Americans Live on Fantasy Island

The scene was “Donahue,” the lone guest Patti Davis, outspoken daughter of former President and Nancy Reagan.

The proximity of her appearance to the lingering furor over Kitty Kelley’s book attacking Nancy Reagan was not coincidental. Although Davis, an author herself, has kept her distance from controversy over the Kelley book, she is open about her estrangement from the Reagans.

And on “Donahue,” she was catching heat from some of the studio audience for calling her family “dysfunctional” while contending that the Reagans were a metaphor for a United States that “dysfunctioned” in the 1980s.

No one in the audience appeared to be challenging what Davis was saying, only that she was saying it. She got some support, but others questioned her motives and judgment in going public about the Reagans and affirming that she planned to disclose the “full story” of her famous, embattled family in her next book, an autobiography.

One man even angrily labeled the 38-year-old Davis a “snot-nosed kid” and implored her to do the right thing and “stand behind Mom and Dad.”

Note that he didn’t implore her to stand behind the truth.

The point is not that the Reagans are or aren’t “dysfunctional” or that Davis was or wasn’t abused in some form by her parents. On that, her “full story” ultimately will be weighed against the Kelley account and “full” stories of other Reagan family members, as publishing books on the Reagans has become the nation’s hottest industry next to welcoming home the troops from the Persian Gulf War.

The point is that Americans, while giving lip service to honesty and regarding themselves as an open society, frequently engage in denial and hiding from the truth when it’s potentially painful. Paradoxically, we appear to love gossip while shrinking from the kind of difficult reality that could touch us personally.

In that regard, we are dysfunctional.

We want the Reagans to be the Cleavers.

We want our television shows to end neatly, with the kind of tidy resolution rarely found in non-fantasy.

We like history as soap opera via TV docudramas.

We prefer to see the world from behind a plexiglass shield, viewing life as an extension of the packaged, cellophaned “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

We passively abide a network (NBC) deleting multiple references to multiple orgasms in the opening scene of a new series (Saturday’s “Sisters”), a move almost surely made in terrified response to criticism from some advertisers and affiliate stations that have seen the program. As if orgasms did not exist.

We fall for commercials that sell fantasy and easy answers to life’s problems.

In fact, we yearn to escape to fantasy.

While anticipating Hollywood’s mother of all parades welcoming home the troops, let’s not forget that arguably the most jolting sidebar of the Persian Gulf War had nothing to do with military strategy or victory.

It concerned polls showing that the majority of Americans did not want more media coverage of the war, they wanted less. Not more information, less:

Sure, we support the war. Just don’t tell us about its consequences. Not the heavy stuff, anyway.

It’s true that ratings for news programs soared in the early days of the conflict, but what the public was seeing then was not really war, but sterile footage of bombing, with targets on the ground going splat ! We were viewing theorists speculating about the war and journalists flinching and reacting to potential Scud missile attacks. Watching strategists move miniature tanks and ships on maps was fun, almost like a board game--the war courtesy of Parker Bros.

But even that got tedious.

One of the things that the Pentagon and public seemed to agree on was this: Don’t show body bags or bodies. Not more information, less. Not more reality, less.

It’s only a short hop from this to the sizzling question of televising executions being decided in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Public-TV station KQED there is seeking the right to televise executions in California. The last execution in California occurred in 1967.

San Quentin warden Daniel Vasquez is opposed, saying that executions should be “carried out with tactfulness and precision.” He makes dying in the state’s gas chamber sound like one of those “precision” bombing raids on Iraq.

Polls show that the majority of Americans support capital punishment. Yet most probably would oppose telecasting executions. But the telecast issue is one in which public opinion should have no bearing.

At issue is not whether such telecasts would validate executions. In fact, one could argue all sides: That showing executions would increase their supposed deterrent value, also that viewers would either become desensitized to executions or be so horrified by them that a public outcry against capital punishment would ensue.

It wouldn’t matter. What does matter is that as long as capital punishment is public policy, then the public should have complete information about it and the opportunity, available only through television, to view what it has wrought.

The way it is now, we turn thumbs down on the condemned, then turn our heads the other way. From dysfunctional families to executions, we’re very good at that.