smear of art on the wall above the lowboy in the living room--a Technicolored artichoke, a test pattern--seemed handsome. I was among professors of literature and sociology. I, who professed nothing more compelling than myself, had just been unmasked as a reviewer of TV programs for a local newspaper. The professors wanted to know how anyone could watch 20 to 30 hours of television a week and stay serious, much less sane. They nodded so sympathetically I thought their heads would fall off and scare the cat.

Well, how many hours of TV did they watch each week? I took up pen and paper. News? Five and one half hours, if one counted 60 Minutes on CBS and Close-Up on ABC. Documentaries? They all claimed to watch lots of documentaries on hunger, crime, inflation, farm workers, pensions, prisons and the Middle East. I didn't believe them. Nobody watches documentaries. Say one half hour, being generous. Dramatic specials? It was the same. Everybody claimed to have watched Shakespeare, Ibsen, O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams. I doubt it. Say an hour. Variety shows? Never, they said. Not even Carol Burnett, or Liza Minnelli, or Cher with Bette Midler and Elton John? No. Still, I gave them an hour. Situation comedies? Not really, except, perhaps, for M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, occasionally, Rhoda or The Bob Newhart Show, and once in a while All in the Family, just to glance at a fever chart on the cultural distemper. No one admitted to watching Maude, and yet everyone had a different reason for disliking it. An hour and a half. Talk shows? Hardly ever. Oh, maybe Johnny Carson's opening monolog, which is always interesting because it tells us what can be safely reviled in the nation this week; and then, if the guest is Joan Rivers or Jonathan Winters or Woody Allen or David Steinberg or Flip Wilson, another 15 minutes; and then, of course, if Norman Mailer is visiting Merv Griffin. ... Two hours. Public television? For Remedial Seriousness--Bill Moyers, Kenneth Clark, Jacob Bronowski, The Robert MacNeil Report--an hour and a half; for Upstairs, Downstairs, an hour; for William F. Buckley, Jr., 15 minutes. Sports? Ah, that's different. Five shameful hours or so, especially professional football and basketball, or if Catfish Hunter is pitching; more in Olympic years; and much more if a local team looks as if it might make the play-offs. Movies? Professors don't count watching movies as watching television. I do, either in prime time or after the late news. They will watch reruns of the B movies of their youth--Andy Hardy Meets Frankenstein's Sister-in-Law, Sydney Greenstreet Goes to a Beach Party, inferior in quality to an average episode of, say, Columbo--until the cows come home and the cartoons come on. Ten hours.

That amounts to about 30 hours of TV a week. And the total takes no account of Barbara Walters, game shows, soap operas, political conventions and campaigns, assassinations, moon shots, moratoria, Saturday-night "massacres" (as distinguished from My Lai "incidents"), impeachment proceedings and Presidential pre-emptions. The pre-emptions are particularly time-consuming because, like jet lag, it takes a day or two to recover from them. We had one President on TV impersonating Ed Sullivan, arms aloft in the famous V, operating as a slingshot, flinging our heads through the screen and into incredulity: Government by jack-in-the-box! Surprise! Freeze the wages; go to China! Look what Daddy brought home from the office--an invasion of Cambodia! Now we have a President who impersonates Joe Palooka: Eat your parsnips and the economy will grow strong. This is known as children's programing.

These calculations should not have rained so much on the professors' picnic. Every survey suggests that intellectuals watch almost as much television as the rest of us, even if their sets--instead of being on display prominently in the living room, like a moonstone or a prayer mat--are hidden away in the study, behind Da Vinci's notebooks, under a Ceropegia woodii through whose tendrils their children must hack a path to Gilligan's Island. Moreover, intellectuals tend to look at approximately the same programs the lumpen do. The evening in Brooklyn Heights ended with everybody talking about Kojak. Did you know that the late Lionel Trilling watched Kojak?

•

Morley Safer, who was a superb correspondent covering the war in Vietnam, co-anchors 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace and Dan Rather. He also takes his Jewishness seriously. Every year he has to explain to his outraged young daughter why there will be no Christmas tree in their house.

Safer used to live in Sneden's Landing, a postage stamp of God's country across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Perhaps the only disadvantage of living in Sneden's Landing is the vagary of television reception. The set in Safer's house couldn't pick up the Channel 13 (public TV) signal.

One afternoon, Safer was ferrying his daughter and several of her friends to the circus or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it doesn't matter which. His daughter's friends were discussing Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Bert, Ernie, Oscar the Grouch and the Muppets. Safer's daughter announced: "We don't have Sesame Street at our house--because we're Jewish."

•

At a series of seminars at Duke University in the winter and spring of 1975, journalists variously electronic and otherwise met to meditate on their profession. Each was esteemed by his colleagues, which is why he had been chosen to be a Duke fellow in communications. Among them was Russell Baker, nonpareil columnist for The New York Times, and Bill Greider of The Washington Post, Alan Otten of The Wall Street Journal, John Seigenthaler of The Nashville Tennessean and Ed Yoder, then of The Greensboro Daily News. Sander Vanocur, who has done time with almost every network there is, presided. And Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who makes as much news as he reports, was the star.

The president of Duke is Terry Sanford, who used to be governor of North Carolina. Terry Sanford runs for the Presidency of the United States the way other people run for the bathroom; he needs to. At a reception in his executive digs in Durham, there was a receiving line for the Duke fellows. On passing through it, each fellow perfunctorily shook hands with local dignitaries, including the gracious Mrs. Sanford. Just once in the course of these introductions did the eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Sanford light up, like the dial of a radio. That was in their gasp of recognition on meeting Russell Baker. Their taste was impeccable, but their sense of what constitutes glamor in journalism was at least a decade behind the times--which may be one of the reasons Terry Sanford is known as the Harold Stassen of the Piedmont. Real glamor resides elsewhere.

It resides, as the students at Duke knew immediately, in Schorr and Vanocur. Among the students, they were celebrities, in a class with sports heroes, movie actors, rock musicians, only serious. Like a Cronkite, a Chancellor, a Howard K. Smith, in the synopsizing of the quotidian on our TV screens, their faces have become front pages, mirrors of events. They are heavy: They have taken on the gravity of all they have reported. Physically, they embody the news. History has thickened, substantiated them. And yet they are edited down to essentials: There isn't time, there isn't room for anything that isn't important. This density exerts a mighty pull on our attention. Through their images, we are accustomed to trafficking with momentous occasions. It is altogether natural, then, that when they come personally among us, we should think it an occasion. Otherwise, why would they be here?

Even the print journalists at Duke deferred to the TV density. The problems of electronic news dominated the seminar discussions. It was clear from film clips that the unblinking camera could record the lump in the throat, the trembling of the hand, the bead of perspiration that may, or may not, signify a lie, whereas the typewriter had to resort to adjectives and adverbs. Nobody believes adjectives and adverbs. The newspaper people were defensive and (continued on page 200)Picture tube(continued from page 152) depressed. What's more, with the exception of Baker, the clothes they wore were not nearly so stylish as those on the backs of the TV people. Newspapermen don't expect to be looked at.

Something similar was apparent at the [MORE] "counterconvention" in New York last year. [MORE] is a monthly magazine specializing in gossip about, and criticism of, the way journalists do their jobs. For four years now, invoking the name of the late A. J. Liebling, who wrote press criticism for The New Yorker, [MORE] has sponsored a convention supposedly "counter" to the establishmentarian meetings of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Last year, all manner of media honchos, mostly male and mostly pale, gathered at the Hotel Commodore to complain about the imperfections of the trade they slum in and to compare book contracts.

Wallace and Rather had to beat off the groupies with a stick. It was not that they were, necessarily, better reporters than David Halberstam or Nora Ephron or Bryce Nelson or Charlayne Hunter. But they were themselves occasions, events--importance made corporeal. So much of our consciousness consists of television images that to meet the embodiment of one of these images is somewhat like meeting what it is you think you know, the contents of your own head. You tingle. At the same time, you are aware of the fact that you are not in their stock of images. They have that advantage over you: an inviolate consciousness ... pure beings of the ether.

A letter to the July issue of [MORE] informs us that two women reporters at the convention sat down to await the start of a panel. A young man wearing staff insignia told them to get up. The seats, he said, were reserved for the panelists. After some discussion, the two intruders vacated the seats. Then Mike Wallace sat down. He was not a panelist and this was pointed out to the apparatchik.

The apparatchik replied: "I'm in awe of power. I don't tell Mike Wallace what to do. There are two kinds of people in this world: people you can push around and people you don't. It's as simple as that."

•

On the Fourth of July in San Francisco, there was something called a Media Burn. It was organized by the Ant Farm, a local collective of "conceptual artists." They piled 44 old TV sets on top of one another in the parking lot of the Cow Palace, soaked them with kerosene and applied a torch. An actor pretending to be John F. Kennedy made a speech. Then someone climbed behind the wheel of a rebuilt 1959 Biarritz Cadillac, revved up and rammed the car into and through the wall of smoldering electrical detritus. Zowie. According to programs distributed before the event, onlookers were supposed to experience a "cathartic explosion" that would liberate them from the cultural tyranny of television. The conceptual artists--along with the network film crews they had invited to the Happening--recorded it all on video tape and then rushed home to see if their denunciation of TV would make the six-o'clock news. It is a nice existential point: We seem incapable of believing that we have actually done something until we see ourselves do it on television. Then it is "real." "Daddy," asked the little girl in the cartoon, "are we live or on tape?" Only Jack Ruby knows for sure.

Lionel Barrymore was ... a great fan of Time for Beany. When Louis B. Mayer decided that television was a threat to the motion-picture industry and forbade sets on his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio lot, Barrymore sent his chauffeur to a local bar to watch the show and report on the plot developments.

--The Great Television Heroes

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I have been writing about television for eight years. Once I compared the medium to Jorge Luis Borges' concept of "the infinite." In Avatars of the Tortoise, Borges claims once upon a time to have longed to compile "a mobile history" of the infinite, which he describes as "the numerous Hydra (the swamp monster which amounts to a prefiguration or emblem of geometric progressions)."

Swamp monster seemed an appropriate simile for television, as mobile history seemed for hundreds of reviews, each no more than 750 words long. Borges gave up on his project because it would require too many years of "metaphysical, theological and mathematical apprenticeship." He settled instead for gnomic riddles, as I have settled here for anecdotes--arbitrarily, if not randomly, strung together.

Borges at least is taken seriously. TV reviewers are not. Learn a trade, says your mother; weave baskets, find God, sell Wacky Packs, eat your Marcusian Rice Krispies. You are unserious because you are powerless to alter events or to cloud men's minds. By the time your comment appears in print, the object of it will have vanished or, if it persists, millions of other people will also already have seen it and made up their own minds. If your reviews are read at all, it is by those who seek a confirmation, either of their own gut reaction to a new program or of their suspicion that you are a jerk. You can no more review TV according to agreed-upon criteria than you can review politics or sports or old girlfriends--or compile a mobile history of the infinite. The lout on the next barstool also considers himself an expert.

But that is precisely the fascination. In writing about television, you are really writing about everything. Swamp monster isn't, after all, appropriate. TV is the sea we swim in. The trouble is that, like fish, we would be the last ones to notice that we were wet or to ask questions about the nature of wetness. Concluding his monumental three-volume history of broadcasting, Erik Barnouw remarks, "Five hours a day, 60 hours a week--for millions, television was merging with the environment. Psychically, it was the environment. What did all this mean?"

In fact, it's now up to six hours and eight minutes a day. That's how long the average set is on in the American home. Ninety-seven percent of American homes have at least one set. The average 16-year-old has clocked more time watching TV than he has spent in school. TV Guide outsells every other magazine on the nation's newsstands. Television is clearly more serious than venereal disease. And yet we go on breaking down this cultural phenomenon into individual components. We study violence, commercials, children's programing, news bias, situation comedy. Of wetness, we have only the dimmest of notions.

Theodore H. White, in his recently published book on the fall of Richard Nixon, Breach of Faith, at least gets the ball rolling!

One year before the [1952 Republican] convention opened, an event had exploded in American life comparable in impact to the driving of the Golden Spike, which, in 1869, tied America by one railway net from coast to coast. In September of 1951, engineers had succeeded in splicing together by microwave relay and coaxial cable a national television network; and two months later, late on a Sunday afternoon, November 18, 1951, Edward R. Murrow, sitting in a swivel chair in CBS Studio 41, had swung about, back to audience, and invited his handful of viewers (3,000,000 of them) to look. There before him were two television monitors, one showing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the other showing the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. The cameras flicked again--there was the Statue of Liberty in New York and Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Both at the same time. Live. The nation was collected as one, seeing itself in a new mirror, on a 12-inch television tube. Murrow then swiveled back to the audience and lifted his dark eyebrows in amusement, as if he were a magician performing a trick....

And one realized this was no trick. On that tube, orchestrated by producers in New York, the battles of American politics would take place with ever increasing intensity; on its stage the emotions of America would be manipulated.

This is typical White--a fruitcake over which, with a heavy hand, the rum of foreboding has been poured. A disappointed romantic, he lapses into Spenglerianisms, gloomy odes. One of his many theses in Breach of Faith is that television, along with public-relations agencies, changed American politics for the worse. Symbol and slogan were substituted for substantive discussion. Well, yes, indeed, "the emotions of America would be manipulated," as they had on the airwaves ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats on radio in the Thirties. It is unclear to me why this method of engaging political reality, of influencing decisions, is inferior to the back-room deals that gave us as Presidents Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, two Harrisons, the on-again, off-again Cleveland, Taft, McKinley, Harding, Coolidge.

Such an argument is just a somewhat more elegant version of the apocalyptic nonsense advanced by Pat Buchanan, a recently disenfranchised Nixon Administration flunky who has found a home writing the "News Watch" column for TV Guide. According to Buchanan, TV news is undermining our democracy. Surveys show that since 1963, when the networks went to half-hour nightly programing, two thirds of the American people have come to rely on these programs as their principal source of information. Other surveys show that, during the past five years, more and more Americans have thought worse and worse of our Government, the business community, the legal profession, the Congress and our military forces. "What television journalism appears to be doing to the American body politic," says Buchanan, "is to undermine the foundation of public confidence in our institutions, and induce a sense of bewilderment in the American electorate."

Gosh. I'd suggest that more and more Americans think worse and worse of our Government because several Presidents have lied systematically to us on television, and one resigned before he could be impeached, and another pardoned him before he could be tried, and almost every agency of the Executive branch seems to have been used for partisan political purposes and/or to have participated in a cover-up of demonstrably illegal acts. We think worse of the business community because of its involvement in illegal campaign contributions, bribery of public officials here and abroad, grain deals, assassinations and other ways of overthrowing foreign governments. We think worse of the legal profession because so many lawyers went directly from Watergate to jail. We think worse of Congress because it let the war go on and let the economy fall apart. (Oddly enough, respect for Congress went up during the televised proceedings of the Rodino committee, a survey it was not in Buchanan's interest to mention, and so he didn't.) We think worse of the military because it lost a war and gained a My Lai.

Of course, the networks brought us all this bad news, sometimes belatedly, as in the cases of Vietnam and Watergate. Therefore, the networks are apparently to blame for doing what most American newspapers have shamefully refused to do for years, which is to tell us what we need to know, whether or not we want to know it. As Garry Wills has pointed out, most newspapers in this country are in business to boost the community; publish ads for movies, restaurants, banks, department stores and retail grocers; provide comic strips, recipes, astrology columns and obituaries. Foreign news is buried, if it is printed at all. National news is hinted at in a couple of paragraphs ripped off a wire-service teletype.

The fact of the matter is that broadcasting--originally a child of the military (wireless, radar, etc.), then a creature of a huge economic consortium (A.T.&T., General Electric, Westing-house, RCA), then a mindless conduit of advertisers and the agencies who packaged all their programs (the food, auto and cosmetics industries, those wonderful folks who gave you the quiz-show scandals)--has almost by accident achieved an independence from commercial and local pressures unknown to much of our free press. It is this independence, this adversary capacity, that has attracted the attention of those in Government who confuse communication with agitprop. "No other nation on earth," says Buchanan, "tolerates the near unrestricted freedom or untrammeled power enjoyed by the national networks in the United States. And the position of these nations is a good deal more easy to appreciate today than ten years ago." Near unrestricted freedom or untrammeled power is presumably the private property only of Presidents, and Presidential speechwriters who perpetrate phrases like more easy. General Amin of Uganda would appreciate this point of view, depending, of course, on the point in time.

Yes, Teddy White is more elegant, or, as Buchanan might put it, eleganter. White deplores the emphasis on "style" that television has brought to politics. (Why, then, was Richard Nixon, an almost totally styleless man, a fierce lump of Silly Putty, elected to the Presidency by the largest vote ever accorded a candidate for the office? To be sure, there were other factors. There are always other factors, which is why the "manipulation" of emotions antedates, coexists with and will outlast television.) He misses the larger point.

During the Sixties, as everybody by now is tired of hearing, our cultural coherence disintegrated. Whatever perceptions we held of ourselves as a people (sons of the Enlightenment, progressive, perfectible), whatever presumptions we indulged of our destiny as a nation (missionary of democracy, cop of the cosmos) took a brutal beating. There were bloody thumbprints of the irrational on every computer print-out. Our leaders couldn't appear in public without getting shouted down or shot down. We couldn't win a war against a bunch of little people in pajamas. Our children despised us and lost themselves in rock music, in the raptures and terrors of drugs, in dreams of blood; high-class, middle-class, working-class, they were all long-hairs--we couldn't see their ears, and if they hadn't any ears, how could they hear the eternal verities? High culture was routed in the academy. Popular culture turned to savage parody. The blacks stopped wanting any part of us. Women got uppity. Gays came loudly out of the closet. Athletes behaved like ingrates. Home-grown monks appeared on street corners peddling the nostrums of the East. Movies were dirty and the theater was abusive and even our astronauts were on the take.

We saw all this on television, and we saw something else, too. With the Presidency imperial in its arrogance, the Congress sluggish and deaf, the courts choked and confused, we saw the disaffected, the powerless, the outraged, the supplicatory and the spat upon petitioning the media, instead of the Government, for redress of grievance. It was, and is, extraordinary--a babel of victimization. See our faces, hear our voices. Even the oil companies, feeling misunderstood and unfairly blamed for the energy crisis, are doing it, sending out junior executives who have been trained before U.H.F. cameras to propagandize on talk shows. Television, these petitioners quite rightly believe, represents access to the consciousness of the nation. The nation may not like what it sees--it certainly didn't care for the McGovern convention, for instance, nor was it much moved by the various invasions of TV studios by militant homosexuals during "live" news programs--but it watches. What the nation knows is what is on TV. I submit that television is our culture, the only coherence we have going for us, naturally the repository of our symbols, the attic of old histories and hopes, the hinge on the doors of change. We may not believe our President, our Senators, our novelists, the deans of our universities, the ministers in our pulpits, the children sullen or surly in our living rooms, Jane Fonda, Robert Altman, Bill Buckley, Wilt Chamberlain or Melvin Belli. But we are more likely than not to agree with Jack Paar when he said, "I am not a religious man, but I do believe in Walter Cronkite."

Nor is this interpenetration, or consubstantiation, of American culture and television limited to the news programs. The situation comedy is nothing less than a socializing agency, as the family and the public school system are supposed to be: The sitcom, after a lot of thrashing about with events and personalities, instructs the members of its "family"--and the rest of us--on appropriate behavior, helps them internalize the various decencies, define the wayward virtues, modulate peeves, legislate etiquette, compromise the ineffability of self with the clamors of peer groups.

In the Fifties, that flabby decade, the sitcom proposed as a paradigm the incompetent father, the dizzy mother, the innocent child. In the Sixties, it proposed the incompetent father, the dizzy mother, the innocent child, war as a fun thing and young women with supernatural powers (witch, genie, magical nanny, flying nun) who could take care of their men and their children, look cute and never leave the house. In the Seventies, it proposes the incompetent father, the dizzy mother, the innocent child--all sitting around discussing abortion, infidelity, impotence, homosexuality, drug addiction and death--and the career girl (have talent, need sex). The inability of the American father to lace up the shoes of his own mind without falling off his rocker has been constant, perfectly reflecting and perpetuating our cultural expectations.

If the sitcom is a socializing agency, the talk show is a legitimizing agency. Ed Sullivan for 23 years used to be our legitimizing agency. His was the power of sanction. He advised us on what was permissible. He authenticated celebrity, significance. Without his stamp--right here on our stage--the package hadn't really arrived, whether it was a mayor of New York, a heavyweight champion, an all-American football player, a beauty queen or Elvis Presley. When he closed up shop in 1971, it was almost as if he realized that another legitimizing agency had usurped his function: Johnny Carson. Carson now presides over our consciousness. He sits, a toad with a jeweled eye, on our nights as though they were lily pads, croaking ad lib, conferring celebrity, defining the permissible. When Carson started making Watergate jokes, Nixon was done for: It was all right to make fun of the President. When he alluded to a toilet-paper shortage, the nation hoarded. When he left New York for Burbank, New York fell apart.

As it dimly perceives our needs as a nation, television tinkers with itself to accommodate and nurture. A nation cannot afford to lose its children and, therefore, television gave us Mod Squad, The Young Lawyers, Storefront Lawyers, John-Boy Walton, Little House on the Prairie. A nation cannot afford the secession of 25,000,000 citizens, even if their citizenship has been but partially and grudgingly conceded, and so television gave us Diahann Carroll (Julia), Bill Cosby (I Spy) and Flip Wilson (the first male TV star since Milton Berle regularly to wear a dress), and when they didn't work, it gave us Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons and a lot of black detectives, private and public. A nation cannot afford offending and alienating women with brains who do real work, and so television gave us, instead of cutie-pie housewife witches, magical nannies, flying nuns and dreamed-of genies, a Mary Tyler Moore, a Diana Rigg, a Valerie Harper, a Karen Valentine, a Cloris Leachman and Police Woman. If two Kennedys were killed off, Hal Holbrook as a Bold One would be born and then be borrowed later on to suggest that homosexuals can have Meaningful Relationships. If the institution of marriage was in disrepute, Rhoda would do the rehabilitating and the nation would weep with joy for the first time since I Love Lucy had a baby in prime time.

In addition, television creates style as much as it records it. Crybabyism was perfect for the Fifties, from Nixon with his Checkers speech to Jack Parr and his fat daughter to Charles Van Doren and Dave Garroway sob-ridden at what President Eisenhower called "a terrible thing to do to the American public"; that is, cheating. The Sixties, as Teddy Kennedy found out after he tried to explain Chappaquiddick on television to an unbelieving public, required something more than squeezing your sincerity like a lemon. TV in the Sixties found it in the style of the media brat. The media brat could be political, like Abbie Hoffman, or commercial, like Mason Reese, but was more likely to be sporty, like Muhammad Ali, Mark Spitz and Jimmy Connors. They are, arguably, the best prize fighter, swimmer and tennis bum in the world. Yet there is something inauthentic about their image on the TV screen and they seem to know it--something pinched in the face, something ungenerous in the eyes, a lack of conviction about themselves as actors, for which they try to compensate by antics and strenuous gesturing. It is a quality of seeming not quite to believe the celebrity conferred on you, so young, by the camera; a fidgety smugness takes over; what if, when the red light blinks off, you cease to exist? The media brats are the new heavies; most of the nation roots for them to lose. They are the children of our watching, and our own children imitate them, and they must be punished.

What are we doing when we watch the Super Bowl each January on television, with a half time full of star-spangled leotards, lunar modules, SAC bombers in friendly overflight, prisoners of war, the obligatory black singing the obligatory anthem and the obligatory Vice-President biting the nose of Pete Rozelle? What does it mean when we celebrate the rising of the national sappiness each spring by watching the Academy Awards? Are both of them exhibition games to prepare for the Bicentennial, when we will bestow a championship cup, an Oscar, on ourselves?

What we are doing and what it means are both aspects of the same activity and significance that attaches to our rapt watching of a Kennedy or a Martin Luther King funeral cortege, an Apollo lift-off, the Olympics with or without the murder of Israeli athletes, Armstrong walking on the moon, a President in China or a President resigning, the world series. We are participating with ourselves as a nation. There is really no other way to participate, given the state of the family, the church, the town, the state, the arts. When there is an assassination or a Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Beatles appear on the Sullivan show, or Joe McCarthy takes on the American Army and loses, or Joe Namath takes on the National Football League and wins, or Kennedy plays Nixon in the Great Debates and Billie Jean King plays Bobby Riggs in the Great Hustle, wherever we are, we turn on the set and watch, because that is what we will talk about tomorrow, that is what we know, that is one of the few things of which we will be certain.

Fragmented, mobile, restless, dispersed, we are nomads on an industrial grid. We get in our cars and go. But when we get there, where are we, and what did we leave behind? With our TV sets, we are one big Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman wherever we happen to be, hearing the same messages, commercials for the salvation of the soul and floor wax. Television is another kind of car, a windshield on the world. We climb inside it, drive it, and it drives us, and we all go in the same direction, see the same thing. It is more than a mobile home; it is a mobile nation. It has become, then, our common language, our ceremony, our style, our entertainment and anxiety, our sympathetic magic, our way of celebrating, mourning, worshiping. It's flimsy glue, but for the moment it's the only thing holding us together.