Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views
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Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
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I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
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The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
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In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
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An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
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the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
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evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
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Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
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t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
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the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
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One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
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What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
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pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
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More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
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ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
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Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
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For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
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But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
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Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
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The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
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his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
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Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
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The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
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such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
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This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
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But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
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In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
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The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
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It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
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"The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
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Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
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A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
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We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
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But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
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The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
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"History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
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profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
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We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
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To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
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Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
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The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
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I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
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in fact, information and ideas did not become a
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Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
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The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
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What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
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Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
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iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
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That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
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hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
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How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
