Word: arlen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Arlen addresses himself to the weary antinomies of TV-relevance and impartiality, balance and accuracy, immediacy and taste, integrity and remorseless expungement of personality, news and entertainment, sobriety and effulgence, public service and self-service-and not surprisingly reaches the conclusion that television flaunts a "slick and greedy and mentally undemanding world...
When we watch the typical war-coverage episode, we see, as Arlen says, "a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall." This episode is filmed and discussed by reporters man-handled by the military in Vietnam and edited at home by men consumed by the desire for "balance." Unfortunately, balance and accuracy are severely antagonistic. Instead of the balance of 365 five-minute bits, we would probably prefer an accurate, expansive evaluation of all these facts which have been presented as if they were equally important and commanding. The American desire for visible accomplishment...
TELEVISION, by pandering to America's absorbent cultural monocracy, makes obsessions of social problems, but produces an incapacitating delusion of anxieties. Arlen writes...
...moon landing, social conscience may be developed so far beyond the power of people to change anything that the fiery political frustration is being mistaken for the reform. And television may be the cardinal source of this paradoxical feeling of unprecedented turmoil throughout an essentially sullen and unmoving nation. Arlen's most moving pages try to capture this sorrowful ambivalence...
Still, perhaps one a year it inadvertently reveals what we need to see and hear. One example which Arlen describes was the irony of a Vietnam special by CBS newsman Morley Safer. As Westmoreland asks about basic training and remarks about the high morale, a soldier tells Safer that he dislikes riding down people's gardens. Safer then routinely asks him about the war. The soldier looks melancholy (did we see it?) and then, in one of those moments when everything comes alive in a gesture, tells Safer passionately: "The country's so beautiful, fertile, and everything...