Media

...The arresting sixties' pre-teens in "Wonder Years" and their screwed-up older incarnations in "thirtysomething" have this in common, so deeply that it need hardly be articulated: their lives are bound up with the very medium that is reinventing their lives...

...And I hope it doesn't get renewed, because it's just too fine to fall into the clutches of weekly schedule hack writers...

...And then fell the Shadow...

...It's why Saul Bellow, say, Nobel Prize and all, seems to be so irrevocably, culturally prior to Norman Mailer, even though their careers are nearly contemporary and Bellow (1915) is only eight years older than Mailer (1923...

...But look at this tangle of thorns...

...And what those shows have in common are the Three Great Secrets of their targeted audience: television (in lower case because it's the medium in which we swim, our real environment), The Music (in caps because it is, beyond the possibility of quarrel, our mythology) and, seldom mentioned but always, intolerably, present, Vietnam (because it is our Shadow...

...The evening after the two-hour premiere of the show, alone in the house, I poured a Lowie Dark, lit a Winston, sat back and listened to Sergeant Pepper, realizing that in clock-time the record was over twenty-five years old, that in subjective time it had still just come out yesterday, and that it was okay—I don't know how else to say this—for both things to be true...

...And rock-and-roll, whatever the lyrics may say, has always had one and only one message, articulated by one of its chief theorists, Jim Morrison, as "break on through to the other side...

...The other (played by Peter Reigert) is just trying, desperately, to hold onto his job as an appliance salesman, though he sympathizes with the idea of the band...

...Cain and Abel, both uneasy in their parts and both wondering if the game is worth the candle...

...It was—and for once the phrase isn't P.R...

...The boomers either fought or didn't fight in that indelible national disgrace: and even if they didn't, they did, hey...

...That is also true, of course, of Slick Bill Clinton, whose Elvis-gig on "Arsenio Hall" may be one of the memorable moments of the presidential campaign...

...I know it's true, Oh so true, Cause I saw it on T.V.," sings John Fogerty—of everything from Howdy Doody to J.F.K...

...As Greil Marcus, probably our best cultural historian, keeps saying, rock-and-roll—innately subversive, generationally divisive, a mass-marketed insider's music (America creates such paradoxes)—was the communion (the Clintonesque "new covenant...

...There's good rockin' tonight...

...Television, from "Ozzie and Harriet" to "Cosby," has been preponderantly the carrier-wave of the "days of old," of those Velveeta-and-saltine family values that got the Republicans in Houston so sweaty...

...It ain't so bad...

...And it's why I (1942), though some five years early to be a baby-boomer, but always a slow developer, belong to the open conspiracy that has now ascended to power—media power, the only kind that counts—and that writes, produces, directs, and markets shows like "The Wonder Years," "Murphy Brown," "thirtysomething," and especially the brilliant CBS miniseries, "Middle Ages...

...Forget birthdates...

...Little Danny Quayle sends his cholesterol-friendly, fundamentalist constituency into delighted shivers whenever he attacks the "media elite," but the fact is that he's a member, and a prime one, of the club...

...That, for me, beats any sociological or biological definition of "generation" by a couple of furlongs...

...A crucial—no kidding—point in our psychic history was when Elvis, in 1956, finally performed on the "Ed Sullivan Show" (against Ed's previous "read my lips" pledge), but was shot only from the waist up...

...Which brings us to The Music...

...And in its brave ambiguity about what is lost and what is gained, it's—rare for the tube or for any art—truly grown-up...

...Not that this isn't a rite of passage as old as consciousness itself...

...So here are the boomers, growing up and being told that life is supposed to be a very long episode of "Father Knows Best," but also being told, with overwhelming force, "Have you heard the news...

...And then there's "Middle Ages...

...Or as Chuck Berry, even more eloquently than Marcus, put it: "Hail, hail, rock-and-roll/Deliver me from the days of old...

...One of them (played by William Russ) decides, after all these years, he's going to do it...

...frank mccONNELL...

...And I looked around the living room, for the first time comfortably, with the eyes of a fifty-year-old guyAnd know what...

...One of the very wisest things I've read is the very first sentence of Samuel Hynes' s beautiful memoir of being a World War II bomber pilot, Flights of Passage (Beil, 1988): "Every generation is a secret society...

...I can remember, vaguely, listening to radio shows with my grandfather, but that's my all-but-gone previous incarnation...

...If not, then not...

...It's a sensitive enough premise to be the stuff of a very good novel...

...It's called television...

...in Dallas to Saigon and beyond...

...And now, as I said, they run the networks and the ad agencies and they're old enough to be president...

...So what can I tell you...

...It's not nostalgia: it's a meditative exercise...

...They grew, in other words, up: and that's always bad news...

...Yes, and again yes...

...that bound our youths, at least from the fifties to the seventies, together...

...But maybe at no time in history has a generation had, ready to hand, a medium so exquisitely fitted to incarnate its spiritual climacteric...

...Without that brimstone whiff of anarchy, The Music has no moral point whatsoever...

...Both "Wonder Years" and "Murphy Brown" feature, every episode, a different song from the fifties or sixties to point up and embellish the theme of this week's installment...

...Prior" is "other": not better or worse...

...Set in Chicago, it's the story of two boomers with good and boring jobs and varying degrees of marital bliss, who remember that at one point they wanted to be a rock-and-roll band...

...And—for viewers of the right age—the music is one of the characters in the screenplay, since the music as first heard ("Wonder Years") or the music as remembered from the vantage of fortysomething ("Murphy Brown") is always The Music: trivial, disposable, and also the shrine of what we'd hoped Commonweal 20 November 1992:19 for and the measure of what we've lost...

...hype—a defining moment...

...And learned—the good ones—that both the domestic suasions of the tube and the apocalyptic promise of The Music were dangerous half-truths (think about Born on the Fourth of July and The Doors as mirror-images of the great disillusionment...

...If you're really cursed with smarts, of course, you find you're both...

...Because none of them knows a world without television, and a world where television was not somehow a crucial paradigm of "real life...

...Symbolic castration, anyone...

...And the scary thing about getting that old is realizing that you're a flawed Abel— now you 're the role-model you've tried so hard to imitate—or a failed Cain—now you 're what you used to think you were rebelling against...

...A candidate playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on tenor on the Tube...

...If you share the public secrets of a group—share them in Newman's second sense of "knowing"—then you're a member of that generation...

...CBS had meant to run it as a summer miniseries, but because of a scheduling foul-up it's being shown on five consecutive Thursdays...

...No white middle-class American born after, say, 1948, can help but be (generations, unlike other secret societies, enlist you...

...The tube and The Music— both, of course, leviathan-like mass phenomena—are, or pretend to be, Abel and Cain...