Amusing Ourselves to Death
Postman, Neil
grumpy about having to say goodbye to the fine, old, value-laden academic discipline of political philosophy, subsumed decades ago by the far less ambitious political science. The Brookings scholars...
...Its opponents will not be reinvigorated until their frivolous fascination with the processes of government gives way to an agenda that can win broad approval...
...The wench...
...He then declares, "Suppose you were he that can read this most awful decree upon what shall come...
...She is forced at swordpoint to enter that yawning maw in the mountainside, which reeks of Fear, Foul Deeds, and Dread Destiny...
...Lacey how he would react were he to meet with one who "said that he had pierced the secrets of the world to come—I mean not those of .Heaven, but of this world we live in . . ." and, further, "that this prophet reveals that the predestinate future of this world is full of . . . endless calamity...
...Nor does one get the feeling that Mr...
...It is characteristic of this book that Mr...
...As the sun sets, Dick emerges, running as though in terror for his life...
...The liberal-academic intelligentsia has kept itself largely free of the taint of substantive belief dating back at least to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who allowed that he would be unconcerned if the United States were heading toward hell in a handbasket so long as proper constitutional procedures remained in force...
...All this is fine for the faculty club, but elections ultimately hinge on real issues and arguments, and the Democrats need to sink their teeth into afew...
...Television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing...
...Half an hour later she, stark naked, comes walking out, "like one who wandered in her sleep . . . like one planet-struck . . ." The young lord, however, has been as if swallowed up...
...Sure: but it promises a lot of' fun...
...Why, in these circles it's just a drollery...
...John Fowles's A Maggot wants starting over, not from the beginning, but from, say, page 52, which is when the intriguing narrative is abandoned for nearly four hundred ensuing pages of tedium and tendentious foolishness...
...Reagan conservatism is alive, well, and popular because it engages a specific I have yet to find anybody who thinks the ubiquity of television in America is a good thing...
...He is very good on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, equally good on the network evening newscast as art form: All television programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...
...Had Neil Postman been content to criticize television on an ad hoc basis rather than to engage in grand theorizAMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH: PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN THE AGE OF SHOW BUSINESS Neil Postman/Viking/$15.95 Terry Teachout 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 ing, this might have been a better and more valuable book...
...agenda, a concrete set of objectives...
...Says Mr...
...Postman to confess them, even more graceful for him to have let them rest in peace...
...They drag out minutiae of circumstance endlessly, going over and over old ground without breaking much new...
...out of obsession with a theme...
...and Soviet) are in the process of realizing the consequences of their interaction and of developing the wisdom and discipline to manage it safely...
...Can he truly be dishing out a rehash of all the junk we have had come off the presses since Rosemary's Baby...
...The landscape is the then brutish wilderness of Devonshire, in England...
...Bartholomew," is presented as a worldly, etiolated, capricious, and at times cruel dilettante-scholar (or mystic, or necromancer) who has a strange relation with the lackey, that of master, yet also almost fraternal, too, and maybe (it is strongly hinted) even something else...
...But their conclusions are broad, too broad to be made without examination of genuine issues...
...After all, most people view the world through their television screens...
...What we read are transcripts of appalling length and discursiveness that occupy the bulk of the 150,000-plus remaining words of the novel...
...Every television pro-gram must be a complete package in itself...
...Might not a most condign divine anger at such blasphemous breaking of the seals of time be assuaged at the price of your silence—nay, your own life...
...To focus narrowly on the effects of a single (and obvious) phenomenon like biased news coverage is completely to overlook the personal effects of television on its viewers and the neighborhood effects of television on society as a whole...
...This is not the same as actively disliking television...
...They know what they know about art, politics, manners, even the lifestyles of the rich and famous, solely from having seen then) on television...
...Not that there aren't a few sharp moments in Amusing Ourselves to Death...
...America in the age of the founders was an intelligent, even intellectual society where everybody read and took reading seriously...
...The young gentleman, who is addressed as "Mr...
...He is given to wild generalizations that collapse under gentle prodding...
...For Mr...
...but we quickly catch on that this is a space ship from another world/time...
...Jones waits all day long in hiding...
...Postman should be full of good words about "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report," which he praises as "an unusual and gracious attempt to bring to television some of the elements of typographic discourse" without stopping to wonder why a television show should even at-tempt to ape the forms of typographic discourse...
...It would have been graceful for Mr...
...We have been tipped off that an elaborate charade is being enacted...
...How, for example, might a Mario Cuomo respond to Republican charges of Soviet malfeasance...
...Oh, she is along to enter into the service of the rich aunt...
...So long as the writing stays pitched at this entertaining level, not taking itself too seriously, we go along...
...But he is a theorizer, and a liberal one at that...
...And yet there is reason to suppose that the situation is not hopeless...
...Fowles as being a Negro, by the way...
...He interrogates everyone he can search out who met, or saw, or was connected with the young lord's party...
...Though he had been paid off and dismissed the night before Dick hanged himself and the young lord vanished, he covertly followed the party next morning into a sylvan wilderness, in the heart of which they come upon "a black-mouthed cavern...
...In his "Prologue," this heretofore masterful spinner of the ambiguous tale confides in us the meaning of "maggot" as he applies it to this work...
...the invention of television undermined the Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...cognitive foundations of that long-lost Arcadia and is making us "sillier by the minute...
...Holmes and his intellectual heirs can perhaps be understood to see the American polity as primarily a secular creation of the Enlightenment—a set of clean pipes—while Reaganites regard the nation as the beneficiary of the Judeo-Christian heritage—liquid gold running through the works...
...Fowles, some mildly interesting, others bristling with prejudice, on the morals and mores of eighteenth-century England...
...When she is obliged to enter the cavern, she sees suspended from the ceiling, under a blinding light, what she describes as a maggot...
...Fowles intersperses these examinations with fawning epistolary reports from Mr...
...Generally speaking, though, Mr...
...It is with these effects in mind that Neil Postman, a professor of "communication arts and sciences" at New York University and the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, has written a new book called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business...
...Lacey, who is a professional actor in the employ of "Mr...
...Claptrap...
...The riders never progressed to any destination, but simply rode along a skyline . . ." (My emphases...
...I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from television...
...The time is' the early eighteenth cenReid Buckley is a novelist and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking...
...Yes, she is with child, but not by the Prince of this World...
...that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play...
...Bartholomew disappeared without a trace...
...It is an end fraught with ominous-sounding mystery...
...He is absolutely correct, for example, in claiming that "the best things on television are its junk," though not quite right (or grammatical) to add that "no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it...
...Is it not best that you should accept to be its only victim...
...Their essays are replete with graphs revealing such arcana as the amount of money appropriated by Congress compared to that requested by the President...
...The narrative virtually stops...
...Fowles concocts for these eighteenth-century travelers are contrived and outlandish...
...Ayscough to his principal, and with essays by Mr...
...Bartholomew" (we know he is Lord-something) is, it seems, impotent when it comes to heterosexual intercourse...
...Postman's argument is simple—almost simple-minded...
...Falwell's mother wears army boots...
...Postman has never seen "Hill Street Blues...
...Jefferson is his ideal founder, education his all-purpose nostrum for saving America from the hideous morass of showbiz politics...
...There is the obligatory huffy chapter on religious broadcasters which forgets to mention that Billy Sunday was preaching to huge audiences in true Graham-Roberts-Falwell style long before commercial television saw the light of day...
...She told this cockaninny tale to Jones for fear he would ravish her on the spot, which was probably good thinking on her part...
...But the wench is in reality no maid...
...He can turn to John Steinbruner's essay on political security and learn that "One can guess, and hope, that the two political systems (U.S...
...Dan Rather visits us for a mere half-hour each evening, but Captain Furillo and Joan Collins and Kermit the Frog are with us always...
...One would think that Reed Irvine had never watched an episode of "The Cosby Show...
...Worse...
...The greatest noticer of our time, of course, has been Peter Drucker...
...He is being taken by his kind uncle to visit the uncle's rich childless sister, into whose good graces it is hoped the wastrel will insinuate himself...
...Postman's approach is a bit too casual...
...Planted axioms haunt every page of Amusing Ourselves to Death...
...It is the larval stage of a winged creature...
...In any event, while Democrats starve for issues, the idea manufacturers give them only bloodless academese...
...Even Lionel 'frilling was a "Kojak" fan...
...Postman: Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on television...
...Well, he botched it...
...The girl is dressed as a June bride, poor dollink...
...Apparently Mr...
...The Brookings offering is no help...
...Chesterton observed that an organism usually is healthier when it focuses on ends rather than processes...
...But just when our interest is most keenly fastened, Mr...
...The Brookings scholars are indeed rigorous scientists...
...Now comes the deposition of Mistress Rebecca Lee, the harlot-heroine...
...There is, however, a more solemn, ulterior, possibly more evil purpose for the long journey, a climax that will involve the girl meeting with and giving herself to (it is suggested: nothing is made so clear that it will spoil the broth) certain personages from other climes (other worlds...
...Maybe they really are engaged only in value-free efforts to stake out tiny areas of knowledge...
...The cultural significance of television, however, goes much deeper than the sticking points of any particular interest group...
...It is an acknowledged task of the schools to assist the Beware novels that sport introductory notes, which more often than not are sly and disingenuous disculpations for a work that the author has uneasy suspicions is wanting...
...It is whitish, and has the vermiculate shape...
...That is, he breaks into his yarn to air anachronistic philosophical and political opinions of deadly earnestness and overwhelming left-secular conventionality, which further encumber an already overloaded narrative The pieces of the puzzle at length begin to come together when Ayscough cross-examines the braggart known as Farthing, whose true name is David Jones...
...She is A MAGGOT John Fowles/Little, Brown/$19.95 Reid Buckley THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 43...
...As usual, it suffers the withering dismissal of being called "a dubious theory" that "remains on the edge of academic respectability...
...Fowles then explains that this "fictional maggot was written...
...The elitism of it might shock him, but Mr...
...The servant Dick is a deaf-mute but not the idiot we are at first given to understand he is...
...Postman himself is capable of some pretty trenchant noticing from time to time...
...Postman to acknowledge the influence of Marshall McLuhan doesn't make his literal recycling of McLuhan's ideas about the relationship between form and content in television any fresher...
...young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their culture") For Neil Postman, television is the force that has made America stupid...
...We learn from what is gossiped about these travelers by the raffish bodyguard, a braggart called Birthing, that the young gentleman has been in disgrace for his spendthrift ways and is even now in debt . (a . mortal sin in eighteenth-century England...
...To be able to carry such a process very far, each will have to undergo considerable internal political realignment...
...Postman's alley...
...I could not quit yawning...
...Fowles has boiled in his pot...
...The book is yet another occasion for liberalism to lament the unhappy marriage to academia, with its almost religious devotion to procedure...
...She explains now what really happened...
...It is "far larger . . . than any political party...
...tury...
...Postman has examined real-life television programming with any genuine sympathy or thoroughness...
...Conservatives invariably harp on the mortal sins of Dan Rather, liberals on Ronald Reagan's amazing Teflon coating, sociologists on the consummate vulgarity of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...
...This historically shaky line of reasoning is not quite as bold and original as the author seems to think...
...Internal political realignment can do wonders, no doubt...
...The four are shortly joined by a fifth rider of military appearance, carrying cutlass and blunderbuss, who is evidently a kind of escort...
...This serves to introduce Henry Ayscough, Esq., a solicitor in the employ of Bartholomew's sire, who diligently investigates what happened...
...Does the Communist ideology present any obstacle to the salutary effects of realignment...
...Fowles tosses it aside by a strategic blunder...
...Ronald Reagan is a retired actor, Tom Brokaw uses makeup, Pat Robertson has a talk show, Jerry...
...Or that he should devote four pages of a slender book to the group discussion which ABC appended to "The Day After" without having anything to say about the show itself—a prime specimen of the bizarre and extraordinary phenomenon of "docudrama," a subject which would certainly seem to be right up Mr...
...a small group of travellers, faceless, without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event...
...No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure...
...There are the obligatory fatuous meliorist solutions attributed to all the usual suspects...
...Something on the order of supply-side economics, which, by the way, is the single Reagan idea to get any sort of hearing in the book...
...When Jones runs after the girl, she relates that she was compelled to take part in a satanic rite the climax of which was her rape by Satan himself (who is earlier represented by Mr...
...which sacrificial act will open to the young man the gates of virility and mayhap much else Oh, yes: there is a good deal more at stake We learn from a conversation with the "uncle," a Mr...
...Fowles as though they were heavy stage furniture across the floorboards of his imagination, what little development there is being limited to the girl, and that accomplished by mere assertion...
...What a shame And quel damage in fact he does to those brilliantly evocative first pages...
...The young gentleman may be a bit of a bore, yet there is something appealing about the girl, bawd that she is...
...The motives that Mr...
...No previous knowledge is to be required...
...Bartholomew," that the aristocrat is embarked on a mystical adventure that will terminate, or culminate, on the morrow...
...Postman might do well to give some thought to a very different and much less palatable thesis: Television is the force that has made America's stupid people powerful...
...And the extreme triteness of his loudest complaints about television doesn't help matters any...
...She conceives of this unholy union . . . and we lament to ourselves: How flat a surprise Mr...
...We are not present at the denouement promised for the morrow...
...But as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about...
...She is a London prostitute...
...There are four riders: a severe young man on a mudsplashed bay, who wears a tricorn "trimmed discreetly in silver braid," followed at a few paces by an elderly gentleman in sober dress on a plump horse, he trailed by a third animal on which are mounted two young people, the one a manservant, the other a mysterious girl muffled up "in a brown hooded cloak . . . so that only her eyes and nose are visible...
...In criticizing television, however, intellectuals tend to fix on a single pernicious aspect and let the rest off easy...
...He has hired the girl these three weeks in the hopes of exciting anatural lubricity- by observing her disport with his servant Dick, but this has failed...
...lb enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms...
...Instead, we behold an extract from the Western Gazette, from which we glean that Dick hanged himself that next day and that Mr...
...There are Dark Doings in store, and everything we see is a hall of mirrors...
...they are shoved by Mr...
...I would gladly testify before the Federal Communications Commission as to the manifold merits of this excellent idea...
...Neil Postman praises Lewis Mumford for having been a "great noticer...
...The riders never truly achieve the kind of organic destination that develops out of character...
...There is the obligatory huffy chapter on political advertising which argues that "history can play no significant role in image politics" without stopping to point out that Ronald Reagan, the consummate image politician, uses his skills to advance the agenda of the most historically aware movement in recent American politics...
...If there were no music—as is the case when any television program is interrupted for a news flash—viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly life-altering...
...For some years before...
...Bartholomew asks Mr...
...It bears also the more ancient meaning of a whim or quirk...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
