Television and Tragedy

LEON WIESELTIER

The Mind's The

Memory may deceive, but this decade that was supposed to make one dizzy with American glory seems to make one dizzy with American disaster. Terrorists and technology produce one calamity after another. Ronald Reagan—and the army of optimists with which he surrounds himself—has witnessed the violent deaths of more Americans than any peacetime president I can recall. The memorial service has become one of the busiest institutions of American politics. And one of the most familiar; for into this sad series of American reverses, of murder and mayhem at home and abroad, steps the only power outside of the Soviet Union with anything to gain from it—television.

A rather sickening symbiosis between television and tragedy has become a permanent feature of American culture. Indeed, almost the only certain consequence of public and private disaster (the distinction is rapidly becoming obsolete, also thanks to television) is still another shower of the networks' selflove. "I can't recall any time or crisis in history," Peter Jennings preened a few hours after the space shuttle exploded in January, "when television has had such an impact." Ted Koppel, the most thoughtful man on TV, observed less breathlessly that television is "the national mechanism by which we begin to vent our grief and our curiosity... by which our leaders try to point the rest of us toward the purpose in what today at least seems like such tragic waste." A writer for Time wrote vaporously of "the weird metaphysics of videotape," and so on.

The catastrophe of Challenger furnished a fine lesson in the limitations of the imperial medium. Television had an image, a picture of plumed destruction that nobody will ever forget; but an image was all it had. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody could have known what to say. The sight should have made the mind modest and the sorrow silent. On television, however, nothing is modest and nobody is silent.

T here are times, of course, when some people do know what to sayor so they think. These people are known as experts, and television cannot live without them. The speed with which they grasp the news, even before the news is fully known, is astounding. It is one thing to be ready with wisdom, say, about the national budget, and quite another to be ready with wisdom about the emotional state of men and women thousands of miles away in the hands of captors whose language almost none of us can speak and whose minds almost none of us can comprehend. The experts are rarely daunted. They stream before the cameras with calm and confi dence and condescension. The com mentary provoked by the TWA hijack ing last summer reminded me of lines of D. J. Enright's: "Floods of light are about to be cast / Where hitherto there was no darkness." Darkness, of course, there was: but from the truly dark, from the meanings that resist the packaging into platitudes, the experts flee. They are not being paid to be puzzled.

How refreshing it would be, in the middle of a crisis or in the aftermath of a catastrophe, to hear somebody on television say: I don't know. Or: I'm scared, too. Instead, desperate intellectual measures are taken. Consider the commentary about Challenger. "Not since November 22, 1963..." Over and over the pundits (and then the politicians) said it. When has a platitude been so swiftly produced? And so senselessly. There is no way in which the accidental killing of seven astronauts sembles the premeditated killing of a president. No way, that is, but one. They both happened on-camera. That is all they have in common. But for television that is quite enough. Ontology is conferred. The event exists. And no sooner does it exist by television than it expands by television. Thus the terrible tragedy at Cape Canaveral was promoted by Jennings into a "crisis in history."

Since imagery was all television had, the imagery was given no rest. Hour af ter hour, day after day, the tape of the fiery final seconds was played. In the end it was hard to restrain the ugly thought that the camera was a little tak en with its good luck; but it is, as I say, an ugly thought. More likely, the net works believed that the repetition would help "us" understand. In reality, how ever, it had the effect of making mil lions of viewers seem prurient. You couldn't watch that scene again and again unless you forgot that you were being fascinated by the blowing to bits of seven people. If you remembered, you were transformed, against your will, into an accomplice to pornography.

Nor is that all the complicity that tele vision communicates. There is also the voyeurism of grief. How many fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and sons and daughters have come before the cam eras in the middle of how many hijack ings and murders? Intruding upon indi viduals in their most intimate moments of suspense and sorrow has become a common instrument of news gathering. Saddest of all, Americans appear to have been thoroughly trained by televi sion to meet its exhibitionistic requirements. During the TWA drama, for example, Americans at home hungry for news about Americans abroad turned to television, only to find themselves invading the privacy of other Americans at home. There was one imperishable instance when television showed the families of the hostages watching television, which showed the hostages themselves in an appearance staged for television. To be sure, families will grab at every look they can get. Still, it was a kind of cathode epiphany.

Finally, there is the screen's first person plural—its greatest flattery of itself. During these disasters "we" see, "we" hurt, "we" need an explanation. Rather, Brokaw, Jennings are "us." Into these puny pronouns is packed the most fundamental assumption of the age of television: that the simultaneous presence of its signal in the homes of millions of people transforms them into a polity, a group. Remember "the global village"? Television still believes in it. The medium remains trapped in a kind of fundamentalist McLuhanism. The consequence of its universality, it thinks, is community.

But what, pray, is a community of millions? Yes, millions shared the image. But the image is all they shared. And an image is not an experience. It lacks the density, the opacity, the duration, the animation of a circumstance that can change a random assembly of people into a genuine human association. Universality is not quite community. There are walls, after all, between us. Our lives are specific, and it will take more than a picture, even a powerful picture, to link the specificity of your life to the specificity of mine.

Without television we would be blinder to the appearances of history. But there its services pretty much stop. When history perplexes, when the appearance seems to be missing a meaning, we don't turn to television for help. We turn to our minds, to our hearts, to our friends, to our books, to our priests. Or so we should. At least they will not trick us into an illusion of total clarity. At least they will not play upon our agitation for the purpose of a monthly or a weekly or a daily apocalypse.