Diminishing the Magic of the <i> Word</i> : Thoughts on the State of Language and Bird’s TV Debut

When it’s not playing big ones, life is always playing little tricks on us, forcing associations that would probably never have entered our minds otherwise.

It’s hard to imagine how else I could have expected to find a connection between Rose Bird’s debut as a television commentator and two plays I’d seen a couple of days before and less than 24 hours apart. John Olive’s “The Voice of the Prairie,” about the salad days of radio, and “Darlinghissima,” a concert adaptation of some of Janet Flanner’s letters to her close friend Natalia Danesi Murray, had only one thing in common, but an important one: Both illustrated (as Shakespeare never fails to) the incontrovertible force of language.

In this decade of flashing images, blank programming, instant celebrity and even faster oblivion, the plays, lucidly and suddenly, clarified the fascination we have with those singular exponents of the storyteller’s art: Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray.

Was Minnesotan Olive’s “The Voice of the Prairie” (now at the San Diego Old Globe) triggered by the enormous success of Minnesotan Keillor’s radio megahit, “A Prairie Home Companion”? The protagonist in “Voice” is a spinner of tales at least as spellbinding as the chronicler of Lake Wobegon. Olive’s play has that same tender, bewitching, invigorating salubriousness.

It’s a countrified class act.

As for Janet Flanner, she was the urban and urbane chronicler of the mid-20th Century--the citified class act. Through 50 years of private letter writing and public reporting (with her “Letter From Paris” in the New Yorker), she forged an astutely subjective yet sweeping panorama of historical and political events spanning five decades. It’s a breathtaking view.

Except for the accident of seeing them so close together, juxtaposing these two shows was an unlikely demonstration of how language can stoke the imagination and engage the inner ear and eye so much more potently than images. Then along, in the same week, came Rose Elizabeth Bird.

What is a former California Supreme Court chief justice doing in broadcast news? Filling an appropriate place. No one blinks at heads and secretaries of state of all genders who routinely feed us opinions on talk shows. If Phyllis George could do it, Rose Bird could do it. The woman who took her fall off the bench “like a man” could surely give us her slant on the news like a woman. Who would have anticipated that there would be no slant? That Bird would come on not with the ballyhooed bang but to trivialize--apropos of absolutely nothing--the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans in World War II with political doggerel at 6? The last thing one had expected from this television debut was the trashing of language.

All those unpleasant litanies about network television began to well up in me--that it’s a drug for a nation of addicts; that it reduces whatever it touches; that it depends on the banality of the toothy grin, coiffed hair, homogenized ethnicity, vacant phrase, robot camaraderie. These are the quick, accessible fixes, the reassurances of glazed images guaranteed to deaden thought quicker than you can say alcohol. How else can mounting catastrophes and the monstrousness of the possible become “safe” if not by a dedicated process of neutralization?

Yes, Bill Moyers and Charles Kuralt and David Attenborough manage to dignify the electronic screen with running commentaries that rely on the dignity of the spoken word. But not weeknights at 6.

What commercial television is doing to us had been luridly illustrated. No one forced Rose Bird to speak in rhymed couplets or submit to the stupefying declension of language that hasn’t a thing to say. But the messenger had bowed to the medium--a medium so slavishly and unavoidably dependent on the picture that it is wrenching us from the potential magic of the word.

I thought again of the carefully spun tales of David Quinn in “The Voice of the Prairie,” of the graceful sentences and penetrating thoughts of Janet Flanner in “Darlinghissima” and yearned for the animation of words that have been shaped and informed by an articulate, compassionate intelligence.

But if the battle is still raging, the war is nearly lost. Like the rest of us in front of that television screen, I too have been numbed to the societal enormity of the staggering loss we suffered when we gave ourselves up to those images on the screen. The day we opted for information instead of knowledge, reporting instead of writing, we anesthetized that part of ourselves that wants to actively conjure up visions rather than passively look at pictures. It’s what keeps me addicted to theater--the last, boisterous bastion of the conjurer’s art and the incantations of language.

Images are facts. They can be telling only within their own inflexible limits. They are reflections of neo-reality--self-evident, sterile, uninterpreted. Without finesse or nuance. Brain dead.

Worth a thousand words?

Not even a single one.