Folklore in a Box

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Poets and playwrights and novelists have always processed political events into entertainments and legends. Television now hastens reality into art with a sort of Irish efficiency: when an Irish Republican Army terrorist-hero blows up a British army truck in midafternoon, the deed will probably be a song in the pubs that night. Such ready glorification is one reason that no peaceful settlement has been found. Sitcom writers have developed similar reflexes. Topicality, however, ages a script rapidly. It strands an episode in time, and makes reruns seem alienated, quaint.

Fictions that get mixed up in politics -- or religion -- can become dangerous. Salman Rushdie has reason to know this: sitting alone with his imagination, he conjured up a story, The Satanic Verses, that has had him in hiding, under an ayatullah's fatwa, a sentence of death, for the past 3 1/2 years. But as Rushdie has said, "The idea that writers should not argue about the world and simply write their little stories is a defeat."

Television is almost always unsettling and amazing when one thinks about it. It imposes upon America a strange simultaneity, if not a unity. It makes for a coast-to-coast viewers' version of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called a granfalloon, a wholly artificial brotherhood. TV characters themselves, whatever good lines their writers give them, almost inevitably have the flat soulless quality of people dropped on earth and hatched from a pod. Maybe it's the electron dust on the screen.

Still, surely it is preferable to have television dramas and sitcoms addressing important dilemmas now and then -- single motherhood, for example, or drug addiction or wife battering. Better that than to revert entirely to Gomer Pyle and Gilligan's Island and My Little Margie.

On certain levels, the U.S. is a dangerously splintered and tribal country. America's historically indiscriminate embrace has depended on economic opportunity to make the whole enterprise (The Dream) function. Obviously, angers and abrasions deepen when many are competing for fewer jobs. In such an atmosphere, television acts often as a universalizing, mediating influence. It becomes a kind of third eye, however myopic on occasion, or however silly. By telling stories as it does (however skewed its critics, like Quayle, may think the stories are), television may militate against fanaticism and fantasies of revenge. The medium's demographic gyroscopes almost inevitably discourage bigotry. It is sometimes a shaming agent: a drama about the dilemmas of homosexuals, for example, may shame many Americans into being more tolerant on that score. The medium has a ceremonial and sacramental role when it covers tragedies, Challenger explosions, state funerals and the like. It even performs some of the functions of an American conscience. Its priestly influences reach into areas of everyday attitude and morals.

Ross Perot proposed an instantaneous participatory television democracy -- a national electronic town meeting in which Americans could directly register their opinions on issues. Television has already swallowed the political parties, and Perot's hookup would override the Constitution's framework of representative democracy and deliberation.