Word: evenness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Commercial TV is what we live with... it provides the reflection that we all live with, and commercial TV is irredeemably and unalterably, implicitly and explicitly, a system for moving goods. It will take a few exertions of nothing less than a kind of anarchism of the soul to even postpone the desert...
...asteroids, the extinction of the sun, test-tube giraffes, housing, Eskimoes, hari-kari, cabbages, cornea transplants, insurance, ghettoes, suburbs, and Agnew. TV enervates us by its never-ending, relentless "exposure" of evils. Its documentaries and brooding newscasts are just as much entertainment as Jackie Gleason. Television regards social outrage-even in the euphemistic form of protest, irony, or bitterness-as intolerable betrayal of the public trust. It has profoundly affected us all, even as we move to criticize it, and reduced our spirits to onerous waste. Vietnam, the implicit subject of Arlen's book, has been turned, despite unprecedented "coverage...
Television has not brought the war closer or made it more real, or even kept it constantly before the public's attention. Instead it has reduced the immediacy, ameliorated the intensity, and finally, almost removed the war from vivid human concern by repetitious, chaotic exposure. There is both the willful censorship which slaughtered the Smothers Brothers, and the structural censorship which the physical nature of TV imposes on the programs, the producers' intent, however noble, and the audience, however receptive and unsullied...
...this point that most of us assert our personal ability to resist the Insidious Tube. The reality is that we are all physically contaminated by it, since it represents one of our pathetically few sources of "information." We are corrupted by television even if we have never gazed upon it, for we must live among those who have gazed upon little else. I admit that it is difficult to abstract from those tiny colored images, largely static, to the minds of those who watch TV eight hours a day. Watch Hugh Downs or Ed McMahon punch those Concentration buttons...
...merchants realize that the floating variety show is the best way to maintain the integrity of the land. The fashionable theorists, particularly McLuhan, speak of the unprecedented-rate-of-apocalyptic-change. Yet after the Beatles, Che Guevara, the Civil Rights Act, and even the 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...