A Lonely Crusade in Support of Reality

Among people I know, it’s a running joke (actually a standing joke; people I know are partial to constructive indolence) that I will meet a violent end because I do not watch enough television.

There I’ll be, waiting in line at the Quik Mart, when Mr. Armed and Dangerous, whom everyone else recognizes instantly from “America’s Most Wanted,” strolls in, and I wind up as the standing target while the other customers are out the door. My tabloid obituary will be headlined, “More TV Could Have Saved Her,” reassuring those people who are as hooked up to TV sets as polio victims were to iron lungs.

Likewise, I am rendered mute on the subject of Ally McBeal’s sex life, I don’t know the docs on “Chicago Hope” from those on “ER,” and when I read the name of “The X-Files” guy, I thought it rhymed with “anchovy.” But I’m not nuts. Or if I am, then Barry Sanders--who finally broke down and paid $10 for a thrift-store black-and-white TV to watch “Monday Night Football”--will be there to keep me company. To talk with me.

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Life would be much easier if epiphanies came with unmistakable lightning bolts. Instead, as for Barry Sanders, who teaches and writes at Pitzer College, moments suggest themselves, disturbingly and cumulatively:

--When the ante to get into a contemporary social conversation is no longer thoughtful discourse, but bits and shtick recycled from movie dialogue and pitchman jingles and sitcom plots and late-night comic routines.

--When the top five books on the bestseller list at one point were all assembled--authored seems too generous--by TV and radio bombasts and infomercial queens.

--When one of Sanders’ students, in a research paper, solemnly footnoted as an archival, academic source some orphaned piece of Internet flotsam.

Hence Sanders’ book, “The Private Death of Public Discourse,” which you will not find on the bestseller list. Its premise parallels something I’ve believed for years: that Gresham’s law applies to the media/Internet world, that junk crowds out good information just as Gresham declared more than 400 years ago that bad currency drives out good.

In Sanders’ book, it is the avalanche of the secondhand, the virtual, the ersatz, the inauthentic (talk shows, soap operas, the Internet’s empty-calorie Web sites) that crowds out “interiority,” a private, rich, imaginative mental life, thus reducing us to scripted automatons mouthing other people’s notions for want of our own.

Sanders believes we made a bad bargain of it. “I think we miss a kind of interior space in our lives.” To him, freedom is “the ability to conjure. So Al Gore can talk about outer space, Bill Gates can talk about cyberspace, the Freemen can talk about wide open spaces, but the fact is, none of them is a match for what’s in your forehead.”

The poverty of it all, against the cornucopia of the individual mind, appalls him. “Life is remaining open to surprise. The surprise to me is not Ellen DeGeneres coming out of the closet on a TV sitcom. I’m happy for her, but that’s not a topic of conversation for me. I’m interested in the immensity of imagination, and I don’t get it sitting in front of ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

Some of you are already saying that this is snobbery. Expecting the poor to buy expensive computers to make up for a crappy public education is snobbery. Ceding to a few dozen scriptwriters and Beltway braggarts and lowbrow talk-show dictators the alpha and omega of public discourse for a quarter-billion Americans--that is snobbery.

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Public rage is running at a level that, if it were a fever, would kill us. Sanders works backward, drawing a line from incoherence of imagination to hair-trigger hostility, the zero-sum world in which you have to lose if I’m going to win.

It is possible, Sanders thinks, that certain emotional responses are dropping out of the culture--embarrassment, guilt, shame--and new, aggressive ones are entering it. Instead of a middle ground of discussion, people operate at the edges, “where anger resides. Anger is an emotion in the muscles. It’s what you see as the most prevalent response in the world now, from road rage to what goes on on Capitol Hill. In order to make myself heard, make myself felt, I have to hit, I have to shout.”

Why? Because people feel left out, powerless.

Why? Because others run the culture and dictate the rules.

Why? Because the means to have a hand in the culture, as citizens and not just as consumers, has been both taken over and surrendered. Our faith in talking as a problem-solving mechanism has been conquered by hollow “performance” conflict (Limbaugh, McLaughlin, et al) and nudged aside by sitcom wisecracks and talk-show buzzword chat.

Think about it: the only really free place in the world is what’s between our ears--and that’s the part we relinquish most readily, handing it over to pundits and blowhards and clowns in exchange for faux freedoms--say, an extensive selection of running shoes, or fourscore and seven brands of shampoo.