Word: arlen
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...Arlen wrote me that he was not at all certain that his pieces were about TV. Perhaps they were about a great, white, ultratechnological superpower picking an out-of-the-way closet of the world in which to have a nervous breakdown- "like sending one's crazy aunt to Pernambuco... but Jesus, now the nervous breakdown seems to be here." His primary concern throughout the book is to present television as a dynamic power capable of fashioning human dreams and fears. He writes...
While this is not a surprising statement, it has serious implications. The most significant is that television programming is not a benignly vapid mess. In fact, the vapidity of television's material is responsible for its deleterious influence, which is primarily the enervating substitution of inoffensiveness for reason. Arlen writes of the most obvious example...
...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...