Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (40 page)

During February of 1977, public television carried a National Geographic special, “The New Indians,” which was billed as exploring the emerging attitudes among Indian people who, while recovering their civil and political rights, also wish to rediscover and reaffirm the old Indian ways. Robert Redford narrated.

The first five minutes of the program attempted to convey a sense of the beauty of traditional Indian life-style and perception. The camera panned to mountains, rivers, fields of grass dotted by circles of teepees. Redford spoke of the Indian conception of the “oneness of things,” the equality of all creatures, the desire to keep in harmony with the Great Spirit. We heard Indian chanting and drumbeats.

Sitting in my living room, I kept track of the technical events. No single shot lasted longer than ten seconds. Keeping the images jumping was a very wise decision on the part of the producers, because the mountains were too far away to be seen in anything beyond outline, the rivers were only a blur, and the fields of grass became a background haze in which the teepees were the only visible highlight. If we had been left to gaze at these images fur more than ten seconds, an awareness of boredom would have developed. It was impossible to get a sense of the mountains, rivers, and fields which, so the narrator said, were the central forces in Indian awareness.

Neither did the chanting and drumming have much effect. If you have ever heard
real
Indian chanting and drumming, you know that they create their effect only after many hours of sitting within their rhythms as the repetition and the beat slowly seep into your bones. On television, they were only thematic, and used for that purpose, artifact.

The story cuts to Chicago. A group of bright-looking young people are loading their car. These are city-raised Indian kids, packing up for a cross-country drive to British Columbia, where there’s to be a gathering of young Indian people and traditional Indians. The idea is to merge the activist energy of the young with the traditional knowledge of the old. The enthusiasm of the young people comes through. They laugh. They joke. They tease. They remind me of the kind of jovial, good-hearted people you see on
Sesame Street:
AU-American, although not exactly white.

At the meeting in Canada, the city kids struggle to learn how to build a teepee, how to start a fire with sticks. We watch an old medicine man explain to the Chicagoans how a field of flowers reveals natural cycles. We hear him speak of natural balances; we watch the kids listening intently. His words are clear, the beauty of his face is moving, but the flower he is holding in his hands, and its seeds, the subject of his example, are impossible to see.

Later in the program we see some rare footage of the Potlatch ceremonies of the Kwakiutl people, which were suppressed by the Canadian government until recently. We see Indian dances; people dressed as animals; Indians in canoes led by an eagle-man, his arms flapping in a mock attempt to move the boats forward. We watch totems being carved. The goal is to immerse us, the viewers, in the Indian experience, to convey the beauty and mystery of their art and its organic, naturalistic meaning. But on television, cut at an average of ten technical events per minute, the ceremonials are practically impossible to follow. They are as fuzzy as the natural surroundings from which they have emerged. We get no sense of the dance. It passes in and out of the frame of the camera. We see only this piece of it or that one. The fine details of the costumes blur like the tiny seeds of the flower. We cannot smell the burning fire or the sweat of the dancers’ bodies or the dirt of the floor. We cannot feel the coldness of the air.

Our exposure comes in ten-second pieces, at most. Whatever understanding we develop comes from Redford’s words, which describe what we cannot actually see or intuit.

As I sit at home in my living room, watching these scenes with my family, the program takes on the quality of carnival or Mardi Gras or gigantic costume party. A reenactment. It looks like a production staged by the local museum auxiliary. Its reality is impossible to get. The whole ceremony enters the realm of artifact.

The information loss is virtually total. Aura is utterly destroyed. Time is fractured. The sensory information is lost. The context is deleted. The gestalt of intuitional experience is cracked. The details are gone. The mood is impossible to convey. The process is invisible, as is the source. No magic. Not enough is conveyed to develop any feeling of caring about what might happen to these people because the heart of their belief remains invisible, despite the attempt to convey it to me. This is not to say I don’t care what happens. But I cared before I saw these scenes. If these scenes had been my total exposure to these cultures, they would only have confirmed the uselessness of trying to sustain cultures that obviously don’t fit the world today.

The program shifts. We go to a Navajo reservation in the American Southwest. A group of young Indian lawyers are struggling to prevent the expansion of power plants in the Four Corners area. The traditional way of life of Navajo sheepherders, suddenly disrupted by roads, noise, soot and ash from the power plants, would be sacrificed to the expansion. The camera follows an old woman, a shepherd, whose land is threatened. The narration says, “She and the land move as one . . . she wants to keep her life as it is . . . she came from the land and she is part of the land.” We hear the woman say, “We live in harmony with the Great Spirit.”

What
Great Spirit could she possibly be talking about? I couldn’t see any great spirit there. Could she mean that fuzzy-looking desert, or the scrawny sheep? Could she mean that little mud house with no wiring? Really. What does she expect? It’s nice to preserve cultures, but how can a few highways bother that?

We go to the government hearings. We see the young Indian lawyers arguing in behalf of this old woman. The lawyers decry the outrage. They cite the brutality wrought on Indian ways. We hear them charge the commissioners with failure to understand the Indians; failure to appreciate their way of life or that a way of mind is being threatened. We see the government commissioners, fat white men wearing suits and ties and looking bored. We learn that the only compensation this woman has had for the loss of her land was a $369 payment years before.

Okay.
Now
we get it. Conflict. Rules. Arguments. Laws. Right and wrong. Rip-off. Rights. Entrenched interests. Brutality. Lack of due process. Oppressors. Oppressed. Heroes. Downtrodden. It all comes flooding through.

Why didn’t they get to this part earlier and drop all this “way of life,” “way of mind,” Great Spirit junk? It’s only muddying things up. It’s a civil rights issue. It’s about economic rip-off. Let’s hear it for those lawyers!

The program that followed immediately after “The New Indians” was called
In Search of America,
hosted by Ben Wattenberg. A six-part series, the show was intended to look at the bright side of America. “How can a nation that believes it hasn’t done anything right or bold or creative in the recent past, do anything right or bold or creative in the immediate future? . . . All we hear today is that big business rips us off, the blacks are losing ground, work is meaningless, we’re feeding a bloated military-industrial complex and that we oppress developing countries and rape their resources. All that is mostly inaccurate,” Wattenberg said.

The program concentrated on the virtues of big business. “For all its flaws, big business has provided more people with more needs and more luxuries.”

Compared with what preceded it, this was quite a simple show; narrow in conception, direct, featuring very simple, straightforward imagery: Wattenberg talking, interviews with corporate economists, and, amazingly, actual footage from advertising commercials, showing how much research corporations undertake in order to improve their products on behalf of all of us. No sweeping (incomprehensible) vistas, no attempts at conveying ways of mind, no talk about Great Spirits. This show was about “needs” (products; easy to photograph); research for a better America (we saw Gillette engineers working night and day to improve our shaving); freedom of choice (twenty-one “shaving systems”); and the satisfaction of American “tastes.” The show, of course, was about life-style, but it was a life-style that couldn’t have been simpler to convey. And it was conveyed simply, clearly, boldly; the way it is in commercials. No information loss. It was a highly efficient program. Whereas the life-style of Indian people was delivered via muddy images, vague and incomprehensible references to alien realities—subjective, sensory, requiring an acquaintance with natural cycles—
this
life-style was objective, economic, product oriented.

There
was
conflict. Wattenberg told us we could choose either the life-style the corporations provided, and the economic benefits they spread out through the whole population, or we could choose central economic planning. We know, he said, that central economic planning doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked in Sweden or England, for example. (Russia and China, though not named, were included by implication.) Here in America if corporations fail to provide what “we want,” then they die. He toured with us through a graveyard of headstones, carved with the names of the corporations that had not kept up with Americans’ changing needs. This was proof that we the people control the corporations, not vice versa. Corporate manipulation was a fiction.

The show only took a half hour. A nice, tight package. Within the terms of its definition, it worked. When I turned off the set and closed my eyes, laying my head back against the pillows of the sofa, the images that came to mind were of this Wattenberg person, his graveyard of dead corporations, the Gillette research labs . . . and I heard an internal recording of his voice: “Planners say it would be nice if we all lived in apartments, but most people prefer to live in their own single-family houses. And American business, sparked by the profit motive, is providing them. The same with mass transit. People prefer their own cars, manufactured by big business, providing what people want.”

I also saw some images of that eagle-man, flapping his huge, furry wings as the canoeists rowed some Pacific bay. I saw some pictures in my head of the Southwest desert and a lonely Navajo woman on horseback, herding sheep. Cars, razors, Navajo deserts and Ben Wattenberg whirled in my mind.

I had wanted the Indian show to dominate, but I already knew that it couldn’t and it didn’t. A stupider, grosser, more simplistic but cleaner and clearer (more highlighted) presentation—better suited to the medium by several orders of magnitude—had achieved an equality, actually a superiority, even in my own biased mind. I reminded myself for the fiftieth time that if there are polar opposites in what television can communicate and what it cannot, at the pole of noncommunication would be cultural forms such as the American Indians’. At the pole of total communication would be cultural forms such as American business’s.

Naturally, television has been used more successfully for the latter cultural forms than the former. Also naturally, the American population develops more of a feeling for products and a life-style suitable to business than it does for a sensitive, subtle and beautiful way of mind that theoretically offers an alternative. The more people sit inside their television experience, the more fixed they become in the hard-edged reality that the medium can convey.

In 1973 I helped organize an all-day press conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by Ralph Nader on behalf of Indigena, an organization devoted to creating a pan-Indian movement in the Western Hemisphere. Indigena gives particular attention to the struggle of South American Indians, who are presently suffering a fate previously visited upon the tribes of our own Great Plains and elsewhere. They are being slaughtered and driven off their land or, in the more “enlightened” countries, driven onto reservations and forced to assimilate. Speaking in cultural terms, it’s death either way. All of this is done to make way for mineral exploration and development.

Before the press conference Nader advised the Indians and sympathetic anthropologists to be specific: to give the names of the corporations doing the dirty work, name the government officials, offer details of actual events. Understanding the bias of the media, Nader advised (correctly) that the information should be short, specific and punchy.