Yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed only to pitch
headlong into the slough of despond. Reading the Times only made things
worse. It occurred to me to issue an SOS: can anybody out there buck me up?
Gradually at first but then quite quickly, the malaise evaporated.
When I wake up, I think of all the things that I have planned
for the day. Normally, they amount to something to look forward to, but on days
like today they're empty burdens, chores to be performed for no good reason.
Except for that best of all reasons: don't make things even worse.
What's causing this spontaneous negativity? A dread that I have
to talk myself out of every day - a dread that the United States is in a
rudderless little boat heading straight for Niagara Falls. Does it matter which
particular rocks destroy the ship and its passengers? An oil shock? A debt
shock? The evisceration of the Republic's vitals by theocrats? The rudderless
little boat is, of course, the Administration. We're still too far from the
precipice for outright panic. But the anxiety is wearing.
We liberals stand by uselessly while our countrymen swallow the
line from Washington. Here's a sterling example of how stupefying that line is,
taken from a Times editorial about the White House's refusal, so far, to do
anything about New Orleans.
But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of
Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give
everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the
governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury,
two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President
Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of
a plan.)
How does the man get away with it?
Thomas Frank sheds some light on the problem in the current Harper's
(February 2006). Mr Frank has been trying to understand how Bernard Goldberg's
100 People Who Are Screwing Up America has held onto its Best-Seller
listing. After all, as Mr Frank is able to show, there is nothing, quite
literally nothing, in Mr Goldberg's book that could not be cobbled together from popular
conservative Web sites. How can it be that so many book-buyers lack the critical
acumen to see that Mr Goldberg brings nothing new to the discussion? (And that
they are really - unless they wish to support Mr Goldberg - wasting their
money?) Mr Frank
eventually hit upon an explanation.
Like so much of today's right-win thought, 100 People owes
its success to the remaking of American consciousness by television. The
book's episodic structure, for example, reflects TV's amnesiac style: Each
little hit-piece flickers by, the previous installment's outrage instantly
forgotten, the staggering, mind-stopping contradictions between them (were
Goldberg somehow to critique himself, he would no doubt call them
"hypocrisies") flowing without narrative consequence.
Mr Frank does not leave it at that, but goes on to suggest why television has
such mindless impact.
A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic
speech is that it solves the difficult problem of real-world power - by
which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservative populists who like
to depict themselves as society's victims. If offensive speech is the raw
material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are
not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be
minimized or made to seem less dire by pointing out those liberals'
inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten
seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to
America is clear and present.
Just as speech trumps deeds, so do individuals trump larger social
forces. In the world of the right, as in the world of TV, personalities
rule. Character is king. "There is no such thing as society," Margaret
Thatcher said; there are only individuals.
And so Bernard Goldberg scolds Kenneth Lay of Enron but has nothing to say about
the moldy climate that has spread through the nation's executive suites as the
sun of federal regulation has been dimmed. I want to take Mr Frank's point one
half-step further, if only because I've never thought of this before and am
feeling somewhat eureka-ish: television can't handle institutions. It can only
reduce them to individual representatives or spokesmen. Institutions, insofar as
they are more than rude collections of individuals, are necessarily
abstractions. They're very real abstractions: they own property and file
lawsuits about it all the time. But when television inquires into a bit of
litigation, it can't see the abstraction that is, say, the General Motors
Corporation. It can only see lawyers and executives - individuals all. You,
meanwhile, following the camera and trying to understand what it's showing you -
you will find it very hard to keep the abstraction in your mind, no matter how
bright and sophisticated you might be. The only way to judge television footage
critically - to discover, that is, what is being ignored or withheld - is to
have seen it before.
The invisibility of abstract institutions, from the "Federal
Government" on down, is dandy for conservative pundits, because if we could
see institutions on television we'd be asking a lot of questions about how,
for example, so few people own so much of the country. Instead of which we see
the occasional plutocrat, on his way to prison or not as the case may be. We
don't see his wealth, however. We see a few of the things that it has bought,
but we will never learn from television that most of the assets of the rich are
highly liquid, and therefore much too boring to look at. (Television is also
constitutionally incapable of registering quality, obvious to the naked eye, on
the screen. That's what makes the home-shopping networks so successful. Visit a
TV set if you doubt me.) And we will never see "the rich." So they don't exist -
on television. There are only rich people, and someday, if you're lucky, you
might be one of them. Although that's highly unlikely, given the collective
power of "the rich" to keep you right where you are.
Torture:Others :: Watching Television:Self.
