Television

I WRITE THIS with one eye on the 11 O’clock News. It is the eve of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Guess Where, and the Bishop of Pittsburgh thinks Cardinal Spellman is wrong to defy the Pope, and Floyd McKissick feels it’s perfectly all right for folks to carry Vietcong flags in the big parade tomorrow, and a teeny-bopper peacenik from Queens has been jailed for booby-. trapping peace stickers (one exploded, injuring a small boy) and I don’t know what to think about it all. By the time this reaches print, however, I will no doubt have watched a Special In-Depth Report on the anti-war movement, and been provided with an Answer. (I haven’t seen the script, but I’m betting on that old favorite about the Value of Dissent to a Free Society.) How comfy to live in a world of Problems and Solutions. Well, perhaps not exactly comfy— the Problems get awfully sticky sometimes, and the Solutions often are less than reassuring—but at least — we are given the illusion that life can be coped with once all the Solutions have been doped out, and we are spared the pain of merely meditating on the dismal constants of the human condition. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasting are a vast Problem/ Solution industry; television leads the field because it is perfectly suited to the process: it can pre-empt an hour between Batman and Hogan’s Heroes, fill it with fifty minutes of Problem and ten of Solution, and presto! the Public Interest has been _ served. Splatters of modest applause are heard from the National Association of Broadcasters. Guerrillas in Latin America? Land reform, and quiet prayer! Teenage immorality, VD and The Pill? Understanding, and renewed efforts to Bridge the Gap between Generations! Pollution of air and water? Community concern, and quick action by The Government! No date for the Junior Prom? Yummy, the mouthwash that fights acne! Of course, it’s all done with unbearable solemnity: we slump in acquiescence as our eardrums throb to the sepulchrally sonorous pronouncements of Frank McGee, Charles Kuralt, Joseph C. Harsch and such (or, if a note of gritty realism is needed, Morley Safer). With few exceptions—those frolicsome little essays on Doors and Hotels narrated by Harry Reasoner, for example— television becomes stuffy and self-conscious as soon as it puts on its Public Service toga. Perhaps it knows the viewers would rather be watching I Dream of Jeannie. The approach can be applied to anything that frets people—for example, to popular music. One network recently offered a collection of snippets: a dib of The Mamas and The Papas, a dab of Simon and Garfunkel, snatches from several far-out rock and jazz groups and pan shots of crowds of youngsters either writhing obscenely or listening in slack-jawed, nodding absorption. The emphasis wasn’t on the music (I can’t recall hearing a single song all the way through), but on the outlandish dress, dances and hairdos of the performers and their audiences. The viewers in East Drainage were shown just enough to get their adrenalin pumping, then told by the announcer not to worry because kids are kids and, shucks, there’s always gonna be something new and strange around the corner. I’m sure they all went to bed smiling benign, philosophical, Mary Worthish smiles. I didn’t—I wanted to hear the songs. Music is easier to explain to death than almost anything else, and television persists in taking the same basic approach as a third-grade music appreciation hour (“Now Beethoven hears a little birdie singing—listen, children, that’s a flute.”) jazzed up, in cases like the one just cited, with mouthings about Generational Revolt. There is a better way, which is most often taken by the rejuvenated Bell Telephone Hour. A recent Hour offered some old and a great deal of new, potentially alarming, music, all in the context of San Francisco. It was very pleasant: just music, and lots of good shots of the city and surrounding countryside. Nothing was reduced to a Problem, and we were allowed to come to our own terms with the more extreme things without benefit of explanations. Prejudice is of course a dandy Problem, one from which the whole moral content can be removed at the stroke of a cliché. The Victims, a recent effort of the Westinghouse system broadcast by National Educational Television, dealt with the corrosive effects of prejudice on children. The presentation of the Problem was arresting enough that the Solution (Dr. Benjamin Spock prating a sleazy evasion about prejudice being an infectious disease) could be ignored, though not forgiven. We saw and heard grown-up WASPs uttering the customary stupidities about Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, Catholics et cetera; then little WASPs repeating their elders’ attitudes; then the victims, young and old, describing their encounters with = prejudice. Dr. Spock and the producers seemed to be concerned only with the pain inflicted on the victims; I was quite as distressed to hear the great steel shutters clanging down in | the young minds of the WASPlets. The program took the position that, well, after all, prejudice is wrong because we’re All Human—which is _ exactly the trouble, isn’t it? Television’s latest go at the Nazi Atrocities Problem was rather better. NBC presented an adaptation of Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, so instead of tendentious narration and old newsreel clips which dull our reactions by their very horridness, we saw just a courtroom filled with _ rather ordinary people, some of whom had done monstrous things to the others. The evidence presented was of single acts by single individuals; there were no vast tumbled heaps of anonymous corpses. When the experience is thus reduced to the human scale, the frightfulness comes through undimmed. There was no explicit Solution, or Answer; Weiss being a bit superficial, the implicit message was that a wicked system will dehumanize everyone it touches. Too easy—but anyway, the evidence ‘itself bypassed solutions to suggest that there is such a thing as wickedness, and that it is not inhuman but all too human for a man to beat other men to death and then go home to amuse himself breeding rabbits. Once in a while, however, television does a bang-up job on a Problem and then forgets to supply any Solution at all. A recent special by CBS News examined life in one building in a Negro slum on Chicago’s South Side: nine families, five of them on welfare; at least forty children in the place, and only two resident fathers. The Omniscient Narrator was busy elsewhere, so the people spoke for themselves, giving the depressing details of life in a world of vermin and easy credit ($60 for a $30 suit), where children pass almost directly from the crib to premature, hopeless adulthood (“I always was grown up,” a young mother said wistfully, “I never was a little girl”). At first, there is a lust for education, but it soon evaporates in unemployment and despair. The show told the whole story—yes, the tenants do throw garbage out the windows; yes, some women do have babies to get bigger welfare checks. Wait—the neighborhood is being Urban Renewed; the building itself will soon be razed. But the producers made it clear that Urban Renewal alone does little good; it destroys the only neighborhood these people know and, in the words of one man, “It’s like takin’ one big slum and puttin’ in another—nothin’s | been changed because the people are the same.” S The program set me to worrying about the Problems of slums, ghettos, poverty and people; because no Solution was proposed, I am still worried, and still thinking.