Media

...This NSC met on the air and repelled a Soviet thrust toward the Persian Gulf without precipitating a nuclear war...

...It's all still there...

...And so, thanks to ABC, the fearful symmetry of the nuclear era is to be reaffirmed: Every reference to the threat of nuclear war must be countered by summoning the specter of the Soviet menace...

...That was when Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, and some others sat around telling us not to worry, the experts had the matter well in hand...

...Let's have a movie called In Red America," he had written...

...Well, the time has come to push for a symmetrically reassuring simulation following Amerika...

...It is high-tech Russians and their U.N...

...so is Kansas City and Lawrence____What we've all just seen is a sort of a nuclear version of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol...

...It should work to ensure that the most egregious material is cut from the script, whatever its length...

...By then, the network had picked up Stein's idea, floated in his weekly column in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner...

...According to a survey by Daniel Grunen-baum for Nuclear Times, such groups as Educators for Social Responsibility and the American Friends Service Committee will be producing materials for classroom and activist use that will, shall we say, put the program in context...

...The movement must do more about Amerika...

...If, by creating a situation that's worse than anything we've seen in the last forty years, we can't push people into a nuclear confrontation, maybe that actually says something good about the balance of terror, if you will, that exists in the world today," Koppel told Entertainment Tonight...

...Good propaganda...

...Let's draw the lessons of what communism does...

...It would be about a few days or weeks in the life of several American Robert Karl Manoff is co-director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University...

...However ABC may characterize it, and whatever civil libertarians may have to say about the freedom of corporate speech, such programming absolutely subverts the informed public debate which the media, under the protection of the First Amendment, were meant to foster...

...In such quarters, the ABC nuclear saga was seen as a vehicle for weakening the moral fiber needed to maintain nuclear deterrence and conventional containment of the Soviets...

...Other groups—including the progressives' answer to AIM, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)—are considering asking ABC to schedule a panel discussion of the sort it provided following The Day After...

...If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because, as the president of ABC Entertainment told the network affiliates, Amerika is "based on thorough research on every takeover since the Holy Roman Empire...

...It should work to see the twelve hours cut to the single evening in which The Day After was contained...

...Let us have Ted Kennedy as the President, Gary Hart as Secretary of Defense, and Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State...

...Lies told about the Russians will be more effective than the truth told about the Bomb...

...At a time when it seems that the arms-control and disarmament movement has collectively made up its mind that fear of the Bomb is not an effective organizing tool, its opponents have come to the opposite conclusion, and they are right...

...That is why many of the organizations that teamed up to prepare the way for The Day After are going to work once again—this time, to contain the damage...

...Your neighborhood is still there...

...This was ideological containment at its best, and ABC should be held to these same manipulative standards following Amerika...

...Indeed, that is not sufficient, as it was not in 1983...

...There is some good news...

...Come February, you will also get the chance to see it, and ABC is betting more than $30 million that you and sixty million other viewers will stay tuned for five evenings to its miniseries about America under the jackboot of Soviet occupation...

...If you choose, you will see Kris Kris-tofferson play a Vietnam vet, former Congressman, and Presidential hopeful whose wife sleeps with the enemy, betrays her husband, and, while he is doing ten years in the Gulag, makes off with their sons for the bright lights of Chicago...

...This time, though, it is not funky mullahs who are to blame...

...And when Kristofferson heads off on an odyssey through middle America to recover his son, the program comes to resemble nothing so much as Easy Rider...

...Most miniseries aren't conceived as history lessons, of course, but this one has been from the start...

...It lost, but ABC had already gotten the message...

...allies, who have in mind a "final solution to the American problem...

...After all, is this not a hell of a way to avert the Soviet occupation of America...

...But not until we have endured another dozen hours of ABC's perennial programming favorite: America Held Hostage...

...Stein and Irvine and the others are not fools...

...That one-evening program, you will remember, infuriated those who felt (rightly) that discussing nuclear war might somehow compromise our willingness to wage it...

...According to those who have seen the script, Amerika will show us American children forced to sing "The Internationale," housewives forced to stand in line for food, members of Congress murdered, the United States Capitol destroyed...

...Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media (AIM), whose panache must be admired, even introduced a stockholders' resolution calling for an investigation into whether ABC was being used to spread Soviet disinformation...

...This is so bad, it's good...

...They know that in every poll taken to gauge such things, fear of the Bomb is matched by fear of the Russians in the American mind...

...Let them sit around a table for four hours on national television, and let them successfully negotiate an arms-control agreement...

...Then, you may remember, under Koppel's supervision, ABC also televised The Crisis Game in the wake of The Day After, a four-hour simulation of National Security Council decision-making during a U.S.-Soviet confrontation which starred Edmund Muskie as the President, James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense, and Clark Clifford as Secretary of State...

...It is Our Town and Casablanca, Peyton Place and Anne Frank...

...By all means, it should see to it that Ted Koppel comes on the screen just as Amerika fades to tell us, as he did immediately following The Day After, "You probably need it about now...

...But now, twenty years after that film was made, the Americans that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper reviled as dangerous provincials are celebrated as defenders of human liberty...

...The idea was first proposed, in the days immediately following The Day After, by Ben Stein, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon...

...But stronger measures are in order...

...Kristofferson reclaims one of his progeny, ignites a rebellion against the occupation, and dies a martyr...

...If you can, take a quick look out the window...

...families after the Soviet Union had taken over America...

...This time, they are bringing it all back home...

...Let them simulate a meeting with General Secretary Gorbachev, played by, say, Richard Nixon...