Word: manly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Three years ago, I attended a freshman game at Tufts, the season's opener. Tufts had a 32-man squad. Harvard dressed 120 players, and Lamar used them all including seven different quarterbacks. Harvard lost, 15-9, primarily because the Crimson was sending a different team into on every other set of downs...
...which lives on us. It is that small, luminous, oracular, electronic avatar called television. Arlen is in passionate agreement with Richard Goodwin who writes: "We pass through all this tumult seated before the inexorable shadows of a TV set-certainly the greatest psychic disturber ever created by man...
...years of weekly columns on TV for The New Yorker, and then publish the best of them as The Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle of panoramic American social and political epiphanies...
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...
People look at Vietnam... the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man's jacket (who is the man?), part of a face, a woman's face. Ah, she is crying. One sees the tears. Two tears. One counts the tears. Two bombing raids... I wonder what it is that the people who run TV think about the war, because they have given us this keyhole view; we have given them the airwaves, and now, at this crucial time, they have given us back this keyhole view...