In which the podcaster gives an in-depth report on the 1978 text Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, to see how well the book holds up in the contemporary environ, to see how well the listener’s patience holds up through a longer episode, and how well the podcaster’s voice holds up through a full day of recording. This episode contains Chapter Markers to take you between the sections of the book.
In which the podcaster gives an in-depth report on the 1978 text Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, to see how well the book holds up in the contemporary environ, to see how well the listener’s patience holds up through a longer episode, and how well the podcaster’s voice holds up through a full day of recording. This episode contains Chapter Markers to take you between the sections of the book.
MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST
EPISODE 4 – WEEK 3:
Book Report on Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 4 of My 12-Month Video Fast. For the past three weeks I’ve been chronicling the effects that a lack of television is or might be having on my life. This week I’m giving you a break from all that electronic navel gazing to take an in-depth look at a book that I brought up at the beginning of this series. In Episode 1, I mentioned the 1978 text Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander (that’s “Jerry” with a “J” by the way), which I’d read in the 80s but hadn’t looked at since. I’ve been feeling remiss about that as I posed it as somewhat an influence on this video fast and podcast, so I picked up a copy and I’m here to correct that. Due to its substantial subject matter, this episode is longer than those previous, so I’ve added Chapter Markers allowing you to click between the parts of the book.
Most conversations that I’ve had about Four Arguments since I brought it up here have been brief, and with people who recall it being a radical polemic from some years back that they either remember reading, or not reading, or aren’t sure, or that their roommate read and talked about endlessly. As for the content, they seem to mostly recall that it said, “Yeah, we gotta get rid of TV, pronto,” and generally concurred that the book hasn’t exactly been in the news because what a silly idea that was, huh. Well I’m not so sure that’s the case – unpracticable, perhaps, and having revisited it this week I have to say that some of the points and perspectives throughout are not exactly made of stone, some speak narrowly or to the era and have become outdated, while some still hit home like a sledgehammer. It remains a fascinating, thought-provoking text that might have faded from sight not due to a poorly argued premise but because it postulates something that a majority of people might not want to hear. Add to that the fact that, despite its progressive popularity at the time, Mander never put out a second edition or any addenda, and though he authored and co-authored several books after on different topics, I’m not finding any follow-up in this area. I mean I’d love to know what perspective(s) he had on the vast expansion of TV through cable and streaming services, not to mention the internet (I just did), but sadly for us, or at least for me, Jerry Mander left us for untelevised realms in April of 2023, so he’s not around to ask. At this point Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television stands by itself on a hill somewhere in 1978, and not many come around like they used to to even take a look at it. Let’s do so.
soundbite: “Outer Limits” intro
The book is organized very clearly, with an Introduction, each of the Four Arguments, and a brief Postscript. I’m going to attempt to explicate the text section by section. I won’t be able to touch on everything; I’ll try to give detail where needed and a fair overview when not. And if you’re wondering what gives me license to do so beyond the fact that I talk a lot and just eliminated my TV, I’ll add that I’ve been alive in America going on 64 years. Onward.
The intro primarily serves as a bit of memoir to explain how a San Francisco adman of fifteen years transformed into such a radical. Well it turns out that not everyone in advertising is a hell-bent, cash-lusting, truth-denying conservative. Go figure. Really though, since this is a book that wants to trip up a lot of assumptions, that’s not a bad place to start. He got into the biz because he imagined taking part in a glamorous and sophisticated lifestyle and wanted to create images which spoke to that. I think there’s a TV show about that. Through the 1960s though, Mander (and others in the field) became slowly disillusioned as they tried to help to publicize causes they believed in – anti-war, Indian Rights (I’ll keep using his term), eco-issues, etc. He found that to be an increasingly impossible task as costs of advertising in both print and televised media skyrocketed, and he realized that access to the public eye and mind was greatly limited to those with the almighty dollar – and a hell of a lot of it. They even dissolved their ad agency as their inner conflicts and conflicts of interest became insurmountable.
Meanwhile, as Mander tried to figure out how to use television to the benefit of his causes, he became more and more disturbed about what he observed and learned of the medium and its effects. He summarizes the start of his concerns well where he notes that “in one generation, out of hundreds of thousands in human evolution, America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. Interpretations and representations were being accepted as experience, and the difference between the two was obscure to most of us.” This, along with one other mass effect of the medium, that millions of people were having exactly the same (secondary) experiences, lay down the foundation of his perspective. Given, in his view, that access and control of broadcasting and its content would remain limited to massive economic interests (which seems pretty goddamned accurate to me), television could be used to manipulate the thoughts, behaviors, even ideologies of, well, everyone, and, he feared, lead us on a straight, dark path to autocratic control. Whether his ensuing and occasionally dated argument succeeds is one thing, and whether that end has arrived, or is still in process, is quite another.
soundbite: “They’re heeeere…” from “Poltergeist”
Mander’s First Argument, titled “The Mediation of Experience,” is to my mind the weakest, mainly since it relies a bit much on anecdote and speculation. I like how well he roots it in common sense, which he also believes we’ve lost track of in our artificial living environments. This occurs, he notes, as we’ve come to doubt the validity of personal observation. He begins with incredulity that we’d need an expensive scientific study to determine that a human mother’s milk is healthier for infants than an artificial substitute. He finds this partially the case because we now rely on “experts” to explain how nutrition, nature, the human body, and so much else works, whereas we got along for millennia (on the whole) without them. Mander backs this up by illustrating our descent into built environments and how, of course, we can’t know let alone understand natural phenomena we’ve never seen or experienced directly. True, true. He notes that in environs with less sensory input – e.g. offices versus fields or forests, our lesser-used senses dwindle and the objects and situations we do encounter repeatedly take on greater meaning than they otherwise would. Again common sense – or do you need someone to prove it? Do you?
He charts the development of the “expert” in an overbuilt world. Not that specialized fields of study aren’t useful, but Mander’s main concern is that they’ve become exploitative of the fact that most people know so little of what they do. Here his arguments get a bit flimsy as he compares knowledge in pre-industrial cultures (e.g. Amazonian) with the befuddled American masses. The tribal vignettes he draws, however, are vivid and moving. In one of the better moments he notes that pharmaceutical companies tout their discovery and invention of effective medications which have been often taken directly from botanical cures that tribes have known for centuries without Western science. Though I appreciate the value he places on living in an unbuilt environment (which, if we all moved there, would become built), and his anger at the expropriation of knowledge by erstwhile gatekeepers, he makes his arguments too quickly and consequently the connections are not as well drawn as they might be. I’m left to wonder how useful a more detailed explication of the anthropology would be here, and whether another hundred pages might have shored up this section well.
Mander makes one more point in Argument One which, though well-meant, is unfortunately drawn greatly on speculation – specifically on the science fiction works of Tarkovski, Orwell, and Huxley. He wants to make a point about how individual isolation coupled with distorted (if communal) information leads the mind to confusion that makes one easy prey for autocratic systems. This is his first big alarmist point, and while I don’t think that dystopian science fiction is without insight – it often is – it just doesn’t really pull its weight here. I wouldn’t presume to suggest better real-life examples from the era, though I can sure as heck think of a few. That said, looking at his warnings in retrospect, the way in which he expands the idea of autocracy beyond individual or oligarchic interests to corporate structures and technological systems, has the power to really goose one’s flesh, especially in this age where some form of autocratic control seems at times like a carnival just over the horizon.
soundbite: from "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" trailer
Argument Two, “The Colonization of Experience,” is where things start to get juicy. Here Mander gets into value creation, which seems like a background soundtrack to us now. He’s specifically concerned with the creation of products that no one needs, and making them extremely desirable. He’s talking about the invention of commodities here, and what he calls “redeveloping the human being” into a creature of craven consumption. As he succinctly notes, “The goal of all advertising is discontent.” Bravo. I don’t feel like I need to go into detail here, since consumer culture is so pervasive that we interact with it most every day, like it or not. For that matter many of us engage in it, peddling our wares or making ourselves desirable in an insane job market. Oh the joy.
Beyond giving the people of the 1970s their first lowdown on that, Mander also poses a fascinating history for Modern American Consumption – which maybe everyone is familiar with but I – and backs it up with lots (and lots) of statistics. (It’s worth noting that compared to today the numbers he cites are pablum, and the drama of incipient overconsumption plays like a cartoon.) Basically he notes that at the end of World War II, the military-industrial complex, which effectively had flung the country out of the Depression, was looking at massive downturn unless much of it were retooled to maintain maximum production of something. That something turned out to be the American Dream, that fantasy of endless middle-class prosperity which in the 1950s materialized literally out of thin air (or sleight of hand) by credit banking and the advertising industry, in both glorious color print and (less glorious but more effective) black and white television. In fact TV sets were in some ways the first wave, because once they were everywhere, and they soon were, then everyone could watch them to discover more and more things they’d like to own. The biggest and most insidious lie in all of this, Mander points out, was the idea that it could go on indefinitely, and that Keynesian trickle-down economics would keep everyone’s wallets filled. Of course it’s been shown several times since to actually only trickle up, which in Mander’s perspective led to the Recession of the 70s, leaving most Americans who thought they were or aspired to be middle class in an endless cycle of debt and consumption, consumption and debt, left hopeless and isolated with one last real comfort, their TV.
soundbite: “More brains…” from “Return of the Living Dead”
Argument Three, the longest and most meaty of the four, is called “Effects of Television on the Human Being.” This one gets nice and sciencey at times and rather conjectural at others, and contains some of the funnest points of the text (at least I think they’re fun). Mander starts by noting a lot of letters he received and conversations had while working on the book about how TV makes people feel drained, hypnotized, controlled, zombified, etc., whereupon most of them just laugh it off. (Oh no, dear, I’m not really hypnotized.) As is the Mander way, he sets out to find scientific studies and evidence which, not surprisingly, turn up in short supply.
He begins by explaining how a cathode ray tube works, which all TVs had been up to that time. (Sidenote: I did a quick read about LCD, plasma, and OLED screens, and though the technologies differ, they all work in similar enough manners that this point is not far off base today.) Back to the CRT – here’s one of my fave quotes in the book: “Television light is purposeful and directed rather than ambient [which we see reflected off objects]. It is projected from behind the screen by cathode-ray guns which are literally aimed at us…. It is not quite accurate to say that when we watch television we are looking at light; it is more accurate to say that light is projected into us. We are receiving light through our eyes into our bodies, far enough to affect our endocrine system.” Wow! TV shoots ray-guns into our brains! Yay! I love that part of the story. (You all probably already knew that.) Mander anchors his point about the endocrine system on a number of studies done by this fellow John Ott and a team of science people on the effects of different kinds of light on plants and small animals. Mander’s focus is on how light through the eyes stimulates the endocrine system, which produces specialized cells and hormones and other body-things; but without frequent full-spectrum sunlight, different medical issues, malformations, and mutations can occur. I like this point even though he eventually meets a scientist who thinks Ott is full of shit (“experts”…), and I wish he did have more science behind that, though to be fair photobiology was in its youth and nothing yet had been done with the wavelengths of TV. Instead, almost to shore it up, Mander goes into how sun- and light-worship occurs throughout human spiritual traditions, so there must be something there, right? He does that a bit often for my taste, and much as I respect and sometimes align with those traditions, I think the topic doesn’t always strengthen his points.
Then he brings up the issue that I somehow remembered for – what – 40 years and mentioned in my first podcast. That is that cathode ray tubes send sequential images about three times faster than our brains can process them (and current screens – much faster). Here he goes into a long point about hypnosis, subliminal imagery, and suggestibility, which seems like a strong idea to me and more than likely on point, but is problematic as an argument for two reasons. First is that hypnosis is a tool of psychologists but not a measurable phenomenon (which leads us eventually into a list of confusing and not very convincing brain-wave studies). The second is that, like most everything else, there’d been no studies done at that point on anything in regard to television viewing. He resorts to interviewing lots of psychologists, most of whom concur that TV is likely mesmerizing, but none of whom can state so conclusively. He gets pretty frustrated and I get it – of course that shit is hypnotic and can be used to manipulate us, and it’s so, so much worse now.
He finishes this argument with a section on how things we see, that resonate in our memories, help to shape how we see ourselves in the world. This section is where the anecdotal evidence really shines – because yes, we emulate what we like in the world. It’s both common sense and human nature and it rings true. He then veers toward how modern mass media influences this, and can also be used to influence our self-images – because we see that media in the world every day. He cites a feminist book of his era, Myth America (great title), that illustrates how print images of women designed by men shaped how women saw themselves for most of a century up to the 1940s. Go fem libbers! Unfortunately, Mander notes, television had become the primary source of imagery for most Americans, and, he believes, people were starting to base how they see themselves on all that artificial imagery. And even more unfortunately, our brains have evolved to accept every sensory input as “real”, and even when we know the difference, they’re unequipped to do so unprompted. Here I found two startlingly predictive quotes, with which I’ll end this section. This first one seems to reference something we currently experience every day.
"Now, with electronic media, our senses are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What’s more, many of the images are totally fictional."
Sound familiar? While this second quote, referring to the condition cited above, rather sounds like how some of the Zoomers are coping with mediated madness today (all respect to the Z’s).
"Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take generations to let go of our genetically coded tendency to soak up all images as though they were 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes, since nothing can be experienced directly (1984)."
And boy does this leave us ready for the final argument. How is he going to lead us back onto the path to autocracy? I sure wanna know, don’t you?
soundbite: blue pill red pill from “The Matrix”
I was hoping that Argument Four, “The Inherent Biases of Television,” would be a huge, triumphant climax in which all of the pieces and perspectives set forth so far would cohere and muster, with distant booms boding a coming battle – which was of course me expecting a televised dramatic arc. Silly indoctrinated me. Mander soon put me in my place with a fourth leg of reasoning regarding…the inherent biases of television.
This argument is encumbered perhaps more than any other by outdated foundations and references, which do have merit in his reasoning overall and hold interest both historically and in comparison to things today. He wants to show how limited content is presented on TV, to everyone’s detriment, caused by controlling interests who “become the choreographers of our internal awareness,” but even more so by limitations in the technology itself (the big outdated part). He notes the consistent exclusion of any topic that isn’t exciting enough, that doesn’t make “good TV,” some of which would be global cultures and their ways of thinking, detailed explanations of ideas and politics, details in general, and any causes that can’t be shown as physical conflicts, among others. We’ve definitely gotten past a lot of that, or so we think, but I have no doubt that there’s still a great deal of media exclusion, and a lot of inclusion that gets marketed to exclusive (or preach-to-choir) audiences. We also now have countless more ways to watch and get video imagery out there. I think the closest similarity you might find to more old-time programming might be glimpsed by clicking through the hundreds of cable TV channels presenting mostly nothing, nothing, nothing (or what feels like it).
When he turns to the limitations of technology, which is much more his main point here, Mander hits contemporary us with the time-travel effect. But I think it’s worth conveying a sense of his subject matter here since many of the points have ongoing relevance. So for those of you who weren’t around, or need a memory jog: TV sets in the late 70s were big boxy things with mostly 3:4 ratio screens, or square screens on some of the small portable models. For almost anyone in the country, broadcasts were received through antennas, with inconsistent quality. Compared to today, it would be charitable to call the definition on those screens low-def, with some approaching ultra-low. (For those who have seen these sets only in 21st Century TV and film, note that the resolution is rarely replicated.) So Mander’s argument that the technology controls the programming even more than the people is well-founded. He notes that most programming, just to convey a scene let alone hold people’s interest, needed to include some action, be low in detail, carefully colored, and the louder the better, with human drama depicted either through full-body motion or facial close-ups. It’s so easy to see how those effective (i.e., attention-grabbing) techniques have carried through the decades, despite the fact that today’s higher-definition technology allows for much more nuanced acting and detail.
He has one final concern about the limits of the tech which I’m not so sure has changed. He notes with some misgivings that actors on TV appear to the viewer as characters without a “life-essence” (his word) or “aura” (borrowed from Walter Benjamin); unlike seeing someone in person, we don’t experience them as being alive in front of us. It’s an interesting point, and not everyone will agree, but despite again the expressive subtleties of high-def, I wonder if that might be an intrinsic facet of film and video media. Mander uses this to point out how much more vivid products then appear in commercials, which were sprinkled back then, as in many platforms now, throughout any given program, and which he believes were the most important images that the viewer was meant to see.
He starts his next and close-to-final point with a statement I didn’t expect, which was that TV is an inherently boring medium. I think that’s a bit outdated as well, but if you want a clearer idea of what he’s referring to, I invite you to go to YouTube, find a full episode of Petticoat Junction, and watch it in its entirety. If that’s too upsetting, try a Six Million Dollar Man. Yeah we still have programs kind of like these, though much prettier and somewhat better written. My own memory suggests that back in the day you were more likely to plop yourself down to pass the time rather than expecting to be engaged.
So how did they make the shows more enjoyable? Two ways. By focusing the content on peak moments and high energy as much as possible, as I mentioned, which Mander finds egregiously damaging to news reporting in particular (not the first notice made of that in the 70s). Secondly and more seminally, they developed and borrowed from film techniques of direction, sound, camera, style, and editing to keep the viewer engaged. Mander invites the reader to take a “Technical Events Test” by watching any show and counting how many such techniques you see in one minute – cuts, changing camera angles, sound, and lighting for starters. I think in present day most viewers are aware of this and either pay attention to it or not. But Mander has a purpose for pointing this out that’s central to his agenda – because most people weren’t consciously aware of these techniques at that time, paying attention to them pulled the viewer away from the hypnosis of the experience. He references Bertolt Brecht and his concept of “alienation,” a stagecraft technique he used in theater to break the fourth wall and achieve much the same effect. His purpose was to disrupt audience passivity and encourage self-awareness and critical thought. I think most of us familiar with Brecht can guess (or already know) why he found that to be essential. As Mander puts it, Brecht thought that “without ‘alienation,’ involvement is at an unconscious level, the theater-goer absorbing rather than reflecting and reacting. Brecht argued that becoming lost or immersed in the words, fantasies, and entertainments of theater was preparation for similar immersion in the words and fantasies of theatrical leadership: Hitler [who, I’ve heard, gave birth to a child himself which he named Drumph].” Okay, I added that last clause, couldn’t resist, but hey – THERE IT IS. The autocracy we’ve been waiting for, or at least its first mention in a long series of final points.
Mander finishes his last argument with a list of “Thirty-Three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases,” which brings together many of the points he’s made here and throughout the book, focusing on qualities that define for the networks “good TV”. Cognitively it’s useful to view them in one place, but only looking at the compendium did I notice that many of them also apply to live theater – volume, action, pacing, heightened interactions, big details. Curious. Only #22, which he’d not mentioned before directly, comes way out of left field: “Facts concerning the moon are better television than poetry concerning the moon. Any facts work better than any poetry.” Only time he just plain pisses me off. And what is that about?
He uses this compendium to lead to his final point in Argument Four – which doesn’t look forward to autocracy but back to his initial motive for the study: how to best represent social causes via television. He recalls what he considered a failed 1977 National Geographic special called “The New Indians,” narrated by Robert Redford, which he found to come across as very flat and unable to convey the true core and essence of these people and the importance of preserving their culture. He contrasts that with how empowering TV coverage had been for the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, when cameras brought visceral images of hatred, violence, and oppression of Blacks into homes across America, certainly helping to energize the nation toward the Civil Rights Act and other reforms. The latter, he notes, would be considered by the networks as “good TV,” while the former was too slow-paced and landscape-oriented to work well in the medium.
Mander caps his initial concern and wraps up his argument by noting that Blacks and People of Color were finally starting to make it into business, politics, and representation over a decade after the heart of the Movement. He believes that gaining entrance into what he calls “the system” and I would call “class hierarchy” was starting to make their lives better, but might also be having a less desirable effect as well. He laments that “as more diverse people occupy the central control systems, the systems do not become more diverse. The people lose their diversity and start to be transformed by the systems.” Does that still hold up? As for “white culture,” he no longer thinks it exists as anything more than a figment and oppressive tool of corporate culture itself. A striking conclusion at least.
soundbite: last lines of “John Carpenter’s The Thing”
So there’s an eleven-page Postscript titled “Impossible Thoughts: Television Taboo”. We’re bound to find an autocracy lurking somewhere in there right? Let’s see.
Well, gosh, he’s got four pages that summarize all of his main points and arguments, without listing the substantiation. But damn, these are succinct. Might have been easier to just read through them rather than write this giant thing.
But wait – here are seven final pages in which Mander does slam down some kickass points. Perhaps the most abstract one expands on his idea that the technology (and its limitations, of which there are still many), determines how it can be used and the type of people who will gravitate to controlling it. He wants to break the assumption that technologies are benign while the people who use them might be bad. He says, “We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.” There’s a head-spinner. I wonder, have we learned that yet? Like with guns perhaps?
He builds on that to posit a new version of autocracy in which the technology itself functions as dictator. Here he tries to explain that thought in a polemic that really resonates right now with the rise of Artificial Idiocy.
"…our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological innovations that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect a ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves."
Um, wow. Now I’m trying to make a Mad Lib out of that paragraph using AI and Chat-GBT and such just to see how scary it sounds. While I’m doing that, I think I’ll stick with my old-fashioned notion of our current government being more of a corporate oligarchy, which at least makes day-to-day sense to me.
Mander spends a couple of pages discussing why it is monumentally difficult to ban a major technology that has the capacity to subvert democracy, suggests several potential approaches, and ends up in great fear for the future of democracy. Again, I’d love to ask him how he managed to surf everything since then. And though he devotes a few final pages describing what might happen if we were to ban television and what a world without it might look like, def an interesting read, I’m going to finish with a final quote which he apparently meant directly for me.
"At the moment our only choices are personal ones. Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say “no” to television. We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong. But while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before."
Which makes me really glad that I’m doing this for health reasons and not as a political statement. I think.
So – a powerful book with only a few missteps, for my comfort anyway, that are certainly not in the writing, which itself is vivid and full of passion and purpose and urgency and intelligence. For the most part those “missteps” can be attributed to the limitations of information in the era. He purportedly wrote most of it between 1975 and 77, and in a way, the only thing I wish is that he’d given it another ten years to simmer. Because a lot more relevant studies and articles did appear after this point, some of which might have made the argument as substantial as possible – unless of course this book spurred a lot of them on, which also is quite possible. And in the forty years since, there’ve been a great many studies – just look ‘em up. But Mander was also writing with urgency, and I get that. A lot of folks were starting to get freaked out by the television revolution in the mid-70s (those who weren’t watching Columbo or Mary Tyler Moore anyway) and there was a need for consciousness-raising all around. Which Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television definitely did. So good job, Jerr. Thanks for writing this.
And thank you, my listeners, for bearing with this lengthy episode. I hope that it’s been interesting and somewhat entertaining.
As you’ve noticed I’ve been playing with soundbites today, and before my Thank Yous and Signoff, I’d like to take you out with one final bite from the 1975 movie Network by Paddy Chayefsky. It’s one of my favorite films that I’ve viewed a frightening number of times, and which despite some clumsy satire contains a slew of genius monologs that strike to the core of our topic today. In fact this excerpt, delivered by the great Peter Finch as Howard Beale, while not the most famous monolog of the film, sounds so much like this book that I can’t imagine it didn’t have an influence. In fact I was convinced this week that Jerry Mander had some connection with Network, but if he did, the internet is not telling. So here, for your listening pleasure, is Howard Beale.
So, you listen to me. Listen to me!
Television is not the truth. Television's a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
We're in the boredom-killing business.
So if you want the Truth, go to God.
Go to your gurus.
Go to yourselves!
Because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth.
But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house.
And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he's gonna win.
We'll tell you any shit you want to hear.
We deal in illusions, man.
None of it is true!
But you people sit there, day after day, night after night -- all ages, colors, creeds.
We're all you know!
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here!
You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.
You do whatever the tube tells you --
You dress like the tube.
You eat like the tube.
You raise your children like the tube.
You even think like the tube.
This is mass madness, you maniacs!
In God's name, you people are the real thing.
We are the illusion!
So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I'm speaking to you now.
Turn them off!!
Whereupon the poor man collapses to the studio floor in a swoon.
My big big thanks this week to Mary Mackey of Berkeley, CA, second-wave feminist poet and novelist and all-around shining light, and to Steve Arntson of Planet Earth, classical pianist and the best psychedelic nature poet I know of, for subscribing to this podcast. That means a great deal to me. Big time.
I’ll be back to my regular format and length next week with a new episode in which I hope to give you a first if shadowy glimpse of my Cylonic plan for this project and podcast.
This has been Episode 4 and Week 3 of my 12-Month Video Fast.
Thank you so much for listening.