Pubdate: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 Source: Arkansas Times (AR) Copyright: 2000 Arkansas Times Limited Partnership Contact: (501) 375-3623 Website: http://www.arktimes.com/ Author: Mara Leveritt THIS IS YOUR TV ON DRUGS Insanity is a break from reality. Groundings loosen then snap. Those adrift in madness cannot ever be sure if what they see is real or not. Insanity's like watching TV. Once a sort of fun house, television has become a madhouse. Enter --that is to say, switch it on -- and all assurances are surrendered. With the click of a button we slide down the chute into a contorted, contrived environment, where even the news teams are in on the joke that nothing (not even they) are real. Cynics have warned for decades about the mind-bending power of media. But until recently, these jeremiahs were generally regarded as nuts. It was paranoid to suspect that big business or big government -- though certainly not both together -- were manipulating the masses through media. Even to suggest that a corporate or political message might be tucked into the viewing fare was to betray unhealthy suspicion. To voice such fears put one in the class of folks trying to repel unwanted rays by wearing helmets wrapped in aluminum foil. Well, get out the football helmets. Unroll the aluminum foil. Or better yet, smash that ray-thing, the remote. Television is so utterly blurring the line we used to perceive between theater, politics, news and business that the most reliable programming we can watch anymore is the bombastic melodrama of wrestling. At least at the WWF, we know that when that folding chair gets raised in the air then slammed over somebody's head, the scene was as rigged as a "vote-the-dead" election, and the fun comes in pretending it isn't. Nothing else on TV is so blatant, and that's the problem. It used to be that viewers could distinguish between what was theater and what was not. Or what was advertising and what was not. Or what was a political announcement, or even news, and what was showmanship. But now, the screen's gone murky. What you see is not necessarily, nor exactly, what you're getting. It looked, for instance, like Hillary Clinton and David Letterman were having a big old time, laughing and exchanging quips. But anyone who thought that her appearance was the casual thing it appeared was as naive as my mother some 60 years ago, when a boyfriend took her on a date to see her first wrestling match. Sitting horrified in the front row, she yelled at the brute in the ring, "Stop! Stop!You're killing him!" The man on the bottom who had been pounding the mat wrenched his head in her direction. "It's okay," he whispered. Then he resumed pounding the mat. We, of course, are supposed to be a bit sophisticated about these things. We know that the Clinton-Letterman tete-a-tete was a choreographed affair. We understand that these appearances are a cocktail: Mix a little campaigning, a big audience, a few quips here and there; shake; and if everybody's lucky, boost ratings for both the show and for the political guest. The problem with political theater is that it's neither "Hamlet" nor wrestling. Candidates slip into and out of their roles, with nary a change of costume. They may employ as many writers as Letterman, and rehearse as carefully, but, unlike Letterman, they want to be seen as statesmen, not entertainers. They want to evoke our trust, even as they pound the mat. The report from Salon last week that networks had submitted program scripts to a White House office for review in exchange for government ad dollars raised the unreality quotient. Confidence in both government and media were appropriately shaken. It's one thing for a government to drop little propaganda leaflets over an enemy's countryside. It's another for a government to secretly propagandize its own citizens. And the ruse sinks to another level when it enters homes via the entertainment industry that customers have unwittingly trusted. Delivering coded messages covertly to an unsuspecting audience that has handsomely paid its own dupers -- it's brilliant. And claims that the message not to use drugs was for everybody's good only underscore the smugness as they underscore the deceit. But maybe these jolts from our TVs are a good thing, after all. Maybe it's good for us to learn, as we did after the New Year's Eve coverage from New York City, that CBS News had broadcast a digitally altered image of Times Square, taking a large, lighted logo for rival network ABC out of the actual scene and inserting the logo for CBS. Maybe, instead of ushering us into madness, these realizations will awaken us from it. Like it or not, this is our reality. It doesn't mean that we have to envelop ourselves in cynicism or aluminum foil. But it does mean that we'll take government and entertainment both with our wariness function on high. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck