Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.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...
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