Back in the early 1970s, I wrote a talking blues. I had gotten to be a halfway decent picker, and I managed to record the song acceptably, I thought. My old friend Andy Abbott was passing through town, and we sat down with a couple of Manhattans to listen to it:
Talking Thomas Edison
Back in the 19th Century, in the beautiful state of old New Jersey
A man name of Edison took a notion, and it filled him with a great emotion
‘Cause it was a bright idea – and it seemed like the right idea…at the time.
He fiddled with matchsticks, fooled with wires, worked all night & he never got tired
Never got tired ’cause he had the energy, & the name of it was Electricity
He put a bulb on the wall, it lit up – and that’s where it all went wrong.
But everybody thanked Thomas Edison, they was all so grateful for what he done
They put his name on the streets & schools, they was just a pack of grateful fools,
Just like old Adam – he says, “Thank you, Madam – mighty fine apple.”
It was power to the people at a low, low cost, if you didn’t count up what got lost
And if anybody noticed, they didn’t much mind, anymore’n you notice you’re goin blind
Must be somethin in the air makin the world out there a little dim.
So they lost the gas lamps, lost the horses, old wooden stove, it had to go, of course,
So there wasn’t much left to sit around – but then you could always drive to town,
Watch the bright, bright lights erasin the night and puttin the stars to shame.
And then the phonograph came along, so you didn’t hafta learn anymore new songs
Radio followed the phonograph, so you didn’t hafta learn how to make folks laugh
There was a little static, but it was automatic entertainment.
Things they went all right for a while, with everybody smilin that automatic smile
And then some sucker invented the TV, so you didn’t even need to learn how to see
Just open up your baby blues, turn on the 6-o’clock news, and let the world roll by.
But the less there was people had to do to laugh or cry or deal with the blues,
The less they was able to see or hear, or smell or taste, or love or fear anything
Because what you bring, that’s all you ever get to take away.
No problem – just turn up the amplifiers, blow a few more watts through all the wires
Keep it simple and loud and bright, until they holler, ‘Outta sight!’
And outta mind… render ’em deaf and blind, they’ll always love you.
And it’s gettin so that the human race is just a bunch of meaningless faces
And all our electric communication only increases our isolation
We bounce off each other further & further – like a bunch of electrons.
And when all our words have been forgotten & all our feelings gotta be store-boughten
And nobody at all can think or hear or see, I wonder what this world will be
I don’t know… I imagine it might go…somethin’ like this: (Prolonged silence – guitar riff)
Andy, a machine tools salesman and hardly a skeptic or an enemy of technology, chuckled. “Pretty good – ” he said, “should we turn out the lights?”
It’s an uncomfortably good story. Here I sit typing it on a computer, into which I’ve long ago (relatively speaking) transferred that old tape recording of my anti-electronic- technology rant. I haven’t remained true to my own critical views. I’ve been enthralled by mass media, by radio and television and sound recordings and movies, just as nearly everyone has. Guilty.
Born into the age of radio, I find some of the shows of my youth still appealing. As a child, I listened to radio indiscriminately – Sgt. Preston of the Mounties, Bobby Benson and His B-Bar-B Riders, The Shadow, The Great Gildersleeve, Amos & Andy, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Duffy’s Tavern, Fibber McGee and Molly. Home “sick” from school (all I had to do was fake one cough), I’d even stoop to the soap operas supposedly meant for housewives: The Life of Helen Trent, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife, One Man’s Family.
As many have observed, the radio didn’t replace our imaginations; it stimulated them. Sgt. Preston and King made the winter in Chicago an adventure rather than a burden, and a trip to the corner grocery a satisfying survival of all sorts of potential perils – rogue trappers, wolverines, packs of ravening wolves.
Radio did, though, replace a number of other things Americans had learned how to do to entertain themselves and each other. Many had learned to play instruments or to sing together, or both, and few houses lacked a piano, guitar or banjo. Many others had learned to tell stories and jokes, and if conversation didn’t often rise to the level of an art, it was a nightly practice at the dinner table and afterwards in the kitchen, doing the dishes. After radios became ubiquitous, they rather quickly replaced such practices, and we abandoned our musical and narrative and conversational skills to the professionals. We knew we were no Crosbys, no Burns’s or Allens.
At first the commercial “messages” radio programming existed to pass on were fairly straightforward: “Buy this product, Mrs. Johnson,” said a professional elocutioner who wasn’t pretending to be anything but an advertising-reader, “It’s the best ______ you can get for the money.” But it didn’t take long for manufacturers to figure out that people were still skeptical enough to require subtler and more interesting appeals, and the young advertising agencies began to create their own mini-dramas and comedies, complete with ongoing characters who engaged in most unlikely conversations:
“My gosh, Alice,” said husband Jim, “why can’t you make a pie crust like Mrs. Hollander’s? Why, hers is as light as a feather!” Pretty soon, the shows’ announcers started breaking in with helpful suggestions: “Say, Alice, why don’t you try this new Beriberry shortening, made with Procter and Gamble’s new zillion dollar atomic emulsification process?” And Alice not only took the sudden appearance of some complete goddam stranger in her kitchen in stride, she took his helpful suggestion to heart. A week later, Jim was gushing, “My gosh, Alice, your pie crust is literally picking up the pie and flying it out the window! What’s your secret?”
And post-modernism was born. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to really believe your were listening to actual conversations between actual human beings, but then they did sound sincere, even if no one you’d ever known had grown quite so enthusiastic about dentifrice or deoderant or shortening. But the intrusion of sales pitches into everyday home life began to seem natural and acceptable.
Everyone knew, at some level, that the zillion dollar emulsification process was probably just a new name for “factory whipped.” But what everyone knew didn’t matter, for we were being conditioned by radio, a more powerful medium than any previous one, such as print, to accept lying bullshit as an acceptable part of our daily lives, a necessary and often mildly entertaining price to pay for our news and entertainment. (The very attitude toward truth held by our current President.)
But radio had a fatal weakness as an engine for the occupation of a nation’s soul. You could concentrate on other activities while it was on. People had long become used to working with their hands while listening. You could keep radio in its place, although that required learning a perilous skill – the art of selective Not Listening. Television presented an entirely new challenge, though it didn’t look at all new to generations who’d grown used to the movies.
Not too many people mistook what they saw in the movies for reality. The movies were available, after all, only in theaters designed to emphasize how different they were from our homes, filled with fancy embellishments, plush curtains, elaborate lighting fixtures, places we paid to enter in order to share brief hours of illusion with dozens or hundreds of our fellows. Television, though, took place in our living rooms (at first – soon houses began to have “tv rooms,” little shrines to house their television sets).
My family pioneered in possessing a tv set in the early ’50s – first on our block, as I recall. Manufactured by RCA, housed in a substantial wooden cabinet, it took up residence in my first home on Thayer Street and moved with us to Park Place. Its principal offering during early years in our home was the unmoving test pattern most people of my generation will easily recall, and early television programming, like early radio, was a largely local, experimental mish-mash of attempts to imitate or reproduce popular radio shows – just as early radio had attempted to imitate vaudeville. It took a few years for the popular radio shows to migrate to television and for the networks that had come to dominate radio programming to do the same for television, but by 1960 local, independent television production was pretty well a thing of the past, and all over the country we were joined in watching the homogenized offerings of the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). As Vonnegut notes, Ray Bradbury saw very early what some of the results of television’s invasion would be.
That same year, 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. The title refers to the kindling point of paper. That is how hot you have to get a book or a magazine before it bursts into flame. The leading male character makes his living burning printed matter. Nobody reads anymore. Many ordinary, rinky-dink homes like Ray’s and mine have a room with floor-to-ceiling TV screens on all four walls, with one chair in the middle.
The actors and actresses on all four walls of TV are scripted to acknowledge whoever is sitting in the chair in the middle, even if nobody is sitting in the chair in the middle, as a friend or relative in the midst of things. The wife of the guy who burns up paper is unhappy. He can afford only three screens. His wife can’t stand not knowing what’s happening on the missing fourth screen, because the TV actors and actresses are the only people she loves, the only ones anywhere she gives a damn about.
Fahrenheit 451 was published before we and most of our neighbors in Osterville even owned TVs. Ray Bradbury himself may not have owned one. He still may not own one. To this day, Ray can’t drive a car and hates to ride in airplanes.
In any case, Ray was sure as heck prescient. Just as people with dysfunctional kidneys are getting perfect ones from hospitals nowadays, Americans with dysfunctional social lives, like the woman in Ray’s book, are getting perfect friends and relatives from their TV sets. And around the clock!
Ray missed the boat about how many screens would be required for a successful people-transplant. One lousy little Sony can do the job, night and day. All it takes besides that is actors and actresses, telling the news, selling stuff, in soap operas or whatever, who treat whoever is watching, even if nobody is watching, like family.
“’Hell is other people,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Hell is other real people,’ is what he should have said. (Bagombo)
Since those early days, the networks and their successor cable giants have figured out that Vonnegut and Bradbury were onto something, and the most successful and longest-running programming has essentially provided people with alternate families, families who nearly always resolve their most vexing problems with wisdom, good humor, or – in the case of military-industrial-governmental-police families such as those on Hill Street Blues or NCIS or all the dozens of other cop/military shows – with salutary bursts of the old ultra-violence.
Television was quite successful in supplanting people’s family and social lives with its electronic versions, and by the mid 1960s, more than 90% of American households contained at least one television set. One effect of this occupation was that people began to believe, however consciously, that nothing they couldn’t view on television was real. As Kurt Vonnegut observed, “the country I used to write for is no longer anywhere to be found, hard as I may look for it. What made it disappear is TV, which turns out to be life enough for almost everybody, including my twenty-year-old daughter, and in large measure my sixty-year-old wife, too, these days. Quite a success for technology! The H-bomb and antibiotics pale by comparison” (Wakefield).
Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham remarked of another aspect of the resulting new television culture, “In order to fuel the engines of publicity the media suck so much love and adulation out of the atmosphere that unknown men must gasp for breath. They feel themselves made small, and they question the worth, even the fact, of their existence . . .. At any one time the ecology of the media can bear the weight of only so much celebrity, and as the grotesque personae of the divinities made for the mass market require ever more energy to sustain them, what is left for the weaker species on the dark side of the camera?”
Of course, every variety of “programming” on television, as on radio, served mainly as bait to get people to sit still for advertising. When television came along, the ad men saw that “truth” – that is, what people would believe to be true – resided very little in words, and almost exclusively in images. Images, when replacing each other at a lightning clip, would enter the viewers’ brains before the viewers’ could help it, and one image would replace another before viewers could consciously consider the first – let alone the second through the fiftieth.
If the images could imprint positive feelings and associate them with a product (by endless repetition of the product’s name and/or sales slogan), the viewers would be imprinted permanently with positive feelings whenever they saw that product on the shelves of their local supermarkets or multi-emporia. This discovery proved so powerful that, over the years, television advertising images could become utterly disconnected from the words they contained:
Screen shot: old person’s face, looking vaguely distressed; overlaid with product name: Ovidiflo (axovinoparticlubilus). [The drug company ad men share the same Product Naming Think Tank in Osaka with the auto manufacturers.] Soundtrack: “Suffering from something? Ask your doctor about Ovidiflo!” Next 60 screen shots: old person defeating grandchildren at pole vaulting, pigging out at trendy restaurant, leaping onto merry-go-round horse with grandchildren, defeating grandchildren at Nintendo game, etc. Soundtrack: “Ovidiflo! Sudden painful deaths have happened. If you experience bleeding stringwarts, loss of more than one limb, sudden cessation of sentience, vascular palpitations, or have a vile odor, consult your doctor. [Whose answering machine will surely contact you or your estate within less than a month.] Insane bouts of homicidal rage have happened. New Ovidiflo! Because, why not?”
The fact that all these disclaimers designed to short circuit lawsuits completely contradict the cascade of sunny, jolly images matters not a whit. It’s the images that count. The lifelong experience of our species has led us to the questionable certainty that Seeing is Believing. So we’ve learned to ignore any words we might hear that don’t make us feel what we want to feel, or what the image barrage wants us to feel. Look how happy they are. Let’s get us some of that Ovidiflo. Look how much all those people worship Trump. Let’s get us some of that for President.
The next development in programming helped further blur the distinction between entertainment and reality. A staple genre of programming from very early days had been Game Shows, various dreamed-up contests on which “real people” supplied most of the cast, the lucky winners among them to be rewarded with pittances (compared to the salaries professional television performers were beginning to command). What if dramatic actors could be replaced by volunteers? Would that not further inflate the profit margin? So “reality tv” was born. “Real people, not actors” were engaged to take part in contests designed to serve no purpose but to be filmed. “Survivor” may have been the first of these shows – I was so nauseated and repelled by the portion of one episode I looked at that I’m not certain – and its immense and immediate success spawned a number of imitations almost immediately, followed almost immediately by “voyeur tv,” programs on which various “real” families or groups of roommates supposedly conducted their daily lives under the constant gaze of television cameras. Who needs professional actors. Aren’t we all just acting? Isn’t it normal to be perpetually watched by strangers and have our lives projected onto screens?
With the advent of the internet and the explosion of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in the ’90s, that question answered itself. If we hadn’t all just been acting before, we all began to look at our lives as performances, now that we could film our own every move, broadcast our every banal utterance to the world. The dark side of the camera was no more; we all stood before ubiquitous lenses, tweeting and texting and mugging. Television had moved from the TV room into every room and then into the miniature telephone, and soon a majority of people felt desperately less than alive if they were not looking into a little electronic screen with which they could “interact.” This development began to make their interactions with actual other people or with the frustrating recalcitrance of the physical world seem like annoying distractions.
Florida writer Tim Dorsey summed up the results of this explosion: “….Technology has just passed our survival instinct, and the country is spinning on a stationary existential axis of make-believe importance. We text about a Tweet of a YouTube video posted on Facebook with a clip of Glee about not texting that we just texted about. Instead of actual life, we’re now living an air-guitar version of life” (Dorsey).
To put it another way: paying little or no attention to the evidence of our senses, or to any previous experiences we might have garnered, our conversations with “friends” (some of whom we might even have physically met) limited to a few “characters,” (“words” having become moribund, yielding rapidly to endless idiot acronyms and a witless vocabulary of juvenile cave-drawings, “emojis,” the visual equivalent of grunts and gestures).
History, such as we ever knew it, erased by an endless stream of images designed to stimulate our adrenal glands and distract our attention from the hands in our pockets and the dossiers being compiled on us, we became easy pickings for the wealthy heirs of earlier generations of robber barons, and either failed to notice or passionately embraced every new gew-gaw of Artificial Intelligence, oblivious to the demonstrable fact that Smart Machines were making us progressively stupider and weaker, that they were recording ever more aspects of our behavior, and able to translate those aspects into reliable conclusions about our thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs.
In her book about our initial reactions to electricity and electronic technologies,Linda Simon wrote, “Yet the press insisted on the X-ray’s potential benefits to the living, benefits that had not been proven through laboratory experiments or clinical trials. Speculations became truths merely by repetition” (Simon). And in a brilliantly prescient novel about the dawning digital age, Danish writer Michael Larsen wrote,
The day is coming without anyone asking us if we want it. Just like all progress. For better or worse, progress is coming. What’s new is that no one’s asking if we need it, if it will make us happier. What’s new is that we don’t even discuss it. If anyone objects, he’ll be met with a steamroller of arguments about all the advantages. And if he really resists, they’ll point to the lowest common denominator and our most basic fears: the fear of losing, of losing the people we love, of growing older, of dying. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. Only after we’ve given in and learned to live with the New Order will we see that the so-called advantages were just arguments designed to camouflage the disadvantages, and the disadvantages are all we’ll really be able to feel.
So now we have our first openly acknowledged Reality-TV President. Television, with the help of manipulation by Social Media, elected Trump, and Television can’t get enough of him. The last bastion connecting television with the actual world, journalism, has fallen to the alluring profitability of Infotainment. A truly revolting, if unconscious, admission of this surrender appeared recently in the magazine of my alma mater, Northwestern University, celebrating the enhanced careers of some of my fellow (if younger) graduates:
In the 17 months since then [2016 election], the host of CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and . . . [the] host of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers have managed to not only provide post-traumatic comic relief to millions of Americans but also some of the sharpest political criticism of the Trump presidency, bar none.
“There’s a central character to our news every day who is constantly throwing red meat to his base, which gives you something to talk about, and he’s always in campaign mode and always controlling the news cycle,” Colbert says. “That’s one of the reasons it’s been so fertile for people in late night. You don’t have to get out a sieve, shake your way through the news cycle and go, ‘OK, what are people going to care about today?’ You know what it is.” [In other words, we no longer have to exercise the slightest effort, now that we are being provided with out material by an administration that understands our needs perfectly.]
The constant focus on the day’s Trump headlines has reinvigorated late-night television. Colbert and Meyer have launched a relentless assault on Trump night after night since he was elected – demonstrating that dissent is alive and well in America. [And demonstrating that satire is utterly ineffective in the age of Celebrity.]
“Hosts from a different generation were really surface in their comedy,” says Medill grad Michael Schneider [blithely using a noun in place of a predicate adjective, as part of the ongoing fashion of junking hundreds of years of the development of English syntax.] “They really focused on the more silly aspects of politicians – how they looked, how they acted. That doesn’t work right now because of what’s going on, because of the real issues we’re facing and what this administration is actually doing.” [Neither of which gets more than the most fleeting mention by either late-night comedians or day-time “news persons.”]
Left-leaning political satire has proved popular with late-night viewers. Once Colbert started taking on Trump, he overtook his more apolitical competitor Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s Tonight Show, in total viewers and significantly narrowed the ratings gap among young viewers.
Colbert: “We are alternative programming to what is being fed to you out of the White House, what you are seeing on the news every day.” [Compare this claim of independence and rebelliousness with Colbert’s opening argument for the “fertility” of the Trump White House.]
Need more proof? Read the funny [an adjective becomes a noun] for yourself. Thede tweeted this on Nov. 27, and it perfectly captures her personality and what she hopes to accomplish with her culturally nuanced political satire:
“If white people snatched trump for his bologna as hard as black people snatched Chrisette Michele for singing at the inauguration, we wouldn’t be in this mess. WHITE PEOPLE: GET YOUR BOY. IT IS THE ONLY WAY OUT.” [Cultural nuance has surely reached its pinnacle now.]
Thede’s weekly half-hour hot take on news and culture is a lot like that tweet. It includes heaping helpings of funny [adjective for noun] and, like all things comedic, a pinch of pain.
“Medill made me a better writer,” says Thede. [Why belabor the obvious?] “It trained me. Medill was so formative because I didn’t know I was a writer.” [But now she know.]
“After graduation she headed to the Second City, Chicago’s world-renowned comedy club, to hone her comedy-writing chops. [Is there an emoji for honed chops yet?]
And that she does. When Prince Harry announced his engagement to Northwestern alum Meghan Markle ’03, Thede immediately used their impending marriage to great effect. Reimagining the logo for White Castle restaurants, Thede said the upcoming royal union was a Black and White Castle – which it is, given that Markle (like Thede) is biracial. It’s the kind of joke that resonates with a younger generation that sees multiple levels of satire in the reference.” (Northwestern, Spring 2018, pp. 24-28)
Multiple levels of satire. Not to mention the elegant wit.
Back before the digital age, Jerry Mander was seeing in the technology of television grave danger to the continued existence of representative government:
Imagine that like some kind of science fiction dictator you intended to rule the world. You would probably have pinned over your desk a list something like this:
1) Eliminate personal knowledge. Make it hard for people to know about themselves, how they function, what a human being is, or how a human fits into wider, natural systems. This will make it impossible for the human to separate natural from artificial, real from unreal. You provide the answers to all questions.
2) Eliminate points of comparison. Comparisons can be found in earlier societies, older language forms and cultural artifacts, including print media. Eliminate or museumize indigenous cultures, wilderness and nonhuman life forms. Re-create internal human experience – instincts, thoughts, and spontaneous, varied feelings – so that it will not evoke the past.
3) Separate people from each other. Reduce interpersonal communication through life-styles that emphasize separateness. When people gather together, be sure it is for a prearranged experience that occupies all their attention at once. Spectator sports are excellent, so are circuses, elections, and any spectacles in which focus is outward and interpersonal exchange is subordinated to mass experience.
4) Unify experience, especially encouraging mental experience at the expense of sensory experience. Separate people’s minds from their bodies, as in sense-deprivation experiments, thus clearing the mental channel for implantation. Idealize the mind. Sensory experience cannot be eliminated totally, so it should be driven into narrow areas. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect.
5) Occupy the mind. Once people are isolated in their minds, fill the brain with prearranged experience and thought. Content is less important that the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at all costs, because it is difficult to control.
6) Encourage drug use. Recognize that total repression is impossible and so expressions of revolt must be contained on the personal level. Drugs will fill in the cracks of dissatisfaction, making people unresponsive to organized expressions of resistance.
7) Centralize knowledge and information. Having isolated people from each
other and minds from bodies; eliminated points of comparison; discouraged sensory experience; and invented technologies to unify and control experience, speak. At this point whatever comes from outside will enter directly into all brains at the same time with great power and believability.
8) Redefine happiness and the meaning of life in terms of new and increasingly unrooted philosophy. Once you’ve established the prior seven conditions, this one is easy. Anything makes sense in a void. All channels are open, receptive and unquestioning. Formal mind structuring is simple. Most important, avoid naturalistic philosophies, they lead to uncontrollable awareness. The least resistable philosophies are the most arbitrary ones, those that make sense only in terms of themselves.” (Mander)
Check and double check. Mission accomplished. It works the same in any country. There’s our present situation, and it’s needed no political dictator to impose it. We’ve rushed into its clutches. I’ve never known any critic to take notice of an odd little passage in Orwell’s 1984, though it seems ever more telling. Every critic, every reader or movie-goer, found Oceania’s telescreen, which constantly monitored every corner of existence and immediately chastised and threatened anyone whose behavior deviated from the desired standards, horrible and unthinkable. And yet, when Winston Smith goes to look at a room to rent where he can be alone with Julia, and discovers that it contains no telescreen, the old man showing him the room says, “‘Ah,’ . . . ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow . . . ” (Orwell). People didn’t have the telescreens imposed on them, in other words; they willingly bought them and brought them into their homes. As we have done with all the technological marvels that increasingly enslave us and make us less and less human, more and more servants of our mechanical masters, more and more at the mercy of sociopathic buffoons, peddlars of toxic snake oil.
from My Checkered Career, ISBN13: 9780984413966
Acknowledgments:
Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box, Putnam, 1999
Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451, Ballantine Books, 1953
Dan Wakefield, ed., Kurt Vonnegut Letters, Delacorte, 2012
Lewis Lapham, “Shooting Stars,” Imperial Masquerade, Grove-Weidenfield, 1990
Tim Dorsey, Tiger Shrimp Tango, Morrow, 2014
Linda Simon, Dark Light, Harcourt, Inc., 2004
Michael Larsen, Uncertainty, Harcourt, Brace, 1996
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Morrow, 1978
George Orwell, 1984, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949
