Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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"As your Commander in Chief, I have ordered the immediate arrest of the terrorists and the individuals in their support groups, whatever their official rank or prestige.

"I have also invoked the implied powers of the President to govern in such times of grave crises, free of the usual encumbrances.

"I am hopeful and confident that these emergency measures, taken to safeguard our democracy, will be shortlived.

"Thank you, Godspeed and good night. "

The set switches off by itself. Was that a dream? Back to sleep.

A few months later I saw a follow-up story in the Times that said the Pentagon proposal had been scrapped. Apparently the administration felt people might "misinterpret the intentions" of such a project.

In retrospect, I know that my scenario was fantastic and unsophisticated, deriving from my simple-minded notion that autocratic interventions can take place only through a single leader or a coup. But whatever the intentions of the Pentagon and President Nikon, who has since asserted that Presidents may create their own laws, it was clear that the existence of the technology itself had created a new potential.

We can all be spoken to at the same time, night or day, from a centralized information source. In fact, we are. Every day, a handful of people speak, the rest listen. Brutal and heavy-handed means of confining awareness, experience and behavior may actually be a thing of the past. In many ways, television makes the military coup and mass arrests of my imagination unnecessary. We can begin to grasp the irrelevance of such acts now that a more subtle coup is underway.

It takes place directly inside the minds, perceptions and living patterns of individual people. A technology makes it possible, perhaps inevitable, while dulling all awareness that it is happening.

WAR TO CONTROL THE UNITY MACHINE

Marshall McLuhan did not help us very much in our early efforts to understand television. By the time he was popular in the mid-1960s we had already been through the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Kennedy-Nixon debates and then the Kennedy funeral which had plugged eighty million people into the same experience at the same time.

None of these events had caused the slightest ripple of alarm, but rather produced a rush to praise our new electronic unity. The mass viewing of the funeral, particularly, was hailed in religious terms, like some kind of breakthrough in the evolution of consciousness: everybody unified in grief, transcending the conditions of their individual lives. Human ingenuity had now advanced to the point where technology could produce a nationwide, one-mind experience, previously thought to reside only in the realm of the mystic.

McLuhan, who saw so much, could have helped us see through that crap. Instead, because of his celebration of our electronic connection, our planetarytribal village, he effectively encouraged support for the technomystical-unification theme.

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