How We See Ourselves

...And then came great warriors with shining helmets and cleated feet, who made Sunday, a day of rest, a day of Great Television...

...While in Vietnam, Arlen came to the conclusion that "for the most part television [there] has operated on a level not much more perceptive than that of a sort of illustrated wire service," in part because tv's sense of the newsworthiness of daily events "is still so restrictively determined by visual criteria...

...In addition to avoiding the easy point-scoring off television that marks the daily critic...

...Since we have given up the ideal of learning about ourselves and the world firsthand in favor "of receiving sometimes arbitrary and often nearly stenographic reports through a machine system we call 'communications,' " we are pretty much victimized by that marriage of men and technology in which we have put too much faith...

...What he has attempted is the more ambitious task of providing a frame of reference for that missing conscience...

...Rather, he suggests, we ought to concern ourselves with the larger issue of television as "something we are doing to ourselves," transforming events, and by extension, people...

...Arlen asks, too, for more investigative reporting, because if the "emperor doesn't have any clothes on, you're surely not doing the empire much of a favor by saying he does...

...It's about us, the people—how we are being shown, and seen, on that much-bruited "idiot box" to which our children devote more time than anything else, except sleep...

...He refuses to get uptight because the Nazis on Ho-gan's Heroes are shown as comical types?the past is always changing, is it not...

...Written at the time of the Tet offensive, it depicts in fine Alice in Wonderland-style how one sees everything and nothing on television...

...Today, after a premature Golden Age and (whew...

...Perhaps there's no worse tragedy than people dying...

...Of Julia Childs and a poached chicken, he observes, "she did all right with the cooking, although I thought the chicken took a couple of the earlier rounds...

...No sit-ins in front of the tv set, are there...

...In Vietnam, says Arlen, it would help if correspondents tackled larger themes than the battle for Hill Whatever, thereby freeing themselves of the need to include what seems to be the same combat footage...

...he asks, predicting that one day we'll have shows called Pleiku Junction and Hopalong with Uncle Ho...

...For that matter, the networks' executives remind us that they are giving the people what they want, and the people hardly seem to prefer education and culture to entertainment...

...In a democracy, he notes, "we elect our government—so they say —on the basis of what we know and are given to know," and yet television is a system "not really concerned with providing a truthful reflection of life because we've never required it to do so...

...No talk of public or commercial television, he maintains, is going to inspire bright thoughts so long as it requires an Establishment, be it commercial or educational, to run the show...

...There are a few straight humor pieces in this collection, and one of them, An Illustrated History of the War, seems to me one of the sharpest pieces of satire in recent years...

...Shawn's faith in the idea later extended to sending Arlen to Vietnam, where his reportage on the American journalism industry there —the country's "largest and most valued single export"—is itself war reporting of a high order...

...And he is able to view Batman, thank you, without once mentioning "camp"—he doesn't recommend large doses of Batman, but he is not embarrassed at finding it "sure-footed, fully of nifty gadgets and ridiculous costumes, and with at least a couple of lines that could pass for wit on a foggy night...

...The National Education Television Network, he quips, has given us "undercooked off-Broadway," and the best "drama" on commercial tv, he concedes, is professionally ground out by contract people the way the big studios used to give birth to large families of movies...

...He is the cheerleader who huzzahs those rare smacks of humanity on television: "Far across the length and breadth of television, one almost never hears a living, breathing, real, first-hand, individual human voice," he complains of a medium quivering with pictures of people sitting down and calmly talking to us...

...a great fourth-quarter comeback, television, sages like Senator John O. Pastore (D.-R.I...

...Still, Arlen is not merely the skeptic...

...Then his mood turns dark, and he admits that "We're all prisoners of the same landscape, and it hardly seems realistic to expect we'll ever derive a truly intelligent, accurate, sensitive reflection of actuality from a free-market communications system that is manned and operated by people like us, and that will, inevitably, tell us for the most part what we want to know...

...Arlen, like the late James Agee writing on films—and, I would add with some fervor, John Lardner, who got to write about tv a bit too late to leave us even a slim volume on the subject—has avoided the obvious pitfall of trying to wrestle into intellectual submission an industry more preoccupied with profit-and-loss statements than its conscience...

...Reviewed by BOB ABEL Senior editor, Dell Books In the beginning the people of the Earth created a new medium and they called it television and they found, even before puberty set in, that it gave forth so much art that soon afterward they declared those first years the Golden Age...

...Put another way, objectivity can limit, as well as sustain, honest minds—and that's why a moment of emotionalism, such as Walter Cronkite calling Mayor Daley's uniformed representatives "thugs," was worth almost the entire Democratic convention coverage...

...While this doesn't bother him for the nonce, he warns that the propa-gandistic possibilities of television?he had been speaking of an effective half-hour commercial made for Kennedy, with Richard Goodwin as writer and John Frankenheimer, no less, as director?haven't really been touched yet, what can be done with imagery and consciousness," and mention of Leni Riefenstahl is enough to make one leery of images that dance in the dark-and-light of television...

...To quote one significant passage in its entirety: "There are so many real and possible tragedies connected with Vietnam—the tragedies of men and women dead, of men and women dying, of nations dying...

...1 trust all this will not convey that Arlen is an excessively serious young man, because while he is serious, he is not solemn...

...At a time when the war in Vietnam has become the central fact in American life, the most reported war, the most intimate war—the "Living-Room War" of Arlen's title—tv with all its footage and all its "news specials" has shed so little light that we still seem to know not what we do there...

...Still, the commitment was made, and Arlen set out to write about television "as directly and topically as [he] could make it...

...Sure, tv is mostly junk, he readily acknowledges, but it is also "one of those great modern totems"?you know, "communications"—and there exists a communications-gap for which tv is to a considerable degree responsible...

...The "telly" in England, Arlen notes, "is fairly intelligent and, I should imagine, useful to the nation (in that it mirrors the breadth as well as the intellectual capacities of the nation back to it in a unique way), and easy to live with, which is no small potatoes...

...Thus he is not actually writing about television per se, or a desirable esthetic for it, but about the world as perceived through television...

...You don't hear the people complaining, do you...

...Arlen has avoided the burden of hauling Art into the picture...

...Part of the central thesis of Michael Arlen's fine book, Living-Room War, is that we must stop looking to commercial television for great art (for the second time in 20 years, there will be no Peabody Awards for network tv entertainment in 1969...

...Indeed, the true value of Arlen's book may be that it makes us anxious about what we know and feel...

...In the same vein, after Robert Kennedy's campaign in California, he observes that "style is what we settle with in electing our gods and princes—and we get most of our sense of style from television...

...That was life, folks, which is sometimes more dramatic than the six o'clock news...

...This is the first book, I think, that not only does the medium justice but in all fairness sentences it...

...But the sages ignore, at their own risk, the fact that the most important message of the medium has always been gathering dollars, and they therefore operate on a pretty silly level in asking for gold instead...

...The programs he covers receive only as much intelligence as they require, and he is almost coversational, rather than formally playing the critic, in writing about most of them...

...constantly remind us, looms as a medium of great importance and considerable potential good...

...He is also the bold maverick-sherifT type who suggests he has a better idea...

...Of the pieces collected in Living-Room War, all but three were originally published in the New Yorker, where Arlen is a staff writer...

...Or why...

...Arlen and his editor, William Shawn, had talked about a television column, but the whole thing started rather casually, as befits a magazine that used to call its short humor pieces "casuals...

...But tv, he charges, has been "consistently nerveless and conventional in its use of film," and he hopes that "a network official [will] some day have the nerve and imagination to call on a few of the really inventive movie-makers...

...And, once again, will have learned nothing...

...Then came the Dark Ages, when none of one's best friends watched television, a wasteland, culturally barren and inhabited only by The Rat Patrol...

...Living-Room War is a book, one suspects, that is going to be around a mite longer than anything now on television, and you do not look into it at your own peril...

...We are all voting citizens of the global village conjured up by Br'er McLuhan, Arlen agrees in wry dissent, but how ironic that "among the methods men have devised for usefully reflecting the world back to themselves, only those methods that the population at large doesn't really take very seriously—one thinks especially of the novel and the film—have made any significant attempt to cope with the evolving human experience...

...But sometimes, listening to the note of anger and impatience that arises above the towns and cities in our country, that hovers over daily life, feeling the growing swell of semiautomatic hawk-ishness and dovishness that pushes so many people nowadays, and seems to say less for what they rigorously, intelligently believe is right than for the inability of many persons to stand in uncertainty much longer when there are firm choices to be seen on either side, sometimes one has the sense that maybe as great a tragedy as any other will be that we will indeed do something shortly (this nation of men and women that always has to be doing something to keep sane), distracted, numbed, isolated by detail that seemed to have been information but was only detail, isolated by a journalism that too often told us only what we thought we wanted to hear, isolated, in fact, by communications—expressing pieties, firmness, regrets, what you will, citizens patting each other on the back ('We did the right thing, Fred')—and not know what we did...