Child's Play

by Michael J. Arlen (Viking, $5.95)

IT should first of all be said for Michael J. Arlen, television critic for the New Yorker for two years beginning in 1966, that it is astonishing (when you think about it) that a critic as wry and shrewd as he could watch anything as barren and stupid as American network television and produce enough useful and readable pieces of criticism about it to fill a book. Somehow he manages, and it has to do with his tone of voice, which is conversational, ironic, but full of reasoned

substance, and in the end, quite serious. I make that five counts on which his voice is the precise opposite of the prevailing voices of television. He himself is conscious of the problem of television criticism, and he disdains the easy way to kick the box: “What is one going to say about Petticoat Junction anyway — beyond making a few arch, superior little cultural leaps into the air, and then jumping on its stomach?” But no television critic could keep such a sober vow and his head as well; Arlen’s leaps are artful and free of supercilious condescension. I like particularly his vision of “the last great interview,” prompted by newscasters’ inane questions to public figures at sticky but crucial moments:

The polar icecaps are melting. The San Andreas Fault has swallowed up half of California. Tonga has dropped the big egg on Mauritius. The cities of the plain are levelled. We switch from Walter Cronkite in End-of-theWorld Central to Buzz Joplin, who is standing on a piece of rock south of the Galapagos with the last man on earth, the water rising now just above their chins. Joplin strains himself up on tiptoe, lifts Iris microphone out of the water, and, with a last desperate gallant effort — the culmination of all his years as a TV newsman — places it in front of the survivor’s mouth. “How do you feel, sir?” he asks. “I mean, being the last man on earth and so forth. Would you give us your personal reaction?” The last survivor adopts that helpless vacant look . . . “Well, Buzz,” he says, gazing wildly into the middle distance, “I feel real fine.”

“Grown men ought to speak in their own voices when they speak to children,” Arlen writes of a television program for the young. This is an unexceptional if typically seasoned remark when it appears early along in the book, but the image recurs as he discusses programming that asks to be taken more seriously than does Captain Kangaroo. And as one watches the medium through Aden’s eyes, one begins to share his perception that what is most wrong with television is that its voices are all unnatural, and that to it, we are all children.

The best of these pieces, “Television’s War,” defines this perception in a vivid metaphor. People, he writes,

look at Vietnam, it seems, as a child kneeling in the corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups arguing in a locked room — the aperture of the keyhole small; the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man’s jacket (who is the man?), part of a face, a woman’s face. Ah, she is crying. One sees the tears. (The voices continue indistinctly.) One counts the tears. Two tears. Three tears. Two bombing raids. Four seek-and-destroy missions. Six Administration pronouncements. Such a fine-looking woman. One searches in vain for the other grownup, but, ah, the keyhole is so small, he is somehow never in the line of sight. Look! There is General Ky. Look! There are some planes returning safely to the Ticonderoga. I wonder (sometimes) what it is that the people who run television think about the war ... I wonder if they truly think that those isolated glimpses . . . are all we children can really stand to see of what is going on inside that room.

The war in Vietnam became “the central fact in American life . . . a changing shape beneath everything else . . . in a way that no other war we’d experienced had been,” because of television. The war was a challenge to various souls in varying ways; to Arlen it was an opportunity to be more than a breezy New Yorker critic effortlessly parrying the crass medium. He went to Vietnam and watched the television correspondents, armed with their industry’s advanced technology, achieving now and again something like an imitation of life, but more often coming back with a mere simplification of it — today’s “thought,” authentically quoted, for the viewing millions. (Correspondent asks corporal “what his overriding feeling about the war was right now.

“The corporal thought for a moment. ‘Better to be fighting the Communists here than fighting them back in San Diego,’ he said.”) And so a random, superficial piece of footage is processed and becomes “the news.” That is what the box — its choices and capabilities frozen in some sterile, frustrated marriage with each other — tells us. “There were, after all, these two realities of Vietnam,” writes Arlen in his introduction, “surrounding us, pressing in on us in ways you often couldn’t feel: the reality of the actual war (whatever that may have been), and the reality of the play of media over the people of this country as they transmitted the war. Whatever that may have been.”

Whatever it was, it was undefined and uncontrolled. It could provoke the best of our critics of the media — the author of this book — to his quiet but fiercely effective attacks on the television networks for their “failure . . . to communicate the reality of the Vietnam war” — their shallowness, inability to interpret what they report, tendency to sound ponderous while sycophantically toeing the official line, and more. Here is Arlen on a particularly pro-government look at our bombing policy by CBS, early along in the war. The narrator of the program, Bill Stout, closing the program.

. . . referred in passing to the matter of civilians’ having been killed by bombing (“Civilians always are killed in war”), and then attempted to truthify — a word I just made up and now present to CBS for the duration — the previous fifty-eight minutes of propaganda by admitting, without much conviction, that the bombing had only “partly” succeeded. Well, swell. One points out that CBS, along with NBC, is the major source of news and opinion for most of the people in this country. One points out that, at a rough guess, nine million people watched Vietnam Perspective that evening. One points out that we elect our government — so we say — on the basis of what we know and are given to know. One points out that one deserves a damned lot better.

But it was the same programming that, according to Johnson Administration stalwarts’ favorite alibi, slowly turned the voters of this country against the war. In answer to the question why there was so much opposition to the war, Hubert Humphrey told the reporter Dan Wakefield late in 1967 that this was “the first time people have seen a real war, live, in their living room”; Dean Rusk gave him exactly the same reasoning. A convenient scapegoat for men looking for ways to find fault in their stars, not in themselves. Proud of its pervasiveness, television was not about to bite back; nor was the government about to crack down on the industry with strictures about what to broadcast.

It would now be academic to get hot under the collar about asking Humphrey and Rusk if they really meant what they said so automatically, that the Johnson Administration’s Vietnam policy would have got by all right if only the public had been protected from hints about the unpleasant realities of war. It may be just as academic to demand reforms in television news; to ask whether anyone is really served by television journalism’s mindless reproductions for us each day of some things which took place the previous day. As Arlen writes,

. . . people watching an evening news show about an ammo dump being blown up in the Hobo Woods might reasonably conclude, on a day, say . . . when a rebel army was captured in Nigeria . . . and when Indonesia broke relations with Red China, that there was some special significance to the blowing up of this particular ammo dump, or not even anything special about it, just some significance — that its presentation on the screen in front of one said something useful about the war. In all too many cases, though, what the blowing up of the ammo dump says is that when you blow up an ammo dump it goes boom-boom-boom and there is a lot of smoke . . .

We are not served, but the point is, no one is served. Nor, for all of Arlen’s art and effort, does there appear to be anything anyone can do about it one way or the other. Humphrey and Arlen and we mortals and Presidents are all children before television, in the sense that we are relatively helpless with regard to it. It represents the contemporary ascendancy of matter over mind; it reflects the disorder of our time so as to defy all managers and programmers, and propagandizes and critics too. It is Arlen’s enemy, as it is the enemy of anyone who similarly values profundity of thought and genuineness of tone and freeness of debate and whatever else we mean by the truth, the whole truth. And yet, in its bumbling, random fashion, it did help bring the roof down on the Johnson Administration’s war policy, though it remained hesitant to speak in any language but that of conventional wisdom.

Arlen returns to the motif of the disordered mysteries of childhood in a piece written from Saigon, entitled “Television and the Press in Vietnam; or, Yes, I Can Hear You Very Well — Just What Was It You Were Saying?”

It isn’t, perhaps, that the world is deeper in chaos than it used to be but that the element of chaos which has always been there in life, which really is life (after all, there were minority groups and emerging nations in the eleventh century too), is now coming more and more out from under wraps: Father has left the house, and the children have some new toys and are threatening to knock the house to pieces, and that would be all right, it would be manageable, if we could somehow get inside the house and really find out what was going on, could sit down and try to understand the children, listen to them, at any rate if we could confront what it was that they were doing (let alone thinking about), but, as things are, we make this big thing about how we know everything that’s going on — nothing escapes us, because we too have new toys, which tell us things — but what really happens is that we sit outside the house and every now and then a maid comes out onto the porch and stamps one foot lightly for attention and then reads us a brief announcement, and we sit there looking thoughtful or impatient and listening to the sounds of breaking furniture from somewhere on the second story . . .

I do not mean to sound as if one is beset by The Weighty Theme reading Mr. Arlen’s wry, unpretentious articles — the idea of there being nothing but children on either side of the keyhole of television is not pressed on us as if Arlen were the only discerning adult in our midst. It is more as if in his chatty, easy, Holden-Caulfield-grown-up way he drops back to it because it’s so clear that any fool should see it. That is how his deft hand works with his fine mind’s eye.