Sound Stages of a Television Nation

Somewhere along the way, America changed. No longer was it a nation. It was a television show. Citizens no longer were citizens. They were actors, waiting in the wings to play their parts. Tragedies--a young woman gone missing, say--no more were mere tragedies. They were television serials, complete with casts, iconic images and titles: “Vanished.”

Public discourse in the television nation often tended to revolve around a single theme: Whodunit? Whodunit in Brentwood? Whodunit in the Oval Office? Whodunit--if indeed anybody did anything--to Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old Modesto woman who vanished in Washington, D.C.?

Inquests into these national affairs would be held nightly on the cable channels, conducted by an apparently limitless supply of former federal prosecutors. For hour after hour, they would shout at one another, smirk and moralize, all with great conviction. Restraint, doubt, facts--rarely were these allowed to muddy up the script.

It could seem quite loony at times. Just the other night, for example, one of these ubiquitous former prosecutors appeared on Larry King--Chief Justice of TV America--to argue that a certain congressman no doubt was culpable in Chandra Levy’s disappearance.

How did she know?

Why, it was the way he smiled nervously when the cameras caught up with him at a farm bill hearing.

“The television cameras really do show you something about people,” she said. “You can see into hypocrisy. . . . That’s why we watch so intently. You could see looks on faces. We saw that with Bill Clinton.

But with Gary Condit, we see something very different.”

Well, of course.

In a nation that has become a television show, how else to determine innocence or guilt than by observing how one acts on camera?

Now admittedly, none of this qualifies as bulletin material. America’s transformation into one big reality TV broadcast has been a long, steady and much remarked upon process. Who knows when it began. Maybe it was that infamous moment some 20 years ago when Congress invited an actor who played a family doctor on TV to testify at a health hearing.

Whatever, it still can be fascinating to venture forth from time to time into the sound stages and watch the taping of America. Last Thursday, the cameras converged on 16th Street in downtown Modesto. There was to be a demonstration of support for Condit outside the Democrat’s storefront field office.

*

A turnout of 200 supporters had been promised. At the appointed hour, however, only about 20 were assembled on the sidewalk, clutching handmade signs, not quite sure how to begin. They stood in a huddle and stared in shy silence at the television crews. The crew members, many of them lounging in director’s chairs arrayed on the sidewalk, stared back.

“I’m at Condit Central,” a reporter spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Nothing’s happening yet.”

Finally, one local crew approached a demonstrator. She gave her name as Doris. The kittens embroidered on her blouse only added to this woman’s grandmotherly appearance.

“We support Gary 100%,” she said, peering sweetly into the camera. “His personal life is his personal life.”

The television reporter asked Doris if she would mind repeating her lines in a few moments “when we go live.” Doris said she certainly would not mind. She was directed to go stand with the other demonstrators, so that the reporter could stroll by as he introduced the scene and then pick her from the crowd. She moved to her mark like a pro, but the others sidled away.

“Where did they all go?” the reporter complained. “I wanted to walk by a wall of demonstrators.”

At last all was made ready, and the live broadcast commenced. On cue, Doris recited her previous comments.

“It’s his private life,” she said. “It has not affected his work in any way that I can see. It’s between him and his wife.”

Boldly, she started to improvise a bit.

“I just think this, this is a man, you know?”

The reporter cocked his head, not quite sure now where this interview was headed.

“I have been married 26 years myself,” Doris plowed ahead. “I know men.”

“OK. OK, Doris,” the reporter cut in. “We’ve got to go.”

He put down his microphone.

“We got the meat hook on that one,” he told Doris.

*

Now other crews roused themselves and began filming. They trained their cameras on a man in a backward baseball cap as he twirled around a sign. Stapled to a yardstick, it said: “If you don’t believe in the right to a private life, join the communist!”

He was standing with a young woman whose placard made this point: “What about everyone else in the world who has had an affair? Why don’t you go bug them?”

Without turning away from the cameras, they spoke to one another through the sides of their mouths.

“We’ll get on the news,” he whispered.

“Whatever,” she said.

The demonstrators took up a chant.

“Hell no, Gary won’t go.”

This seemed no more or less elevated than the rhetoric of the anti-Condit demonstrators who, earlier in the week, on the same sidewalk, had chanted: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

The demonstration appeared to be reaching its climactic moment. A Chevy pickup rolled up the street. Its hood was covered by an American flag. A “Condit Country” sign was fastened to the grille. In the truck bed, a skinny man with a red beard crouched, microphone in hand, wearing a red, white and blue baseball cap. The truck paused and the man began to sing, a cappella, in a rapid, rousing tenor:

“From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli. . . .”

He shot through every verse of the Marine anthem and then, without a word of greeting or explanation, plunged straight into the Air Force song.

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder. . . .”

He was still singing as the truck pulled slowly away and turned a corner, his voice faded but audible: “And nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force. . . .”

And that, as they say, was a wrap.