continued from page 7 now we know what we don't see. Whenever a TV show or a movie or a news broadcast leaves out crucial realities for the sake of sentimentality, we pretty much understand the nature of what’s been left out and why. But American media forgives the emptiness and injustice of our daily life by presenting our daily life as innocent. Society, in turn, forgives American media for lying because if we accept the lie as truth then we needn’t do anything, we needn’t change. I like Dave’s line of thought because it suggests a motive—literally, a motive force—for these rivers of glop that stream from the screens and loudspeakers of our era. Because, contrary to popular belief, profit is not the motive. That seems a rash statement to make in the vicinity of Las Vegas, but the profit motive merely begs the question: why is it profitable? Profit, in media, is simply a way of measuring attention. Why does what we call “media” attract so much attention? The answer is that it is otherwise too crippling for individuals to bear the strain of accepting the unbalanced, unrewarding, uninspiring existence that is advertised as “normal daily life” for most people who have to earn a living every day. Do those words seem too strong? Consider: to go to a job you don’t value in itself but for its paycheck, while your kids go to a school that is less and less able to educate them; a large percentage of your pay is taken by the government for defenses that don’t defend, welfare that doesn’t aid, and the upkeep of a government that is impermeable to the influence of a single individual; while you are caught in a value system that judges you by what you own, in a society where it is taken for granted now that children can’t communicate with their parents, that old people have to be shut away in homes, and that no neighborhood is really safe; while the highest medical costs in the world don’t prevent us from having one of the worst health records in the West (for instance, New York has a far higher infant mortality rate than Hong Kong), and the air, water, and supermarket food are filled with God- knows-what; and to have, at the end of a busy yet uneventful life, little to show for enduring all this but a comfortable home if you’ve “done well” enough; yet to know all along that you’re living in the freest, most powerful country in the world, though you haven’t had time to exercise much freedom and don’t personally have any power—this is to be living a life of slow attrition and maddening contradictions. Add to this a social style that values cheerfulness more than any other attribute, and then it is not so strange or shocking that the average American family watches six to eight hours of network television a day. It is a cheap and sanctioned way to partake of this world without having actually to live in it. Certainly they don't watch so much TV because they’re bored— there’s far too much tension in their lives to call them bored, and, in fact, many of the products advertised on their favorite programs feature drugs to calm them down. Nor is it because they’re stupid—a people managing the most technically intricate daily life in history can hardly be written off as stupid; nor because they can’t entertain themselves—they are not so different from the hundreds of generations of their forebears who entertained themselves very well as a matter of course. No, they are glued to the TV because one of the most fundamental fnessages of television is: “It’s all right.” Every sitcom and drama says: “It’s all right.” Those people on the tube go through the same—if highly stylized —frustrations, and are exposed to the same dangers as we are, yet they reappear magically every week (every day on the soap operas) ready for more, always hopeful, always cheery, never questioning the fundamental premise that this is the way a great culture behaves and that all the harassments are the temporary inconveniences of a beneficent society. It’s going to get even better, but even now it’s all right. The commercials, the Hollywood movies, the universal demand in every television drama or comedy that no character’s hope can ever be exhausted, combine in a deafening chorus of: It’s all right. As a screenwriter I have been in many a film production meeting, and not once have I heard any producer or studio executive say, “We have to lie to the public.” What I have heard, over and over, is, “They have to leave the theater feeling good.” This, of course, easily (though not always) translates into lying—into simplifying emotions and events so that “it’s all right.” You may measure how deeply our people know “it” is not all right, not at all, by how much money they are willing to pay to be ceaselessly told that it is. The more they feel it’s not, the more they need to be told it is—hence Mr. Reagan’s popularity. Works that don’t say “It’s all right” don’t get much media attention or make much money. The culture itself is in the infantile position of needing to be assured, every dal, all day, that this way of life is good for you. Even the most disturbing news is dispensed in the most reassuring package. As world news has gotten more and more disturbing, the trend in broadcast journalism has been to get more and more flimflam, to take it less seriously, to keep up the front of “ It’s really quite all right.” This creates an enormous tension between the medium and its messages, because everybody knows that what’s on the news is not all right. That is why such big money is paid to a newscaster with a calm, authoritative air who, by his presence alone, seems to resolve the contradictions of his medium. Walter Cronkite was the most popular newscaster in broadcast history because his very presence implied: “As long as I’m on the air, you can be sure that, no matter what I’m telling you, it’s still all right.” w W hich is to say that the media ■ ■ has found it profitable to do the mothering of the mass psyche. But it’s a weak mother. It cannot nurture. All it can do is say it’s all right, tuck us in, and hope for the best. Today most serious, creative people exhaust themselves in a sideline commentary on this state of affairs, a commentary that usually gets sucked up into the media and spewed back out in a format that says “It’s all right. What this guy’s saying is quite all right, what this woman’s singing is all right, all right.” This is what “gaining recognition” virtually always means now in America: your work gets turned inside out so that its meaning becomes “It’s all right.” Of course, most of what exists to make media of, to make images of, is more and more disorder. Media keeps saying, “It’s all right” while being fixated upon the violent, the chaotic, and the terrifying. So the production of media becomes more and more schizoid, with two messages simultaneously being broadcast: “It’s all right. We’re dying. It’s all right. We’re all dying.” The other crucial message —“We’re dying”—runs right alongside It’s all right. Murder is the crux of much media “drama.” But it’s murder presented harmlessly, with trivial causes cited. Rare is the attempt, in all our thousands of murder dramas, to delve below the surface. We take for granted now, almost as an immutable principle of dramatic unity, that significant numbers of us want to kill significant numbers of the rest of us. And what are all the murders jn our media but a way of saying “We are being killed, we are killing, we are dying”? Only a people dying and in the midst of death would need to see so much of it in such sanitized form in order to make death harmless. This is the way we choose to share our death. Delete the word “entertainment” and say instead, North Americans devote an enormous amount of time to the ritual of sharing death. If this were recognized as a ritual, and if the deaths were shared with a respect for the realities and the mysteries of death, this might be a very useful thing to do. But there is no respect for death in our death-dependent media, there is only the compulsion to display death. As for the consumers, they consume these deaths like sugar pills. Their ritual goes on far beneath any level on which they’d be prepared to admit the word “ritual.” So we engage in a ritual we pretend isn’t happening, hovering around deaths that we say aren’t real. It is no coincidence that this practice has thrived while the Pentagon uses the money of these death watchers to create weapons for death on a scale that is beyond the powers of human imagination —the very same human imagination that is stunting itself by watching ersatz deaths, as though intentionally crippling its capacity to envision the encroaching dangers. It is possible that the Pentagon’s process could not go on without the dulling effects of this “ entertainment.” When we’re not watching our, screens, we’re listening to music. And, of course, North Americans listen to love songs at every possible opportunity, through every possible orifice of media. People under the strain of such dislocating unrealities need to hear “ I love you, I love you,” as often as they can. “ I love you” or “ I used to love you” or “ I ought to love you” or “ I need to love you” or “I want to love you.” It is the fashion of pop-music critics to3 discount the words for the style, forgetting that most of the world’s cultures have had songs about everything, songs about work, about the sky, about death, about the gods, about getting up in the morning, about animals, about children, about eating, about dreams—about everything, along with love. These were songs that everybody knew and sang. For a short time in the late sixties we moved toward such songs again, but that was a brief digression; since the First World War the music that most North Americans listen to has been a music of love lyrics that rarely go beyond adolescent yearnings. Eitherthe song is steeped in the yearnings themselves, or it is saturated with a longing for the days when one could, shamelessly, feel like an adolescent. The beat has changed radically from decade to decade, but with brief exceptions that beat has carried the same pathetic load. (The beat, thankfully, has given us other gifts.) It can’t be over-emphasized that these are entertainments of a people whose basic imperative is the need not to think about their environment. The depth of their need may be measured by the hysterical popularity of this entertainment; it is also the measure of how little good it does them, y !¥■ edia is not experience. In its ■ most common form, media substitutes a fantasy of experience or (in the case of news) an abbreviation of experience for the living fact. But in our culture the absorption of media has become a substitute for experience. We absorb media, we don’t live it—there is a vast psychological difference, and it is a difference that is rarely brought up. For example, in the 1940s, when one’s environment was still one’s environment, an experience to be lived instead of a media-saturation to be absorbed, teenagers like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t learn their music primarily from the radio. Beginning when they were small boys they sneaked over to the black juke joints of Louisiana and Mississippi and Tennessee, where they weren’t supposed to go, and they listened and learned. When Lewis and Presley began recording, even though they were barely twenty they had tremendous authority because they had experience—a raw experience of crossing foreign boundaries, of streets and sounds and peoples, of the night-to-night learning of ways that could not be taught at home. This is very different from young musicians now who learn from a product, not a living ground. Their music doesn’t get to them till it’s been sifted through elaborate corporate networks of production and distribution. It doesn’t smack of the raw world that exists before “product” can even be thought of. The young know this, of course. They sense the difference intensely, and often react to it violently. So white kids from suburban media culture invented slam dancing (jumping up and down and slamming into each other) while black kids from the South Bronx, who have to deal with realities far more urgent than media, were elaborating the astounding graces of break dancing. Slam dancing was a dead end. Break dancing, coming from a living ground, goes out through media but becomes ultimately transformed into another living ground—the kids in the elementary school down the street in Santa Monica break dance. Which is to say, a grace has been added to their lives. A possibility of grace. With the vitality that comes from having originated from a living ground. The media here is taking its proper role as a channel, not as a world in itself. It’s possible that these kids are being affected more in their bodies and their daily lives by the South Bronx subculture than by high-gloss films like Gremlins or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even through all this static, life can speak of life. / Of course, break dancing inevitably gets hyped, and hence devalued, by the entertainment industry, the way Elvis Presley ended up singing “Viva Las Vegas” as that town’s most glamorous headliner. He went from being the numinous son of a living ground to being the charismatic product of a media empire—the paradigm of media’s power to transform the transformers. The town veritably glows in the dark with the strength of media’s mystique. We do not yet know what life is in a media environment. We have not yet evolved a contemporary culture that can supply the definition—or rather, supply the constellation of concepts in which that definition would live and grow. These seem such simple statements, but they are at the crux of the American dilemma now. An important aspect of this dilemma is that we’ve barely begun a body of thought and art which is focused on what is really alive in the ground of a media- saturated daily life. For culture always proceeds from two poles: one is the people of the land and the street; the other is the thinker. You see this most starkly in revolutions: the ground swell on the one hand, the thinker (the Jefferson, for instance) on the other. Or religiously, the ground swell of belief that is articulated by a Michelangelo or a Dante. The two poles can exist without each other but they cannot be effective without each other. Unless a body of thought connects with a living ground, there is no possibility that this era will discover itself within its cacophony and create, one day, a post-A.D. culture. It is ours to attempt the thought and seek the ground —for all of us exist between those poles. We are not only dying. We are living. And we are struggling to share our lives, which is all, finally, that “culture” means. Report from El Dorado is from Michael Ventura’s Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A, which is a collection of essays taken from his columns in the L.A. Weekly. He has just published an excellent novel entitled Night Time, Losing Time. This essay also appeared in The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-cultural Literacy. Twin Cities artist Stuart Mead is a frequent contributor to the CSQ. Connie Gilbert is a Twin Cities graphic designer and artist. Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 23
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz