A SUDSY AFFAIR
Steinfels, Peter
A few days from now, ABC-TV will unwrap a product called "Soap," and by the time you read this, all the television critics will have been in a lather. I have not seen "Soap." I will not be...
...It has philandering spouses, an impotent husband, two members of the same family having an affair with one person (a tennis instructor), a homosexual...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Box 121, Jenkintown, Pa...
...I t is hard to imagine what this innocent man of the cloth perceives as controlling what's on the air now, other than economic leverage...
...Now I could fill a book with generalizations, mostly uncomplimentary, which Father Greeley has tossed off about intellectuals, professors, academics, etc., with nary a nod to "such things as data...
...however if one can judge from the extracts from his novels which he includes for some reason in this nonfiction essay-travelogue, it does raise certain questions about the differentiation of the fictional style and the essay of self-exegesis...
...To write as Mirsky does that "when half the argument is missing, Wolfson jumps in and makes it up" and to persevere in this vulgarization by asserting that "when there is no argument, Wolfson creates one" is to suggest that Wolfson was a kind of clever mountebank...
...Peter's College in Jersey City, writes for various newspapers and magazines on health science and other subjects...
...Camera pulls back to show a worried looking Mr...
...The Spirituality of the Earth, Thomas Berry...
...It adds some racial insults, a pinball that has been bouncing around since "All in the Family...
...He did not elaborate on the process which presently determines what is right for the viewing public, and what role "specialinterest groups" might possibly play in it...
...The real celebration of the book, the real center, the real Messiah 'whom Mirsky will one day find is himself, Mirsky the Messiah--"and all the time I was looking for myself" he may one day write...
...ABC, mind you, is not a specialinterest group...
...ERNEST M. CAGNACCI, C.R.S.P...
...his is a highly refined, highly competitive, and highly lucrative business...
...Louis...
...Yearly subscriptions are $3.7S...
...But there is one "fact" about which he consistently utters falsehood...
...Whatever does he think inspired such an exercise in vulgarity and titillation as "Soap" in the first place...
...JOHN HEmENRY is a free-lance writer and critic living in St...
...Such agonizing...
...I have a terrible fear," says Aaron Spelling, who counts "Starsky and Hutch" and "Charlie's Angels," among his contributions to civil liberties, "that the time will come when any of us who have ever been connected with a police show will be in front of a McCarthy committee...
...PmLn, ~ is Assistant Production Manager of The New Republic...
...They professed the antiquated notion that making adultery, incest, transvestism, and sundry other foibles a laughing matter might dull the moral sensibilities of the several million children who would be watching TV at 9:30 (or earlier in some parts of the country...
...Why does he put on paper such a mishmash of shorthand opinion, quotation, misconstruction, halfreadings of great minds and great texts...
...Would ABC knuckle under...
...Classified payable with order...
...one t~me...
...He would find it consoling...
...The Crisis of the Future Ewert Cousins...
...The exercise would be tedious and unprofitable...
...The fictional prose is energetic, vivid, the imagery selective, the exposition (the little that is shown off) quite intelligent...
...If the monsignor thinks my scholarship is as dishonest as he says it is, he ought to appeal to these highex authorities to have me thrown out...
...Continued on page 638) Commonweal: 615 of mine which he didn't like much at all), but I am told that they are ambitious, full of big bites out of the large issues...
...And ABC scheduled the program several hours earlier in the evening...
...Sic, thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...At this point some people took offense--it seems there are always a few straitlaced Puritans who don't know a good joke when they see one...
...The National Opinion Research Center is not my company, much less my "entity" (Monsignor does remember his Latin, doesn't he...
...19046...
...PHILLIP CORW1N is a poet, novelist sad critic who works for the United Nations...
...With friends fike this, does free speech need enemies...
...and presumably everyone also has the right to boycott sponsors, unless the 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS FATHER R. EMMETr CURRAN, S.J., i8 associate professor of history at Georgetown University...
...I prefer to remain among the great unwashed...
...They'll carry the show along for years, losing millions but preserving us from the wasteland and standing up for "controversial material...
...SAM BASS WARNER, JR., teaches in the history department at Boston University...
...That is from Frank Price, president of Universal Television...
...This is a relief to know...
...Next year, they'll be saying they don't like fantasy because some report says it makes kids fantasize...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ]rom page 610) the Living Spirit in terms of decisionmaking, social ministry and community spirit...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 S t e t m f e l s ( C r o f t . ) "Shameful...
...If television knuckles under to those minority pressures," declared one advertising executive, staring grimly into the camera, "it will sink deeper and deeper in the quagmire of mediocrity...
...It played the soap opera to the point of the ludicrous...
...It compresses the deviant relationships into a tighter family circle, suggesting the full possibilties of family life in America...
...A parish, unlike such a community, has the responsibility of bringing the reluctant and the unwilling along, to listen *to them, minister to them and challenge them...
...To the Editors: One of the two priests charged in the death of a West German woman who underwent exorcism, went on German TV with tapes of the exorcism sessions and identified the voices of two demons in the woman as those of Hitler and Nero [News & Views, August 19...
...Everyone,,' announces another advertising man, "has the right to turn the set off...
...New York...
...No wonder all the melodrama...
...To think that "special-interest groups" are "trying to use economic leverage to control what's on the air...
...Essays of opinion are presented in each issue from a traditionalist viewpoint...
...Ah, what a show that will be...
...an ecumenical women's ~mn'~niW in southern Ohio Beyond COl~ng: Ch~p Str~lim for Women in the Church with St...
...Can there be true soap opera without the guiding words of the clergy...
...Soap" is a comedy, or so we are told...
...But, I work for the knowledge industry and, whatever my many sins, am not about to advocate killing the goose that laid the golden egg...
...Even before Mark Mirsky finds the Messiah, I do hope he finds a good editor...
...Reprehensible...
...411 East &6th St., New York, N.Y...
...Teilhard Tapes American Tnilhard Association Cassette Series: The Religious Experience of Teilhard, Donald Gray...
...4c, seven times...
...In fact, news documentaries have always been affected by economic considerations: pre-censorship and censorship to suit sponsors, off-hour scheduling (thus determining how many people are in the audience) to maintain network profits, and occasionally alterations due to outside pressures...
...In liberal soap opera, that means the American Civil Liberties Union...
...It had philandering spouses, an impotent husband, two members of the same family having an affair with one person (a cop), an occasional homosexual...
...Fade, while organ music wells up...
...REV...
...The gentleman did not explain that ABC has done its best to refuse advance showings, thus guaranteeing that the program's critics had only "hearsay" to go by...
...A new idea injected into television is like a steel ball in a pinball machine...
...THE NEW CRITERION, Box ?6386, Cloveldmd, Ohio 44101...
...Of course, Mirsky does not think he is a moumebank...
...Is that a cloud on the horizon...
...Can we draw the line...
...Soap" also changes the two sisters sharing a bed partner to a mother A SUDSY AFFAIR PETER STEINFEI~ and daughter, thereby deepening the note of incest, which is one of the more hilarious subjects around at the moment...
...In thz,~meantime, he puts his foot on everything, on doctrines that look to him like prototypes of some bit of his sacred jargon, on admiration for the followers of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, on bits and fragments of his past, on good Israeli writers who were ~moved by his palpable warmth and open-'hearted generosity, on his affectionate nature and on his capacity to be a simple world-wide shlepper...
...Admittedly if you are in Peter's unholy trinity of Novak, Moynihan and Greeley, you don't deserve a fair break from him...
...I will not be seeing "Soap...
...No, it's "a dangerous new climate of repression...
...I don't quite believe .his modesty, although his judgment is in ~his respect quite correct...
...9 each, $2S for camp eta series...
...The demon Hitler was speaking German with an Austrian accentmNero's with a Roman accent...
...I hope "Soap" loses its sponsors...
...So now we have "Soap...
...Blacklist...
...10021 (212) IMI-S6SO...
...Harry Austryn Wolfson (whom Mirsky calls "Harry") was perhaps the most learned historian of philosophy produced in this century, an imaginative rationalist who did for the history of Jewish thought from Philo and the Patristics to Spinoza what Etienne Gilson (with a different methodology) did for medieval Catholic thought, that is, define its schema and problematics, its historical resonation, its plenitude and lacunae...
...Tune in tomorrow...
...He will not be the first authoritarian churchman to try that strategy...
...cries Aryeh Neier, pastor of the First Church of the First Amendment...
...An experimental community functions very nicely in a fashion similar to a religious community in terms of expanding people's vision of what the Christian life can mean in a practical way...
...It isn't even hagiography for which I would find a noble excuse-genuine love and submission to the authority of better minds...
...As for the New Class, I'm sure no one there is interested in such things as data, but there is a fine doctoral dissertation done at SUNY-Buffalo by James Barry on the subject...
...He acknowledges that to call himself a student of Wolfson or of Soloveitchik or of Scholem "is to defame them...
...ANDREW M. GREELEY Reply I am pleased that Father Greeley so readily acknowledges, among his many sins, complicity in the knowledge industry...
...Are we throwing the baby out with the "Soap...
...PETER STEINFELS N a t i v e Tongues Youngstown, N.Y...
...Quite clearly, because Mirsky only resorts to calling people by their first names when he is in awe of them and needs to cut them down to his size (hence Harry, but aho Mr...
...Commonweal: 639...
...Viewpoint Viewpoint to Roe v. Wade-The Legal Principles d the Founding Fathers and the Supreme Court by Edward J. Melvin C. M. $1 to Pro Lifo Coalition of Pennsylvania P.O...
...Contact: Hallel Communlcalions...
...Then you ask: "wonder how he recognized Nero's voice...
...FATHER KILIAN MCDONNELL, O.S.B., is Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Collegeville, Minnesota...
...Any realistic shows are off," moaned David Gerber...
...It has a president, a board of trustees, and a director, none of which I am or ever will be...
...they wring their hands and wonder whether the ordinary citizen can possibly be trusted to know when it is appropriate to exercise the first right only and when it might be appropriate to exercise both...
...COMMONWEAL, 2U Madison Ave...
...C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word...
...it is bounced back and forth, battered into one corner after another, flipped back into action as long as the lights keep flashing and those cash register-like bells jingle...
...But his are no testimonials to great human beings nor to great teachings, since the "three gurus" he has chosen occupy the center of his stage for about a third of his book...
...Spelling hunched over his kitchen table...
...THEODORE SNYDER Facts and Fancies Chicago, Ill...
...It should be established by now that commercial television programruing is essentially a device for collecting large numbers of people and selling their presence before the screen to advertisers...
...I hope the boycott succeeds...
...The real line that recent "consumer action" threatens to cross is the line between money-losing, serious programs and money-making entertainment...
...Gerber is the producer of such realistic antidotes for escapism as "Police Story" and "Police Woman...
...soap" cannot possibly be funnier than the performance of television executives, producers, ad men, and assorted others, in its defense...
...To the Editors: It is surely beyond my competence to educate Monsignor Charles Owen Rice away from his epistemological rigidities...
...30 September 1977:638 ACLU is planning to take it away from us...
...and I would do anything to give him a fair break, including stating that, to my knowledge, he has never, never, attacked the knowledge industry...
...Alas, it is not quite so simple...
...REV...
...however his account of their life, thought, and charisma is cheap, even vulgar...
...7c, three times...
...This is the work, I suppose, of the Creative Department...
...Wolfson worked, to use an accessible metaphor, tb rc llvllrc...
...Last year it was gratuitous violence, this year it's transvestism--I mean where will it all end...
...No soap opera is complete without its boffo lines: "You'll never know what this means to me...
...You have to take a stand somewhere...
...Notice, for example, the transformation of the cop into the tennis instructor...
...And then the real soap opera comedy began...
...Now the chorus of television critics comes onto the scene...
...10016...
...Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" was a new idea...
...They were not long in coming: "Censorship...
...It is the essence of public spirit, like the Red Cross or the Lincoln Monument--what Sam Ervin, in the great days of the Watergate soap opera, would call, with more than a slight hint of disbelief in his voice, "an eleemosynary institution...
...Marjorie Tuite, OP October 28 - 30, 1977 New Contexts for Christian Thought with Thomas Berry November 25 - 27, 1977 For information on these or other programs and residence opportunities write: Greilville Loveland, Ohio 45140 call: (513) 683-2340 on the theory of the palimpsest, the historical overlays can be filled by reading the writings abandoned or obscured beneath...
...On the subject of factsmnot that they matter much at Commonwealm will someone please ask Peter Steinfels where I attacked the knowledge industry...
...It is conducted by individuals who make up in energy what they apparently lack in imagination...
...or "I've been waiting all my life for this moment...
...One should not belittle the originality of "Soap...
...Then we will see the brave ABC executives stand firm for principle, won't we...
...I recall how Playboy, with a sure sense of its readers' intelligence, used to print "Humor" above the titles of certain articles...
...Gracious, one hopes they never mention anything as disgusting as that o n "Soap...
...I thank him, however, for his bibliographical suggestion about the "new class...
...A major component of the knowledge ind u s t r y - i n political discussions a component so controversial as often to be taken for the whole--is the intellectuals...
...For box numbers add S0c per insertion...
...Peter might just want to look at it...
...These constraints will continue whether or not "Soap" goes down the drain...
...Why then does Mirsky ,#rite My Search...
...However, it is also subject to the same dangers as a religious community in that it can grow away from contact with the average Catholic in the pew and can become increasingly alienated from them...
...The enterprise of Mirsky's pursuit of Jewish substance (Jewish identity he has abundantly) has enabled him to make contact with three of the indisputable prodigies of modern Judaism...
...I might read a novel one day by Mirsky, but I will never again pick up his (what is it called, that genre)--nonfiction...
...The tears were only beginning to flow...
...Is this a threatening trend...
...Well, wonder no more...
...The New Criterion THE NEW CRITERION is a distinctive quarterly review of church, state and humane leHors...
...It's a very unhealthy situation," intoned the president of ABC, "when special-interest groups, stimulated by hearsay before a program goes on the air, determine what is right and what isn't for the viewing public...
...They proposed to boycott "Soap's" sponsors...
...la/wa A. c o i ~ is completing a new novel, Acts o~ The/t, and a novella, A Spanish Romance, both of which will appear next year...
...mCHARD CoNNWF, adjunct lecturer in writing at St...
...Economic leverage...
...Would "Soap" rescue us from the quagmire of mediocrity...
...Now they're looking for fantasy, escapism . . . . " Mr...
...Billy for Faulkner and Bernie for Malamudm only Jews are wholly diminished), he knows that Wolfson was a genius and no mountebank...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 20
