TELEVISION

...This is why the vulgarity and cheapness of television are beside the point...

...That one area, of course, is the ability to sustain attention, to hold things in the mind while going on and on to explore related aspects of the same topic instead of abruptly changing the subject and being momentarily brilliant on another matter...

...Once they get beyond the stage of yammering through the supermarket for the plastic gooey-goos being pitched by Bo-bo the Bobbitt, many kids develop a reaction that insulates them: They assume any commercial message is a lie, any advertising claim a false claim, anything sold on television a fraud that will fall apart when you open the box...

...Early in our national adventure as the conquerors of Cuba and Southeast Asia, I became convinced that the two underlying causes of these aberrations were widely unknown, even unsuspected...

...If we should want to, we could begin only by retrieving the medium from the clutches of the seamy hucksters to whom we have blithely handed one of the potentially most valuable resources we possess...

...all except one...

...Well, not quite all...

...If, in the last century, kids were out behind the barn reading penny-dreadfuls and dime-novels, Ned Buntline and Street and Smith, they were, all the same, reading and practicing sustained attention...

...And, after the razzle-dazzle beginning, you would undoubtedly be amazed at the early collapse of your decades-younger peers...

...TELEVISION The short-take life Frank Getlein Every grown-up who has established even fleeting contact with members of the television generation, those kids who have grown up with the tube — that is to say, those kids who have grown up with television as a universal, ubiquitous adjunct of life: I would not for a moment suggest that television itself has in any sense "grown up" as those kids have — is impressed by how bright the kids are...

...If, earlier in this century, kids spent their Saturday afternoons watching shoot-'em-ups at the local flea-bag movie house they were, in the first place, only doing it once a week, and in the second, sustaining attention for ninety minutes and then '...the vulgarity and cheapness of television are beside the point' another ninety minutes just as long as they could reasonably stay away from home...

...It isn't the incessant money-grubbing, the all-for-greed attitude that underlies the incredible commercials and the vacuous "entertainment...

...If you, as a bright child of, say, thirty years ago, were plunged through the time warp into a gang of today's Frank Getlein, a contributing editor of The Progressive, has written extensively on art and politics...

...As a result, the New Frontiersmen and Great Socialites could hardly hear themselves — let alone anyone else — talk...

...Mercury, I happened to know, was what traditional beaver-felt hats were treated with to make them pliable — a practice that produced the expression, "mad as a hatter...

...We've always been a vulgar people, though that is a slightly redundant assertion...

...The vital exchange of views among powers and principalities was limited to sixty seconds at a crack, with the results we all know and refuse to talk about...

...The participants were all giant brains by definition, but even so their fragmented attention span got us into Indochina and kept us there...

...The planes were low, loud, and frequent...

...From May to October, half the year, those parties were as likely as not to be garden affairs — and those Georgetown gardens were right on the approach and departure path of the one-a-minute traffic in and out of National Airport...

...ten-year-olds, you would probably be out-classed in all directions...

...The flight pattern shaped the attention span...

...As a private, family problem, television can be confronted in any number of ways — mainly, I suppose, by introducing kids to other forms of art and entertainment, books, movies, theater, music, dance, experiences that last a long time and demand and reward sustained attention...

...These new kids know more, get more references, make more references, to subjects once considered "adult" — "adult" both in the sense of mature wisdom and in the sense conveyed by "adult" book stores...

...Nineteenth Century America produced vulgarians that make our own — William Paley of CBS, for example — look like Lord Chesterfield...

...But the second cause was even more important: In those halcyon days of the New Frontier and the Great Society as fronts for the Great Invasions and New Conquests, much of the public business was conducted informally at parties in the swank Georgetown quarter of the nation's capital...

...The television kids are more sophisticated, at least superficially, than any generation of kids within memory — probably more sophisticated than any kids since the child labor laws were enacted, or since the earlier separation of children from the common family enterprise of making a living, or since the even earlier discovery that there were such people as children, not just miniature grownups...

...It isn't the vulgarity that oozes out of the tube in ever-growing amounts...

...Certainly a logical cause-and-effect hypothesis can be built between the destruction of sustained attention by commercial television's grasshopper program structure and the absolute need for sustained attention to learn anything at all...

...As a public issue, though, it seems highly unlikely we will ever confront television...

...The new boys and girls would run rings around you in many fields of human knowledge, including some you didn't know existed...

...Obviously, especially along the East Coast, the corridor of power in those days, we'd all been eating swordfish and had gone mad as hatters, hence our policies toward Cuba and Indochina...

...But today's kids, watching television, are being galvanically hyped up with entertainment material for three minutes at a time, never more than five, and then super-hyped by the totally different material of the commercials — a little louder, more blatant and blaring even than the entertainment...

...It's a mental life of short takes, and the short-take life claims far more hours than school each week...

...If such deep thinkers as Robert S. McNamara, Dean Rusk, and the rest, could be taken in by sleazy military sloganeering, what on earth will be the effect when similar fragmentation of thought is extended to the entire population, including that vast majority less gifted than the men who gave us defoliation, pacified hamlets, hearts and minds, and saturation bombing...

...The briefer the contact, in fact, the more impressive the brightness...

...The effect of television on attention spans is probably the root cause of the widely perceived breakdown in elementary and secondary education for which everyone from John Dewey to Stokely Carmichael has been blamed...

...Nope, the problem is the attention span...

...As competition, school doesn't have a chance...

...As in a bilingual family, a child can grow up able to speak and understand the shorttake language of television and the sustained language of human communication...

...It's frightening to contemplate...

...What's more, the members of the television generation react faster, get conversational balls back over the net more quickly and with greater precision, than kids were capable of doing only a few years ago...

...This is what's really wrong with television and what scares me stiff when I think about it...

...One was the mercury just then discovered to infest swordfish...

...But in one way you, old-timer, would still hold your own and, indeed, come out way ahead...

...The hustling, peddling, and pushing of commercial television is so blatant, so incessant, that many of today's kids see through it early on...