Media

...And not only does the show have 196: Commonweal a Proper and an Ordinary, it has an Introit, a Dismissio, and a permanent Ordo celebrationis (golly, it feels good to be using Latin terms again...

...Even if you're the kind of hardnosed secularist who snorts at ritual, the Sabbath, and all that, the day just forces you to behave that way, anyhow...

...It should...

...Tony has become a successful real estate man...

...There is much talk of cars and clothes and houses, of the arti- facts of success, but underlying the play is the assumption that black success is always marginal in a white-controlled world...

...It's not exactly a "news" show, because it's about what happened for the last six days, and now we pause to meditate upon its significance...

...And the problem with the American religion of the journalist is that we believe--poor trusting kids--that if we just knew everything we could deal with everything...

...The problem with the exaltation of "news and analysis" is that it often excludes the moral weight of what is actually going on...

...Sam the trifle-too-loud-and-impulsive, always ready to ask the rude question but sometimes willing to ask it when it is in fact unnecessary...

...and George the prissy, the one you always remember wearing a bow tie even if he wash 't wearing a bow tie, the difficult male schoolmarm...

...Joe, the central figure in the piece (well performed by A. Bernard Cummings), has gone nowhere...

...Tony discovers that his new affluence will not protect him from the daily battle against prejudice in the real estate business...

...As Ed leaves, Joe says, "Take me with you," and Ed answers, "Where I am going I can't take you...

...There are some very effective things in Sum: prim Joyce's sudden wriggle of pleasure when she still sees marriage on the horizon, and Dad's inability to tear himself away from the would-be lovers, his attempt to smooth Jeff's way having become confused with his own need for company...

...Most of the action takes place offstage and is recounted as nar- rative...

...Aaaand---out...

...There's only one thing wrong with this elegant rite, and that is that it is not human...

...Another working-class play--an upward mobility one---it concerns six blacks who work or have worked'in a Chicago steel mill...

...It's pretty much a truism in comparative religion that kerygma precedes liturgy and liturgy usually precedes myth...

...FRANK McCONNELL...

...Never mind that Wicker is underused, or that Roberts--who seems brighter and tougher than either Sam or George--is con- sistently chauvinized as those two try to work out their estrus crises...

...and that the full flowering of the mythology is in the mystique of TV news...

...Walt Whitman would have understood...

...steak and eggs and Heinekens at Carrow's (we always just beat out the Methodists because their sermons----heh heh--are longer...

...But what makes it special is not its smartness as much as its intellectual choreography...

...And the three journalists are wonderfully well-cast by now: Brinkley, ironic, wise, and shining with the look of having seen it all before...

...Although the problems facing the characters are essentially serious---or would be in other circumstances--the play is pri- marily an amiable exercise demanding very little emotional response from playgoers...

...In terms of the American religion of the journalist, I'd say that the kerygma--the "good news"--is the elevation of the figure to secular sainthood that begins with Benjamin Franklin...

...Joe is left alone, stating into space...

...If I had the space to explain Jungian psychology I could tell you wh), this makes perfect sense: but you know it does already, and that is why Jungian psychology works in the first place...

...I wonder how many Americans understand what a breathtaking act of faith that is: at the same time I insist loudly and often that we were in the wrong in the Persian Gulf, I remind myself that if I had said something similar in Iraq, I would probably have been, by sundown, minus a tongue or a hand...

...For the most part, however, the play moves along easily, carrying the willing audience with it...

...But, then, that is what the Winterfest plays are for...

...Ed comes to see his position in the law firm as the equivalent of Charlie's in the mill--doing the white man's dirty work...

...And that, I say with a sigh, is why I wind up getting up for 9:30 Mass every Sunday...

...Leaves of Grass, after all, is nothing if not his heroically arrogant attempt to write the epic poem of that new mythology...

...Intelligence, irony, wit, and disengagement are the values of the liberal mind...

...Wait, who would have made a great TV critic, believed that a democratic, materialist society would eventually produce rites and observances as pow- erful and satisfying as those of the "dead" religions of the past...

...In the early acts, he talks enthu- siastically about what he will do as soon as he gets a paycheck or two ahead, but he resists Ed's attempts to get him to quit the mill, to sign an application for college...

...that the liturgy is the gradual elevation of the First Amendment into the First Commandment, with the daily paper and then the daily broadcast becoming a central feature of our common life (Citizen Kane, seen this way, is actually a Faust story about the betrayal of the holy things...

...By that time, Ed has become a lawyer with what I would call a prestigious real estate firm if I used fake words like prestigious...

...There is vigor in the cross-taik of the scenes, but the characters are too much functional representative figures, the action aimost all retrospective...

...It's entirely subjective, of course, but there's a difference about the day: as if light itself were moving just a little slower than its assigned velocity, and hence so is everything else...

...Brinkley" is an archaic ritual imposed upon history and its end is to reassure us that we are in control of the chaotic events of our times...

...am Kelly's Pill Hill, which I saw in a production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, was first done as part of the Yale Repertory's 1990 Winterfest...

...and then "This Week with David Brinkley...

...Charlie may be better-offthan he was in the Mississippi of threat- ening sheriffs who humiliated him, but his bosses at the mill, who congratulated him verbally, never provided him written recommendations strong enough to give him the advancement he expected...

...22 March 1991:195 Think about the full rifle: this week with David Brinkley...

...Won't she ever try to get a word in edgewise...

...And one dead Iraqi child or one slain American brother or sister, by their mute existence, toss most of that into the dustbin of rationalizations of the unspeakable...

...Brinkley," to be sure, is a consistently intelligent validation of the immense sums of money poured into network news...

...That line could mean that he is staying with the firm, denying all the Joes, or that he is going to mail the resignation he has already written, which means that he will destroy his image as the superachiever in the group, robbing Joe of the dream that he represents...

...The very phrasing is sabbatical...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA SUNDAY WITH DAVID A SABBATH OF SORTS E ver notice--not, please God, to sound like Andy Rooney--but ever notice that Sunday always feels like Sunday...

...Oprah and Phil and Geraldo can jam about transvestite Rosicrucians or (ahem...

...That is, first comes the electrifying revelation of the new truth, then comes a public service to celebrate the new truth, and then comes an official story about how the new truth came to be revealed...

...Unlike the "Evening News" or "Nightline," it imposes regularity on history (which, as we know, does not observe the Sabbath...

...It consists of three acts and the gathering of a group of friends at five-year intervals...

...Even the father's paralysis is tempered by the actor's stepping out of the wheelchair to speak to the audience...

...Ed and Joe are left onstage alone...

...But this is this week: a stately and predictable observance and analysis of the events--the "text"--of the previous six days of the circling earth...

...So the topic of the week is, let's say, the "Proper" of the show, and the conduct of the show is its "Ordinary": and if you've read enough of these columns, you know that I don't do blas- phemy-not even for a gag...

...At the end, he is drinking heavily and is about to move--temporarily, of course--to a wel- fare hotel, a victim, he suggests, not of society but of his own inability to take the risk...

...For the older generation, of which there is one member in the group, the mill has been a desirable destination, one that rescued them from field work in the South and gave them the middle-class rewards of salary, home, and security...

...For the younger men, it is a dead end, literally, since the mill is scheduled to close at the end of the play...

...Al, the hustler, has moved from selling Bibles and encyclopedias to selling something that makes it possible for him to buy a home on Pill Hill, where the black elite live...

...I suppose I could adjust to Sunday without "Brinkley," which is the way all true cultists refer to it: but it would be a wrench...

...He has been given a case in which he must defend a com- pany against a class-action suit from mostly black workers, and he knows that refusal to take the case will ruin his prospects in the firm while taking it will violate the memory of his father, dead in his forties in the mill, and of the world he once lived in...

...There follow two discussions with distinguished peo- ple-players-like, say, Dick Cheney, Boris Yelstin, or on a slow day Henry Kissinger, confronting, usually, David, Sam Donaldson, and George Will...

...So Sunday always involves 9:30 Mass (thanks to my wife, who doesn't believe that getting up before 10 A.M...

...But information is no substitute for wisdom--or love...

...Remember that the cuddliest of our Founding Fathers was a Philadelphia newspaperman, and that from Thomas Paine and the Federalist Papers through Greeley, Winchell, and Cronkite, the journalist has been an iconic figure in our culture, the man we expect to be just a little better and smarter than the rest of us, and to implement our wisdom and wishes against the deeply mistrusted maneuvers of big government...

...Scott is a successful drug dealer, for the moment...

...Each week, whatever the topic--war in the Gulf, the S&L debacle, the autodestruction ofperestroika--it reenacts the crucial and (copies to George Bush) liberal myth of the American religion of journalism: that open discussion of public issues by serious men and women will and must lead to enlightenment...

...In the order of service, only the steak and eggs are optional...

...Maybe only the MacNeil-Lehrer report on PBS surpasses it in infor- mational nutrition--on which scale, by the way, something like "Sixty Minutes" is TV-dinner lasagna and the "McLaughlin Group" is, of course, a Pop-Tart...

...Pill Hill has its virtues, but mainly it shows the strong promise of Sam Kelly as a playwright...

...Brinkley," I want to suggest, is the nearly ideal enactment--in its limitations as well as its brilliance----of that hoped-for secular sacrament, the assertion that you shall understand the news, and the news will set you free...

...Newsman, in fact, was the only regular job Whitman himself ever had...

...And information is an unqual- ified good, and the contrast of opposing views is the stuff of which civilization is made...

...Last commercial break, and then Brinkley comes back on to tell, usually, a one- minute joke about something remarkably stupid that occurred in Washington that week...

...Chadie, the older man, has retired and is ready to move back to Mississippi...

...There are always three journalists--David, Sam, and George---confronting one "official" spokesman, the assumption being, presumably, that "the people"--the joumalists--need these odds to face up to the Shadow of Authority (make no mistake about that: every interview on "Brinkley" is, when you break it all down, a conversation with Darth Vader...

...The first ten minutes are always taken up with David reading us "news since the Sunday papers"--this show knows it's sab- barical--and then with a brief background report on the day's theme...

...get their noses broken on the air just in time for sweeps week...

...The oper- ative concept here is the number four...

...Sound familiar, liturgy buffs...

...Gifted-with-vision Luke, swashbuckling Han Solo, and uptight Princess Leia: there they all are...

...There is an oddly ambiguous ending to the play...

...Last big commercial break: after which David, Sam, George, and another reporter (Cokie Roberts, Hodding Carter, Tom Wicker, like that) sit around and discuss either what the "important" people have said in the body of the show, or other things Brinkley throws at them...

...on that day is a major cause of cancer...

...As the Bangles put it, "Sunday, that's my fun day, I don't have to run day...

...Will...

...But it's not just a "talk" show--isn't that a weird term?--either...

...Sorry, Mr...