Piecework

Meanwhile, in every state, in major cities, in contests for the Senate or the school board, the public discourse is all heat and no illumination. The attack ads come rolling forth, reducing opponents to agents of Lucifer. Vote for me, not the other guy. He’s bad, guilty, corrupt, and stupid; therefore, I’m good, I’m innocent, I’m honest, I’m smart. He’s got a wife and kids? He has an ailing mother? Hey, don’t bother me with details, pal, we’re playing hardball here! Quick, my flack, hand me a label: womanizer, flip-flopper, liar, and, uh, liberal. Brrrrruuuuupppppp. Who’s next?

Most of the American news media have been debased, too. Newspaper, magazine, and television editors and their audiences have been powerfully altered by forty-five years of television drama. The average American household now watches about seven hours of television a day, an appetite for entertainment unknown in human history. The result: The American imagination is jammed with the structures of melodrama. Not analysis, not cool judgment, not the humanizing imagery of high art. Drama. Most of it bad drama. And as it has been since the time of Aristotle, the essence of drama is conflict.

Even the conflicts of the so-called real world — the nonfiction world of news and society — must be simple, easy to follow through meals and other domestic activities, and preferably violent. Following the style of the television tabloid shows, even some network magazines are using feature-film gimmicks: music to tell the viewer what he should feel; ominous photography or bright, happy lighting to make emotional points. Don’t think is the message; feel. In all media, the best-played stories now are the ones that most resemble movies. Give us good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, and for chrissakes, don’t give us talking heads! Action, baby. Bang-bang. Conflict.

In the name of egalitarian vulgarity, the newspapers and the television shows fill up with O. J. Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt, her moronic husband, Amy Fisher, the Menendez brothers; serial killers and heroic cops; priests who corrupt kids and kids who kill parents; drug warriors, gun nuts, and politicians caught getting laid. They in turn become subjects for fictional docudramas of invincible stupidity.

Every day, the American vision becomes cruder, narrower, more parochial. In most newspapers, foreign news gets little play unless Americans are involved. The major newspapers still employ foreign correspondents of immense gifts, but even the greatest reporters must battle for space against the tremendous force of the general parochialism. The mass-circulation newspapers don’t even bother. Unless Americans are concerned, most foreign news seems to be about Princess Di.

To be sure, there are exceptions to the tide of simple-minded stupidity. C-Span has become a wonderful window into some areas of the society; it allows us to see the boring parts of the craft of governance. Court TV has the potential to educate more Americans about the law than any medium in the country’s history. CNN does a splendid job, in many ways, bringing the audience closer to the outside world than newspapers ever could. But the emphasis remains on conflict, drama, present tense, bang-bang: Crossfire is hardly the forum for thoughtful analysis. Maybe nothing is. The networks were positioned to cover the armed invasion of Haiti; when Jimmy Carter made his deal, most returned to the soap operas and talk shows, or cut back, with a sigh of relief, to the OJ. hearings. Who the hell wants to cover a peaceful intervention?

As we move toward Endgame, consider this: We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco.

II. US AGAINST THEM

In the wider society, true to the principles of conflict, an often bewildering variety of social factions batter at one another for position and victory (or, as the jargon goes, “hegemony”). Their purpose isn’t to make a better society, a place where that illusive American goal, harmony, is possible. The goal is therapy. The goal is dominance. The goal is vengeance: to take no prisoners and, in Murray Kemp-ton’s phrase, shoot the wounded.

The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation, disunification, atomization, balkanization, disintegration. Thoughtful men and women — among them Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gertrude Himmelfarb, Michael Walzer, Allan Bloom, the late William A. Henry III, Robert Hughes — have looked at the battlefield from different positions. They offer their own analyses of the causes of and remedies for the Endgame psychology of permanent division and confrontation. But most agree about the symptoms.