Heralding the Golden Age of Video

One Christmas, a family I know found a video recorder under the tree. Almost from the moment that the paper and ribbons were shredded, the video camera was switched on for birthdays and graduations and dance recitals. But, gradually, the marvel of the thing has worn off, and a long time passes between uses.

That is not to say that the birthdays or the dance recitals are any less important, only that the volumes of video images, public and private, have inured us to their significance or insignificance, have blurred the distinction between tapes of Reginald Denny’s beating and Monica Lewinsky’s high-school musical and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

The medium, as was anticipated long ago, has become the message.

But as the culture retreats from written history to an audiovisual one, as durable diaries become evanescent e-mail and keepsake letters turn into dime-a-minute phone calls, there are events worth recording and preserving, events not much heralded now but video history in years to come--and there are people, thankfully, to record them.

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Hard to say, exactly, when Ralph Cole was struck by the dissonance between “says” and “does” in the great world around him. Maybe it was his Sunday school teachers: “Somehow I picked up an egalitarian streak, and then the reality hit me: The egalitarian principles we’re led to think are behind Christianity and democracy are just not being lived up to.”

It led him to hitchhike to Berkeley in 1966. It was Christmas break, and he was 16, and while other teenagers in his Seal Beach hometown might have been trying out their new surfboards, Cole was befriending the editor of the Berkeley Barb, reading back issues and articles about the Vietnam War and the bedfellows of Uncle Sam the president, and Uncle Sam the CEO.

It led him to study economics in UCLA’s doctoral program, an English major among MBA types, searching for the touchpoint between social responsibility and economics. When he first picked up a video camera, it was as a study aid. It helped him to tape his classes and then go back and watch again, to make sure he understood the nuances of what was being taught.

He was still in Westwood when he found himself a single parent and organized a group called Socially Responsible Singles. The group was not big enough to attract the kind of speakers it wanted. So Cole took his video camera to the speakers and brought back tapes to his group.

The group waned and went, but Cole’s video camera did not.

Now (I’m skipping ahead a bit here) his library, his archive, contains videotapes of more than 1,500 events, unedited, start to finish: speeches, conferences, hearings, a visual history of 15 years of California’s and the nation’s progressive politics and social policy.

I first noticed him at one such hearing, a guy with a bottom-end video camera that would have been outmuscled by big, expensive TV news equipment, if TV news bothered with such events. Cole’s is often the only camera in evidence, for speeches by the likes of Noam Chomsky (Cole has maxed out credit cards traveling to tape Chomsky), Helen Caldicott, Ramsey Clark, Michael Harrington, Oliver Tambo. He has perhaps the last video of Cesar Chavez, and footage from police abuse hearings, Ward Valley nuclear site hearings, U.S. war crimes hearings, NAFTA and malathion and minimum-wage hearings.

That first time, he gave me his business card, although “card” is rather a grand term. It was a slip of paper headed JUSTICEVISION, and it noted that tapes of this and other events were available for a populist-priced $10 donation. He operates on a shoestring; people may tuck a little more than $10 into the envelope, or they may forget to pay altogether.

While he doesn’t presume to edit “sound bites,” he does compile a video magazine, Democracy University, 10 times a year--six-hour compilations of the “best of” on issues of justice, economics, covert politics in Central America, the CIA and crack. Some subscribers are professors who use the videos in class, which was precisely what Cole was hoping for.

Every video camera wielded like his opens a crack in the media’s monopoly edifice: “The most informative and interesting TV is going begging because the media do not want to challenge the status quo. The decentralization of media is coming via the Internet and via video. The golden day of video is not passed but is coming still.”

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It is the one speech he didn’t videotape that stays with him, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, speaking calmly, marshaling his numbers about the scientists and soldiers who had died of radiation exposure.

The man died a few months later. “I think of that so often when I’m videotaping, when someone is putting so much energy into something. It needs to go beyond the people listening there. It needs to be there for the people who can’t be there,” who may be too young to hear it, too impatient to sit and listen. “Video is a way of catching important things across space and time.”

Ralph Cole can be reached at his e-mail address: DemocracyU@aol.com.