Wunerful, wunerful!
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL HINDS John Garvey WUNERFUL, WUNERFUL! LIFE WITHOUT TELEVISION olitics is the oddest collective idea, even stranger than sports. It is wide enough to include Britain's decaying...
...and how often is violence shown as ugly and degrading, rather than thrilling...
...Answer: it is...
...You know the old adage, "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king...
...Granting that Quayle has his own narrow political reasons for complaining about TV fare...
...Television, though we watched it before our move, was not among the things we cared enough to take with us...
...Plainly more is at the base of our problems than television, but no other single factor has had a greater influence on the distorted politics under which we suffer, or a more malign effect on common values, or a more stultifying influence on our intellectual lives...
...Commonweal...
...In its absence, we have found that we have a lot of time, for reading, writing letters, talking with friends...
...they have lives in which things other than television happen to them...
...It amazed people—as it certainly should have—to think that a single episode of a situation comedy was made politically important, something that can send the leader of the nation into a tizzy...
...granting of course that Quayle's speech was written for him by people smarter than Quayle—granting these things, it still has to be said that Quayle—or "Quayle" or, to borrow from New Testament scholarship, "Q" (since we are speaking of a word-product a; manufactured as Murphy Brown is, something removed by staff handlers and paic writers from a single person or a particulai authorship)—this manufactured entity, anyway, has a point...
...First they agreed, then they didn't...
...it is frequently the source of allusions made for purposes of illustration...
...Nothing spreads across a culture so suddenly as a change introduced into a situation comedy, or a televized disaster (riots in Los Angeles, or the seizure of the American embassy in Iran), or a happy war, interpreted by "anchor people...
...Men and women whose major concern is selling time to advertisers are the main forces in our common understanding...
...Not that I do nol think that single women who are pregnant should not bring their children tc birth—I'm for it—but it is a fact that values are communicated to most Americans by television more than by any other means, probably including family and certainly including church, and Americans think the way they think because of television, and little else...
...We learn this because we don't get them...
...We find the absence of television wonderful...
...There are studies that reveal the effect on children of repeated viewings of violent behavior: they react less and less, and become able to see violent behavior without being moved...
...It is wide enough to include Britain's decaying monarchy (it's lovely to watch that, if you're an Irish-American), Peru's vicious Shining Path, America's Ross Perot phenomenon, the Los Angeles riots, and the question of whether a candidate's haircut is relevant to his character...
...In the same way, a tacit approval of sex between uncommitted, unmarried people certainly has had a cultural effect...
...We have a television stored in another city, along with a VCR, and if we use it again it will be used solely for watching movies...
...You see, at least, how odd and scary it is to live in a society whose social cohesion is based on something as shallow and manipulative as television...
...It is to our culture what the language of the Bible or Shakespeare or Homer was to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the common font from which references are drawn, the shared set of images that made 19 June 1992: 9 up a collective imaginative experience...
...One way you can find this out is by not watching any television, good or bad, at all...
...No one seems to notice that the characters on television are usually not seen sitting around watching television...
...It is a pleasure to live without it, and more than that...
...By now you will have heard of the Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown incident...
...This would be alarming enough, if it were not for the fact that even the best television has a way of inducing passivity, putting the imagination to sleep, and juxtaposing images in a way which is ultimately desensitizing...
...A passivity about life is reinforced by the very physical act of watching television: we become consumers of sensations...
...For two years we haven't...
...But we have noticed something else: television influences common references, common tag-lines and joke-phrases...
...But something else is going on here...
...Television sex is something that just happens to passive people, like weather...
...In the country of the TV-addicted, the abstainer at least has a slight edge on clarity...
...That came from some television show, I'd be willing to bet...
...a moment of violence (either dramatized or real, like the Rodney King beating) is followed by an ad for laxatives, then by something touching—film from a famine, for example—and then by something amusing...
...and sex is virtually never shown as having anything to do with pregnancy and childbirth...
...granting that he and other conservatives are as shortsighted as they can be when they magnify a partial truth into what they apparently think is a sufficient explanation by claiming that it is a breakdown in family and cultural values that led to the riots in Los Angeles...
...It is a collective argument in which profound questions can be made shallow, as both prolife and prochoice people have managed to make of the abortion issue, and in which silly statements can, oddly, have a share of truth that serious people ought to explore, but may be afraid to...
...Suddenly, for example, people began giving other people backrubs in pretty ordinary office situations—almost always people of the opposite sex, by the way...
...It was used by lots of commentators to illustrate what's wrong with, and what is comical about, the White House— George Bush and his press spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, were caught unprepared when Quayle, the designated lightweight, said that it was a cultural problem to dramatize, as something worthy of approval, a woman bearing a child out of wedlock...
...This is not true of the audience, however...
...It makes you appreciate how good—and comparatively unaddict-ing—radio is, if you can tune into some decent stations...
...When my wife and I moved from the Midwest to a small apartment in the East, we took only the necessary things (a computer, various forms of equipment for processing caffeine, and books...
...Murphy Brown's choice to bear a child was prolife, etc...
...We also see social habits take sudden turns that I suspect flow from television...
...Not only our values are influenced by repeated exposure to behavior that most traditional religions have rejected as immoral (how many romantic interludes between married men and women are ever portrayed...
...The way people feel about issues ranging from abortion and euthanasia to war to people sleeping with other people to racial harmony or disharmony are all TV-driven, because this is all most of us have in common, and that is frightening...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 12
