Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Michael Arlen's immediate subject in The Living Room War is not the staggering charnel house we live in and 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...
...reason Michael Arlen bothered to produce two 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...
...HEART of The Living Room War deals with the farce of television news coverage in general and Vietnam in particular. Whether news broadcasts are viewed as welcome interruptions of family entertainment or as rude incursions of the real world, the fact is that television stands or falls according to its news. The insurmountable obstacles which vitiate TV news are the physical nature ofthe screen, the commercial basis of the industry, its time structure, and the vague consecrated code of democratic mediocrity usually referred to as impartiality. Television is commonly given considerable credit for generating national discontent over the war...
...FIRST impression about The Living Room War is that Arlen writes around his subject with stunning circumlocutory adeptness. But the persevering reader discovers that the essence of the matter is precisely this elusiveness. We sense the devil, all right, and know he is traducing our life, but how he pursues his subterranean mischief is maddeningly invisible...
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...