My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #40, June 18, 2000

NON-PROGRAMMABLE FUNCTION

Have you seen TBS's new promo? "It's YOUR world. We're just programming it."

Scary, isn't it? It's pure 1984, the way the slogan bends reality, and then tries to flatter us into believing it. Think about it. They're telling us that WE are in control, WE make the choices -- from the selections they have given us.

Now, I wouldn't deny for a moment that Ted Turner has given us lots of things to choose from. The MGM film library Ted bought includes musicals, edgy dramas, gangster movies, war stories, westerns, romances. How can you knock a network that's keeping alive some of the old screwball comedies, and giving a new generation a chance to see them? And TBS is even making some interesting movies itself.

But it's only the appearance of choice, still a fairly uniform Hollywood version of the world, where the stories that get told are mostly about mostly white Americans. We absorb without noticing it, a particular way of telling stories.

What we don't see is that people of other cultures are real, too, and have stories worth telling. We don't see the VietNam War through the eyes of Vietnamese filmmakers, or the conquest of our West through the eyes of the natives who lost everything. And we're not seeing that there are other ways that stories can be told, other forms to tell them in -- short films, experimental films, documentaries.

We're also seeing characters from history, literature, and folklore as concrete, fixed images. When we hear a story, or read it, we can make up our own image for the characters, which is why Jesus is portrayed in some countries with blue eyes and blond hair, and in some countries as the black Christ. We adapt the heroes to our needs, make them like us. As long as a story is only words, any girl who feels abused by her family can picture herself as Cinderella, and any boy can envision himself as Jim Hawkins searching for buried treasure. But when we SEE a story, that pretty blonde Cinderella makes it harder for us to imagine ourselves into that story; a nordic Jesus makes it harder for us to remember that he was, after all, a nice Jewish boy (and that Christian anti-Semitism doesn't make a whole lot of sense).

Those images can limit our imagination, too, like paint-by-number sets that tell us exactly what colors to put where. Can we envision the original nameless seven dwarves in the fairy tale without thinking of Grumpy and Doc? Can we envision or create animated creatures that are NOT cute and cuddly?

Another part of the programming is advertising, which limits our reality with its assumptions about the world -- that we shouldn't have to put up with pain for longer than the minute it takes to swallow a pill; that aging is to be avoided at all costs; that women have an obligation to be pretty; that buying things will make us happy; that for every problem there's a product to solve it. From their absence, we learn that old people and black people don't matter.

The picture of reality in news programs is equally skewed, incomplete, and rife with assumptions about what really matters. We are told it's a good thing when millions of people are laid off, and a bad thing when our wages go up. We learn that the global economy, which sends American jobs to Thailand so they can be done by workers making a dollar a day, is a good thing.

We see next to nothing about the lives of ordinary Americans whose effective wages have barely budged in the last twenty years, and even less about labor unions, or community activists, or people trying to raise the minimum wage. "The news" is news for people who are doing well, thank you, who think they did it all by themselves, and who don't want the government taking their money.

At least I think that's why reporters show us nothing about the routine and valuable work of government and focus solely on its mistakes. They tell us about the National Park Service setting the fire at Los Alamos, but not about the firefighters who risk their lives to put down this and every other forest fire (I'm willing to bet most people don't even know they work for the government). Reporters blast the FDA equally for taking too long to approve new drugs, and for not spending enough time testing drugs like Rezulin before letting them on the market.

But the same standards are not applied to big business on the news and in the food-fights that pass for political discussion. There are no regular features on waste, fraud and abuse in corporations. Reporters who gave dire warnings about health care directed by government bureaucrats say nothing about health care directed by HMO bureaucrats. Reporters who question cabinet members' decisions don't inquire why CEOs collect staggering paychecks while their companies lose money, or why their paychecks soar every time they throw people out of work. Pundits and reporters who complain about the IRS and other government agencies messing up people's lives are less concerned with corporations that seduce people into debt, charge them 18 percent interest rates, and then pressure the government to make it harder for them to declare bankruptcy. Pundits who complain about the political influence of unions and trial lawyers and teachers don't talk anywhere near as much about the nice laws banks and insurance companies and drug companies buy with their campaign contributions.

If the news couldn't be counted on to ignore such things, do you suppose both parties would still be planning to solve the problem of high-priced prescription drugs by helping seniors (and only seniors) pay for them, rather than demand that drug companies lower their prices, even though many of the new drugs had their origins in government-funded research? Would a major bank and insurance company have feelt free to merge even while that was still illegal under the Glass-Steagall Act? Would the American taxpayers have been stuck with the tab for the savings and loans, instead of the crooks who made big bucks running them into the ground?

It may be our world, but we're for damn sure not in control of it. TBS, and all the other networks, are "JUST programming it"? That means telling us only what they're willing for us to know, and assuring us that anybody who sees anything wrong with that is a crackpot or, worse, (shudder) a liberal. And just to make sure we don't pick up some other ideas from other media outlets, they're buying up all the radio and tv stations, newspapers, magazines, and publishers.

How does anybody find out about the realities the networks DON'T program? There are still churches who believe these are the guys Jesus was throwing out of the temple. There are still libraries and the internet, where freedom of expression flourishes. (Have you noticed that both are under political attack?) There are still writers like Jim Hightower and Molly Ivins and Barbara Ehrenreich, still reluctant politicians like Ralph Nader, who persist in telling the truth, still libertarians who believe that what we read and watch is none of the government's business, still plenty of cantankerous Americans who are pretty sure that this is not our founding fathers had in mind.

Blessed are the ornery, for they shall not be programmed. May they multiply, and take over the world.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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