Matrix TV

Yesterday, while unpacking bags from our trip, I watched both John Kerry's and President Bush's post-election speeches. I was moved by both men. John Kerry was classy and President Bush humble. They both communicated something far more noble in those speeches than in any speech, debate, or TV ad I witnessed during the campaign. It made me wonder why neither of them could pull off being more human during the campaign.

There is something about a political campaign that pulls the sheets back on the abysmal state of public discourse in this country. It's about as compelling to me as watching dust settle. But we appear to be trapped in it. We seem to need everything to be a spectacle. I read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death years ago, and I remember his observations re: the effect TV has had on public discourse were compelling to me. Over the years, I've managed to reduce TV's place in my life, but it still gets too much of my attention. I'm going to re-read Postman's book, and ask my wife to do the same. Maybe together, and with God's help, we can figure out a way to dislodge ourselves completely from "The Matrix". Here's a quote from Chapter 5, for those of you who've never read it:

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.