Folklore in a Box

It is very strange, and metaphysically untidy: television has eaten a hole through the membrane separating America's right brain and left brain.

Fantasies seep into facts. Entertainment and journalism drift back and forth across the borders. The bicameral arrangement of culture and politics dissolves. The baby of the (nonexistent) Murphy Brown flies out of its cradle and hovers like an illicit pink cherub over the American presidential succession.

About these spectacles -- the Sister Souljah nonsense a few months ago, the Vice President of the U.S. wagging his finger at hallucinations of the popular culture, denouncing Murphy Brown, or telling the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, "I will continue to speak out against Ice-T," as if he were preparing for the Lincoln-Douglas debates -- there is something both confused and vaguely degrading. Something unworthy and a little stupid. Here is American history deterios. A homemade videotape could burn down a large section of Los Angeles. The videotape told a story: Los Angeles cops hit Rodney King on the head and, doing so, split the social atom.

The movie director Spike Lee set off a small tabloid uproar not long ago when he suggested that young blacks should skip school if necessary to see his movie biography of Malcolm X when it opens this fall. A hideously wrong message, people said, undermining discipline and education. But Spike Lee understands a central truth: what is occurring today is a war of American myths, a struggle of contending stories. And pop culture, often television, is the arena in which it is being fought.

Stories are precious, indispensable. Everyone must have his history, her narrative. You do not know who you are until you possess the imaginative version of yourself. You almost do not exist without it. Blacks were mostly excluded or held in the margins of the national story. As Spike Lee knows, blacks more than other Americans need their stories now, the recovered histories of what they have been and fantasies of what they might be. The American family, as well, desperately needs a new folklore, a new driving myth. The old version, which in caricature is a 1950s suburban setting out of Ozzie and Harriet, does not entirely work anymore, except in nostalgia, in Kennebunkport, Maine, or in Ronald Reagan's afternoon naps.

America needs to restock its repertoire of folklore and self-images and archetypes. The 1992 presidential campaign has made its noisy way across a nation that has lost many of its defining ideas about itself. The cold war's end gave Americans only a kind of abstract triumph -- and left a void. The collapse of communism and the Soviet empire suddenly removed the dark moral counterweight by which Americans measured their own virtue. Chronic recession, the rise of Japanese and European economic competitors, the vast inflow of immigrants from non-European sources (strangers to the older American tradition), the shrinking of the buffering Atlantic and Pacific oceans (jet travel, satellites, global distribution of goods), all these have eaten away at the long American smugness, the postwar sense of superiority, of grace.