Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (3 page)

What a bizarre situation!

It was suddenly possible for an entire nation of 200 million people to be spoken to as individuals, one to one, the television set to the person or family, all at once. I was chilled at the thought, realizing that these conditions of television viewing—confusion, unification, isolation, especially when combined with passivity and what I later learned of the effects of implanted imagery—were ideal preconditions for the imposition of autocracy.

At that time, however, my own definitions of the nature of autocracy were confined, like those of most Americans, to the model of single, charismatic leaders. Hitler. Stalin. Chiang. Franco. Mao. Differences among these were submerged in the model of the powerful leader, enforcing his will, ruling absolutely.
That
was autocracy. Television seemed to be the perfect instrument to help bring on that kind of control.

My fears were encouraged one day in 1971, as I sat around my office reading the morning
New York Times
and noted a small item. It concerned a Pentagon proposal to President Nixon that an electronic gadget be attached to every television set in the country. Capable of being activated directly by the president, it would switch on every set in the country at once. It was to be used, of course, only in case of extreme national emergency. My mind flew into a paranoid pattern:

It’s 4:00 A.M. Two hundred million people are awakened by the national anthem. Where is it coming from? What’s that light over there? It’s the TV set. There’s the President!

“My fellow Americans, it is with extreme regret that I awaken you from your well-earned rest. Yet we are all met with a crisis so grave as to require it.

“An exhaustive investigation by your law enforcement agencies has uncovered a massive conspiracy to destroy our démocracy, a conspiracy which enjoys at least the tacit support of thousands of students, journalists, attorneys and even certain judges and elected officials.

“As your Commander in Chief, I have ordered the immediate arrest of the terrorists and the individuals in their support groups, whatever their official rank or prestige.

“I have also invoked the implied powers of the President to govern in such times of grave crises, free of the usual encumbrances.

“I am hopeful and confident that these emergency measures, taken to safeguard our democracy, will be short-lived.

“Thank you, Godspeed and good night.”

The set switches off by itself. Was that a dream? Back to sleep.

A few months later I saw a follow-up story in the
Times
that said the Pentagon proposal had been scrapped. Apparently the administration felt people might “misinterpret the intentions” of such a project.

In retrospect, I know that my scenario was fantastic and unsophisticated, deriving from my simpleminded notion that autocratic interventions can take place only through a single leader or a coup. But whatever the intentions of the Pentagon and President Nixon, who has since asserted that presidents may create their own laws, it was clear that the existence of the technology itself had created a new potential.

We can all be spoken to at the same time, night or day, from a centralized information source. In fact, we are. Every day, a handful of people speak, the rest listen. Brutal and heavy-handed means of confining awareness, experience and behavior may actually be a thing of the past. In many ways, television makes the military coup and mass arrests of my imagination unnecessary. We can begin to grasp the irrelevance of such acts now that a more subtle coup is underway.

It takes place directly inside the minds, perceptions and living patterns of individual people. A technology makes it possible, and perhaps inevitable, while dulling all awareness that it is happening.

II
WAR TO CONTROL THE UNITY MACHINE

M
ARSHALL McLuhan did not help us very much in our early efforts to understand television. By the time he was popular in the mid-1960’s we had already been through the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Kennedy-Nixon debates and then the Kennedy funeral which had plugged eighty million people into the same experience at the same time.

None of these events had caused the slightest ripple of alarm, but rather produced a rush to praise our new electronic unity. The mass viewing of the funeral, particularly, was hailed in religious terms, like some kind of breakthrough in the evolution of consciousness: everybody unified in grief, transcending the conditions of their individual lives. Human ingenuity had now advanced to the point where technology could produce a nationwide, one-mind experience, previously thought to reside only in the realm of the mystic.

McLuhan, who saw so much, could have helped us see through that crap. Instead, because of his celebration of our electronic connection, our planetary-tribal village, he effectively encouraged support for the techno-mystical-unification theme.

His words entered the arena of talk show patter and word-play. “Hot and cool.” “The medium is the message.” People struggled to find concrete meaning in these phrases. They became the basis of hundreds of conferences and thousands of cocktail party debates. Most people were satisfied that they understood something if they grasped that, because of television, we were now vibrating together to the same electronic drumbeat. Joyful at what looked like a new and positive unity, we failed to perceive, nor did McLuhan help us become conscious of three critical facts, 1) it was only one drumbeat, 2) this drum could be played only by a handful of players, 3) the identity of the players was determined by the technology itself.

McLuhan is not a person who presents his arguments in political terms, so perhaps he can be forgiven for failing to drop the other shoe, to tell us what should have been the most urgent meaning of the medium. Perhaps he was as dazzled as the rest of us mortals, suffering the same reaction to this new technology as the deer staring at the headlights of the on-coming car. Like the religious one-minders before him, he drew no distinctions between one sort of unification and another, leaving the rest of us to sort it out. But we didn’t.

At that moment, anyone interested in social, psychological, educational or political processes should have dropped everything and begun intensive study of the effects of this new phenomenon which was capable of unifying everyone within a new, reconstructed experience. Instead, all factions saw it opportunistically.

Everyone with a message to deliver—government, corporations, the military, community groups, gurus, teachers and psychologists—began drooling at the possibility of gaining access to this incredible machine that could put pictures into millions of people’s heads at once. It was clear that as life increasingly moved away from the streets, community centers and marketplaces, one message on television—thirty seconds on the Cronkite news—was worth more than a thousand hours of organizing or whistle-stop political touring or hundreds of newspaper ads.

A war began for control of the machine and its use. All competing factions shared the idea that if they could gain access to it, television could communicate their message as well as any other, that television technology was only a neutral instrument. Intent on changing other people’s minds, they did not consider that television might change those who used it. All joined in an implicit conspiracy to increase the use of television.

Advancing from the Sixties to the Fifties

My own feelings about the effects of television began to progress beyond the Nixon-Pentagon sort of fantasy as I observed its effects on community groups and Movement people who, believing in its neutrality, sought to use it.

I watched and participated as they changed their organizations’ commitments from community organizing, legal reform processes or other forms of evolutionary change to focus upon television. Educational work was sacrificed to public relations work. The goal became less to communicate with individuals, governments or communities than to influence media. Actions began to be chosen less for their educational value or political content than for their ability to attract television cameras. Dealing directly with bureaucracies or corporations was frustrating and fruitless. Dealing with communities was slow. Everyone spoke of
immediate
victory.

A hierarchy of press-oriented actions developed. Press conferences got coverage once. Rallies brought more attention than press conferences. Marches more than rallies. Sit-ins more than marches. Violence more than sit-ins.

A theory evolved: Accelerate the drama of each successive action to maintain the same level of coverage. Television somehow demanded that. As the stakes rose, the pressure mounted to create ever more outrageous actions.

The movements of the 1960s had become totally media based by the 1970s. The most radical elements were up to the challenges of the theory of accelerated action. They “advanced” to kidnappings, hijackings, bombings. The sole purpose of these actions was often no more than media exposure.

Sensing that television was now the country’s main transmitter of reality, individuals began to take personal action to affect it.

A young Chicano man hijacked a plane to obtain a five-minute TV interview about the ill treatment of his people.

A young man in Sacramento took some bank employees hostage so that a TV news team would report that neither he nor his father could get a job.

Lynette Fromme shot at President Ford, she said, so the media would warn big business to cease destroying the planet.

The SLA kidnapping of a newspaper heiress signaled the final stage of abstraction. It exhibited a warped genius in that it allowed the SLA to demand successfully that their communiques would be published unedited.

However, because it owed its whole life to the media, existing nowhere else, the SLA was subject to cancellation at any time, and it was cancelled most thoroughly, like a series with slipping ratings getting the ax.

Less radical elements did not suffer the SLA’s dramatic demise, but the cycle of fast rise/fast fall was similar for many. Ralph Nader bloomed in the media and then became tiresome. The ecology movement, fitting the holocaust model of TV news, burst upon the scene and then declined. Watergate excited expectations of government reform, but then it was old news.

Once the U.S. was out of Vietnam, the once hot antiwar movement was off the tube. A few years later Jimmy Carter was able to appoint some of the architects of the war to high positions in government. It was as though the war hadn’t happened, or was merely another action-packed drama, replaced by next season’s schedule, with the same actors playing new, equally believable, roles.

Meanwhile, those seriously committed Movement people of the 1960s who were not willing to go on to terrorism began dropping out, moving to farms in Vermont and Oregon. Or, and I know many who have done this, they got jobs writing television serials. They justified this with the explanation that they were still reaching “the people” with an occasional revolutionary message, fitted ingeniously into the dialogue.

“The people,” however, were as they had been for years, sitting home in their living rooms, staring at blue light, their minds filled with TV images. One movement became the same as the next one; one media action merged with the fictional program that followed; one revolutionary line was erased by the next commercial, leading to a new level of withdrawal, unconcern and stasis. In the end, the sixties were revealed as the flash of light before the bulb goes out. The seventies became an advanced version of the fifties. And as we shall see in Chapter Seven, it was all made inevitable by the thirties.

Style Supersedes Content

The changes wrought upon movements by the emergence of television were similar to the changes in traditional political process.

Richard Nixon, probably the first major public figure to understand television deeply, realized that four hours of TV debate with Kennedy had turned probable victory into slim defeat. He understood that TV appearances were more important than personal ones. By the time he ran again, he had revised his image. He became the “new Nixon.”

Even though many people understood that his change was only cosmetic, he won. This confirmed for me the idea that something in the nature of television imagery allows form to supersede content. Once elected, Nixon made his first appointments—Ziegler and Haldeman—from advertising, the field that pioneered conveying pseudocontent in place of substance.

By his third campaign, Nixon appeared
only
on television; never in public. McGovern, meanwhile, made the mistake of trying to deliver “content” through a medium predisposed to resist it.

Having used the media so well, Nixon developed a fatal arrogance about it. He and Agnew may have been right in claiming that their various transgressions were nothing special in American political history. But like the SLA, they forgot that they themselves were media illusions. The gravest mistake that can be made by a media creature is to assault the machine. The machine doesn’t care about its fantasies. A new one will do. Bringing Nixon down was just as good for ratings as supporting him. Better. More action. The only goals of the machine are to continue to be the real power behind the throne, no matter who is king, and to remain the primary factor in all public perception. Television has the power to create presidents, and it has the power to destroy them.