Word: manders
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There will be a talk by Lady Mander on William Morris and the Revolution in Victorian Taste on Monday, April 17 in the Lecture Room, Margaret Clapp Library at 8 p.m. All welcome...
...Mander begins well. People who bother to read books at all are usually not proud of the hours they spend staring straight ahead; a book about destroying the tube can be a nice assuager of guilt. And Mander, a former advertising and public relations agent who grew disenchanted with his meal ticket in the late 1960s, exhorts with all the zeal of the convert and enthusiasm of the initiate. He rattles on like a college freshman who has just been alerted to the difference between illusion and reality. In fact, Mander argues that TV created this difference: "Unlike ordinary life...
...dreams. The farther they wander from probabilities, the more fun and fury they produce. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were experts at such arguments: Is too much energy being wasted transporting ham and bacon from farm to dinner table? How pleasurable to insist that pigs must fly. Author Jerry Mander's treatise offers precisely this kind of joyous irresponsibility. The world knows that the megabucks technology of television is not, repeat not, going to be eliminated. On his final page, Mander himself acknowledges that he has no idea how to get rid of the box. But until that terminus...
Much of this may be true. McLuhan covered some of the same terrain and saw it was good. Mander hollers that it is horrible. But he punches so wildly that he arouses sympathy for The Gong Show. No source is too doubtful or irrelevant to cite, provided it can somehow be mobilized into an attack on the target. "It is known," Mander states ominously, "that light affects the testicular growth of sparrows." The author writes with such urgency that simple distinctions get trampled: "As you may have noticed, a lot of people seem to be going crazy these days. People...
Since characterization in Tots is something less than two-dimensional, only the one-liners distinguish one member of the cast from another. Flo has the best, and the thief in a flat sub-plot, Jerry Mander (Tim Feran) has a lot of the really bad puns and low humor (in response to Henna's rejecting him because he's stupid, he says "I'll be partially sage, Rosemary...in time...