Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (41 page)

However, the people from Indigena believed, also correctly, that the only way the members of the press could possibly
care
enough about Indian people to attempt to give a viewing audience a real sense of Indian-ness, and therefore what was being lost, was to attempt to convey some Indian-ness at the press conference itself.

So, ignoring Nader’s advice, the Indians devoted the first hour or so of the conference to ceremonies, prayers, songs, stories, testimonies to the Great Spirit. About 90 percent of the press left during these goings-on.

Next, the anthropologists got up and told rambling stories about the impact on an Amazon tribe when helicopters start flying overhead speaking to the Indians via loudspeakers, or when machinery is brought in. They described how a culture that has been functioning well for two thousand years can be destroyed in only one generation of technological assault.

A little before the lunch break Nader spoke, rattling off the facts and figures, the corporate names, the government policies, the American collaborations and so on. It was too late, most of the press had left.

By the time the lunch break was over, the audience was composed mainly of Indigena supporters and friends. Four hours’ worth of new information on the conditions of Indian people in Paraguay, Colombia and Venezuela was shared among these friends, but as far as the press was concerned it never happened. There was no press there at all.

The net result of the press conference, which had taken months to organize and had cost several thousand dollars in travel, telephone and printing, was that not one story appeared on radio or television. Only two media outlets—
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
—carried any mention of it at all. Both these stories were carried in the back pages of the paper, were about six inches long, and quoted entirely from Nader. In the case of the
Times
story, an equally long report ran alongside, quoting Brazilian government officials denying the truth of every single point Nader had made. The Great Spirit was not mentioned.

When I tell this story to political-activist friends, their answer, more often than not, is that the Indians have got to be trained in how better to get their stories through the media. In other words, they must drop one cultural mind-set and function in another. Only then can they preserve the former. And yet, in learning the linear model, the technological communication patterns, the objectified forms that modern media honor and disseminate, the Indian herself or himself undergoes internal change to fit the form.

The question is this: Is it possible to adopt the hard-edged, fact-fascinated, aggressive, gross form in order to preserve a way of thinking that is completely alien to this model and cannot be conveyed through it?

To use the computer, one must develop computer-mind. To use the car, car-mind. To build the bomb, bomb-mind. To manipulate the media, one must be manipulative. To use television, which broadcasts flatness and one-dimensionality, it is necessary to think flatly and one-dimensionally.

The struggle of Indian people today is as much a consciousness struggle as it is a civil rights battle. To the extent that it is framed exclusively as a civil rights issue, the Indians lose, at least in cultural terms. Individual Indians may win a job, or a right, or a small payment for previous injustice, but their children and Indians of the future will not be Indians anymore; they will have been moved inside nationwide artificial reality with the rest of us. Since television itself is an outgrowth of the prevailing consciousness, it is logical that the outcome of an issue argued within it would be predetermined.

But imagine for a moment that television did not exist. Let’s say that only print media existed.

It so happens that print media, while not perfect, can convey a lot more about Indian ways of mind than electronic media can because print can express much greater depth, complexity, change of mood, subtlety, detail and so on. Books, especially, can be written in much slower rhythms, encouraging a perception that builds, stage by stage, over the length of a long reading process that may take many hours, or days. Of course, publishers, these days, also riding the rapids of modern life and responsive to commodity-mind, discourage books that move at deliberate speed, preferring those that are punchy, fast-reading, highlighted, riding the tops of the waves, like television sitcoms, or advertising.

Yet many books do exist that are solely devoted to states of feeling or expressions of intuition, or that deal in the realm of subjective reaction. There are books which are exclusively ritualistic or which have a mythic quality. And so such works as
Book of the Hopi, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, Black Elk Speaks, Seven Arrows, Indian Tales,
and others are able to convey more on an imagery level, a sensory level, and an evocational level than all the TV specials combined.

This is not to say that these books are sufficient. Only direct experience is. But if the battle were fought in books, Indians might win. If print were the only media in the world, the natural advantage of today’s dominant forms—corporate, military, technological, scientific—over concrete ways of thinking would be vastly diminished. In a wider information field, the Indian mind would have greater validity. So people who are interested in celebrating and saving Indian cultures, like people interested in the arts or ecology or any nonhierarchical political forms, might be well advised to cease all efforts to transmit these intentions through television and devote greater effort to undermining television itself and accelerating the struggle within other information fields.

Am I actually saying that television is utterly useless? There are the old examples of the destruction of Joseph McCarthy, the exposure of the Vietnam War, the undoing of Richard Nixon, the civil rights movement. We cannot deny that television has occasionally served what appears, even to me, as a progressive purpose.

And yet what ties all of these together is the extent to which they were framed in the sort of objective terms that television can handle.

McCarthy, Vietnam, Nixon were exposed because the issues were lies, deceits, corruption—objective matters. These are all “good television.”

But, finally, I want to get back to the civil rights movement because it is the exception that proves the larger point about the medium.

At the time of the early civil rights demonstrations, led at first by anonymous and brave black people, within incredibly hostile environments, and then by Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and others, television had only recently come into its own. The wiring-in of everyone was nearing completion. As a result, what happened in obscure Southern towns was visited upon millions of living rooms. People could see red-neck sheriffs beating people. Everyone had to face the hard reality of racism. Its appearance on television ignited the movement beyond the South. A new national attitude developed. The obvious Tightness of the struggle could not be avoided.

In turning the television telescope upon this movement, the powers that be in television were not acting out of any deep moral or political enlightenment; they were following the inexorable dictates of the medium itself.

The luckiest, or if it was conscious and deliberate, the smartest aspect of the civil rights movement was that it was confrontational. From the time of the early sit-ins, it expressed conflict.

There was a good deal of violence. The issues were framed in objective terms: rights, opportunities, jobs, housing, schools. There were good guys and bad guys. It was simple to tell which was which because they even came in different colors. There were inspired leaders who stood bravely against dazzling odds. There were mass demonstrations.

All of these were the ingredients of “good television.” They had action, they had highlight, they were highly visible, they were people-centered, they did not deal with sensory or subjective information, they did not require contextual understanding, they were “issues.” No aura!

The civil rights struggle was about power and rights. And now we find black children in schools with white children, black people living in white neighborhoods, black people in high public office, black people on boards of big corporations. There are even black people reporting television news.

But there is something odd in the quality of this success. I’m sure it has not escaped you that the black television news commentators and the Asian ones, as well as the women, are inseparable in tone of voice, phrasing, attitudes, style of clothes, overall behavior patterns and apparent political perspective from the hundreds of white men who preceded them in those roles. The color and sex are more varied now, but the message is the same. Is it nit-picking to point this out? I don’t think so.

The average black person, three or four generations removed from Africa, raised in a transplanted culture in the Deep South, kept isolated until very recently from the dominant white culture and its forms, is likely to have retained something of a way of feeling and being different from the Judeo-Christian European.

But this average black person—the one who retains a rich cultural perspective that is not yet fully Americanized—is not the one who is chosen for the network television show or the corporate vice-presidency. He or she would not be chosen because, in so many ways, this person would be ill suited for the objective, mental, aggressive, unfeeling styles that are rewarded in corporate life. Instead, the corporations pick the rare black person (or Chicano or woman or Indian) who is more like the white males who already occupy the center stage.

What is true for television commentators and corporation executives is also true for government officials. As the personnel within the institutions change, the institutions maintain their inflexible form. The balance of power among races and sexes begins to alter, but the power arrangements themselves—some people on top, other people on the bottom, other people totally excluded—are not threatened. As more diverse people occupy the central control systems, the systems do not become more diverse. The
people
lose their diversity and start to be transformed by the systems. The systems remain the same. The perceptual patterns that have been excluded remain excluded. If alternatives to the life-style of the systems exist, they are not represented.

None of this is to argue that black people, Indians, women, or any other group which has been denied access should not seek the successes they are presently beginning to achieve in the objective world of money and power. In their shoes I would certainly do the same. It is only to remark that the subtle pressures of technological and corporate form create an archetypal Faustian bargain. In winning rights or money or power, the diverse elements in American culture lose their unique identity, their cultural roots. They become what they oppose.

And so the real power is revealed as existing in the institutions and the technology itself. For proof, you have only to watch the occasional black cultural program on Sunday morning television. It might as well be
Happy Days
or
Mr. T.
As with
Roots,
a way of mind is reduced to the exigencies of soap opera and sitcoms. As for white “culture,” presumed to be the oppressor, it does not exist either. It is itself subordinate to corporate culture, or corporate consciousness, commodity life and the channelization of all behavior and thought into a nice package that suits a machine.

January 1977. It’s 8:15 A.M. The phone rings.