Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (28 page)

Children’s games are largely based on their experiences. If they live in the country, their games will involve animals. If they go to movies, their games will reflect that. If they watch television, you can see it in their games. In all cases, the characters and creatures they are imitating are based upon the pictures of them which they carry in their minds.

I have watched my kids after they have seen
Star Trek
on TV. Yari, the older, becomes Captain Kirk—efficient, “manly,” determined, in charge, unafraid, coplike. Kai, the younger, is second in command. He plays Spock, affecting his behavior: wry, unsmiling, unfeeling, scientific, detached, cerebral.

The games continue for hours. Often they replay the same story a few times, as though they were rehearsing it or attempting to memorize it. This, of course, is exactly what they are doing—rehearsing it, to ingrain it in themselves.

Another day, I noticed that Yari was taking giant leaps around the garden and making a clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. I realized that this noise was one he made frequently while doing something active and that it was an imitation of the electronic sound that accompanies all of the bionic acts of the Bionic Man. Later that week I watched the program with my kids.

During one sequence the Bionic Man is shown running at bionic speed across a field, to the accompaniment of the clicks. The movements are shown in slow motion, so they become especially vivid. I asked my kids about this:

How to answer that? Is it bad? Is it bad for kids to do a natural thing—emulation, imitation—which is how children for millions of years have learned about the world? That is certainly not bad. But in this case, they were imitating a mechanical person. I can’t tell him it’s bad because I don’t want him to doubt his own learning processes, and yet the more he practices and maintains his bionic images, the more he imitates them. Slowly, he assumes the role in real life. The Bionic Man slowly becomes real in the person of . . . my kid!

I told him it wasn’t bad and changed the subject.

In Chapter Four I described how emulation is a method used by human beings to understand and integrate nature into themselves.

To get an idea of the naturalness of the process, just think of ways in which you are like your parents or your children are like you.

I believe that a parent may have less to do with the characteristics a child picks up from the parent than the kid does, because of simple evolutionary emulation processes that continue constantly. We attempt to train children in one area, only to discover that they’ve picked up parts of ourselves that we’d rather they hadn’t noticed.

My son Kai has begun to walk with his toes spread slightly outward, ducklike, as I do, and also as my father does. I can remember the moment as a child when I
chose
to imitate my father’s walk, out of a simple desire to be closer to him, to know how he is inside. Now, thirty-five years later, I walk exactly as he did at
this
age, even though it is not a desirable way of walking. One’s balance is not ideal, physical spontaneity is limited and movement possibilities narrow. The manner of walking amplifies a certain static emotional condition that my father had to struggle with and which, finding it also in myself, I don’t much like.

In retrospect, I can see that this way of walking is illustrative of an instinct to “hide” rather than “act,” and perhaps its roots go all the way back to his childhood in the Warsaw ghetto. Who knows? It hardly matters by now. And yet the walk has passed through three generations and is beginning to reappear in Kai.

The point is that imitation from generation to generation is automatic. The tool used is the image of the person being imitated. As I walk, I imagine my father’s walk. This makes it possible for me to repeat it. Without the image I could not repeat it. After many years, of course, the image has submerged though the walk remains.

We tend to speak of image emulation as applicable only to children, as though at some fixed age one ceases to learn in this way. This is absurd.

As there are ways in which my children imitate me, there are also ways in which I imitate them. Kai, for example, has a gentle and efficient way of speaking and moving, and I have often caught myself copying it. Yari has an energy and enthusiasm—a brightness—which I have learned to call upon my-self. He teaches me how by merely being that way. I copy him as the Indian copies the panther and the Zen student copies the river. Slowly I become more like both of my children just as they also become more like me.

The same applies to husband and wife. It is a subject of
New Yorker
cartoons that husbands and wives (and even pets) begin to resemble each other after years together. I have seen countless examples of it, and I believe my wife and I are such an example. After living with someone over decades, one picks up her or his mannerisms, facial expressions, even lines on the face and body attitudes. There is no way to avoid doing this. It’s automatic. Humans are hopeless emulators. We can’t stop it if we wish to. We look around us, and whatever is there day after day becomes the environment for our ingestion whether it is the Bionic Man or one’s own family. We absorb it, take it into ourselves, turn into it. We become each other’s mirrors or buddhas or mandalas. Slowly we turn into what we see. It is a basic way of learning how to be. The process goes on for our whole lives.

San Francisco, unlike New York, achieves its primary cultural influence not from Europe but from Asia. An example of this occurs in many city parks from about six A.M. daily to eight A.M. I walk through one such park each day about seven-thirty A.M. The scene is this: about forty people, half of them Western, half Chinese, are facing an old Chinese man who is doing Tai Chi.

I have watched the way he teaches. He
never
speaks (he knows no English). He merely faces his “class” and moves. They copy his movements. If there is something particularly difficult, he does it several times. There is no discussion of theory; the movement itself is the theory. Once you have absorbed the movement inside yourself, the meaning of the movement invades your consciousness. So the teaching method is 100 percent imitation. After the class is over, the students practice with the image of him in their minds.

Imitating Media

Perhaps you have caught yourself kissing another person as you first saw kissing in the movies or on television. My children have a phrase to describe this: “television kiss.” It is fortunate for them that they’ve noted that there are television kisses and other kinds, because it will help protect them from absorbing it, taking it into themselves where it will come back out ten years later, like a replay.

Most of us did not make that distinction as we sat in darkened rooms or theaters as children. Since we didn’t see all that much
real
kissing, the media kiss became our image of kissing. We found ourselves producing that model of kiss later in life.

I was fourteen years old when I tried kissing for the first time. I imitated Humphrey Bogart’s kiss, but I didn’t feel it. Only later did I realize that perhaps Bogart didn’t feel it either; he was merely kissing the way the director said he should. So there I was imitating a kiss that was never real in the first place, worried that there might be something wrong with me for lacking the appropriate feelings and failing to obtain the appropriate response.

The journalist Jane Margold was driving home one night in Berkeley with her brother, Harlan. Suddenly a man crawled into the street right in front of them. They screeched to a stop and then, stunned, just sat there for a moment. They finally got out and cautiously went up to the man to find that he’d been stabbed several times in his upper body, was bleeding profusely and was in danger of dying right there. The man’s assailant was nowhere to be seen.

In describing the event to me, Jane said that she instantly flipped into a media version of herself. She had never faced anything like it before and had no direct feelings. Instead, playing through her mind were images of similar events she’d seen on television or in films. The media images superseded her own responses, even to the point of removing her from the event. She was there, but she didn’t experience herself as being there. She was seeing the event, but between her and it, floating in her mind, was an image of an implanted reality which would not get out of the way. She thought such thoughts as: “This is real; there’s a wounded man lying here in front of me, bleeding to death, yet I have no feeling. It seems like a movie.”

In fact, it was the very movielike quality that eventually got her into action. Without feeling, she performed mechanical acts. She and her brother comforted the man, directed traffic, dispatched people to summon police and an ambulance. She became extremely efficient, but throughout, she had the sense of performing a script.

In
Myth America,
Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality.

“To the degree that pictures seem real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith. . . . Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent. . . . Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romantic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife. . . . All are expressions of [male] feeling made visible through art . . .”

The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the sexes that is only now being challenged.

The images became the mirror against which the whole society compared women’s behavior, and because of their power they succeeded in becoming a personal and also a political and economical reality. Yet, those were print images, which are not nearly so powerful as the moving images that have since achieved an even greater presence in everyone’s mind.

The women’s movement of today, like all other movements that are interested in recovering self-definition—black, Oriental, Indian, worker, homosexual and others—has discovered that its struggle must be waged not only against the creators of the images—the people and media who purvey them—but also against the very mental images women already carry around in their own minds; stereotypes, which they emulate with their own behavior. Because of this, many political movements have taken on aspects of personal therapy movements. The goal is to rid oneself of what are often called “tapes.” This phrase, heard equally from political people and people involved in many therapy systems—from “radical psychiatry” to, yes,
est
—is used quite literally. The tape is the image, the picture one carries in one’s mind that is continually replicated, unconsciously, however useless, self-destructive, or idiotic it may be.

When women carry inside their heads the image of the idealized subservient housewife-mother-secretary, they automatically tend to imitate the image. This continues until the moment when they say, “Wait, I didn’t create this person in my head; who did?”

When black people invented the image “Black is beautiful,” its point was to destroy a previous image carried in the minds of whites and blacks alike that black was not beautiful. Only then could personal change be made, leading to political results.

The suppression of Indian people in this country, at first achieved with guns, was later accelerated and confirmed by the media images of the Indian as a savage who needed to be saved by white, Western education, morality and life-style. The critical ingredient in this was the implantation within young Indians themselves of the belief that this image was a correct one. With that came self-hatred.

Only by realizing that the image carried in the mind—the tape—is
real
and
implanted
is it possible to disconnect oneself from the cycle of taped replay and subvert an otherwise inevitable process whereby the image is translated into reality.

You may be among those who believe that the evolution of image into reality takes place via the mysterious processes implied by Hermes, the Tantras, the Cabbala or the Rosicrucians. Or you may be impressed with the biophysiological evidence that images are carried in the cells. Or you may believe that the emulation process is the primary way image becomes reality. Or you may believe, as I do, that the evolution of image into reality involves all these routes and others.