Alessandra Stanley, a TV critic for the New York Times, is deeply, deeply irritating. In today’s paper, she sharesher great insight: that on television “news” of the war doesn’t come only from “the news” but that it has penetrated into pop culture, too.
The networks, which covered the early days of the invasion on tiptoe, worried that their patriotism in the wake of 9/11 would be questioned, have grown more openly skeptical. But news programs are not the only place where viewers are exposed to the conflict in Iraq.
Since the invasion, and most particularly in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the war on terror has surfaced as a subplot or subliminal theme, not just on “24” or ripped-from-the-headline crime series like “Law & Order,” but even on reality shows and sitcoms. On NBC’s “30 Rock,” the network executive played by Alec Baldwin tells co-workers that he is dating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Well, duh! What did she expect? Our country has been on a war footing for five and a half years. Regardless of whether you think Iraq and 9/11 have anything to do with each other, there’s no contesting that war entered America’s consciousness on 9/11. Because of the deep, irrational anxieties and fears roused by continued reports of violence and unrest, it was inevitable that issues surrounding war would penetrate our pop culture.
Typically, after being embarrassingly, humiliatingly late to this party, Stanley also misses the implications, offered in The Times (London). Sometimes it takes an outsider to see—and report—what is under our own noses:
while America unarguably remains the most politically correct society on earth, a new, subversive spirit is transforming its entertainment networks. Political incorrectness is suddenly doing great at the box office. It is not just Simon Cowell slating competitors on American Idol (although he did get into hot water this year for telling one talent-impaired singer he looked like a “bush baby”). On both the left and the right wings, programme-makers are peppering the air-waves with a pleasingly rancid assault on comfortable audience complacencies.
Nobody has done more to defy polite television convention than Jack Bauer, the indestructible hero of 24,
After running through all the familiar caveats on the use of torture in the series 24 (and making fun of American critics who take it so seriously), Tony Allen-Mills goes on to observe the wider trend:
Adult cartoon shows such as South Park and The Simpsons have long been regarded as the cutting edge of deliberately offensive humour, but these days they are far from alone. The success of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat film — and his Ali G television series, shown on HBO — suggests that American audiences are tiring of a relentless diet of politically correct cop shows in which the investigating team always seems to comprise one white, one black, one Hispanic and an occasional good Muslim.
The Comedy Central cable network recently launched The Sarah Silverman Program, a sitcom featuring one of America’s most foul-mouthed comedians.
It is the foundation of peaceful coexistence, and it has deep roots in human evolution:
Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.
Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.
The notion of an “information war” is not limited to the battlefield of the Middle East. Increasingly, politics will be fought through PR-Bordering-on-Propaganda.
That “infotainment rules” is merely an observation about the state of the news, not a hearty endorsement of the sound bite and the publicity stunt and the emotional storytelling and the slugfests and the takedowns and the tug at the heartstrings or the kick in the gut delivered by infotainment, which has all but replaced the “news” on television.
When I call for better infotainment, it’s not because I don’t like serious news. [But I know that if the mass audience liked that documentary series much as I do, TV would be wall-to-wall Frontline clones. …
High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.
When I read this essay by Susan Sontag—the last she wrote before she died in 2004, and just now being published—I was reminded of how hollow a triumph it would be if infotainment were ever to really rule.
Literature tells stories. Television gives information.
Literature involves. It is the recreation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances - immures us in our own indifference.
The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or “interesting”), that all stories are endless - or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story.
By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate - the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading - offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.
In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always - as I have argued - an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution - which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our mediadisseminated glut of unending stories.
Television gives us, in an extremely debased and un-truthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. (”Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once … space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)
To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.
To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.
The word factoid was coined by Norman Mailer to mean: “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper.”
The word factoid has entered the dictionary. Its first—i.e., preferred— meaning is: an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print.
I’ll grant you that the second meaning of the word factoid is: “a briefly stated and usually trivial fact.”
I just cannot stand it that nobody knows the goddamn meaning of the word.
Judging from the headlines on Google News as of 7 p.m., concern is mounting for BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza eight days ago and still unaccounted for.
Britain ‘using every channel
France24, France - 4 hours ago
Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said Tuesday that Britain was using every channel it can to secure the release of BBC reporter Alan Johnston, …
Headlines for March 20, 2007
Democracy Now, NY - 9 hours ago
In the Occupied Territories, Palestinian journalists are staging a work strike today to protest the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston. …
Alan Johnston on the front line
BBC News, UK - Mar 17, 2007
Palestinian security services are still searching for the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston who was kidnapped on Monday by unidentified gunmen in Gaza. …
Beckett says she raised BBC abduction with Abbas
Jurnalo, Germany - 6 hours ago
The British government is using “every channel and opportunity” to secure the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston believed to have been kidnapped in …
The best response was in a letter to the editor published in today’s Times.
Nicholas D. Kristof’s suggestion that the United States press Israel to be more forthcoming in negotiating with the Palestinians reminds me of the story of the rabbi who gave a sermon about charity and deemed it 50 percent effective: he persuaded the poor to accept.
When has Israel been the impediment to establishing a Palestinian state?
From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was administered by Jordan, not Israel, and a Palestinian state could have been established at the stroke of a pen. After the Six-Day War, Israel offered to return the newly acquired territories to the Arabs in exchange for recognition and peace; the response was a thunderous no.
More recently, Yasir Arafat was offered a state in almost all the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem by Ehud Barak and then more generously by Bill Clinton, and turned it down because the offer did not include the destruction of Israel by flooding it with returning refugees.
Currently, the Palestinians are ruled by a government that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. What would the agenda be in the dialogue that Mr. Kristof urges on Israel, a timetable for Israel’s committing suicide?
Fair-minded observers know where the roadblock to peace in the Middle East is to be found, and it is not Israel.
(Rabbi) Harold Kushner
Natick, Mass., March 18, 2007
Also, David Harris took on Kristof in the pages of the Jerusalem Post:
Kristof went after Israel with a two-by-four and chastised elected leaders in the US for uncritically embracing Israel.
He sanctimoniously lectured Israel on what he called “the best hope” for the country, namely, “a peace agreement with Palestinians,” and lambasted “hard-line Israeli policies.” And he accused American politicians of having “learned to muzzle themselves” regarding Israel policy.
Most striking about the column was what was missing. There wasn’t a single reference to the unenviable situation in which Israel finds itself.
Here’s my take: The longer Kristof and other Israel-bashers refuse to take reality into consideration and the longer they ignore events, which change daily in the Middle East, the stupider, more hypocritical, and more unprincipled they look.
There has not been one word from a Western journalist about the fate of the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped in Gaza by Israel’s “partner for peace” eight days ago. When I see Nick Kristof write about Johnston, I will reconsider my opinion of him. Otherwise, he’s just another name to add to the list of columnists I no longer read.
"Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are
always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is OK.
But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not OK."
