• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Auguries of Decadence: American Television in the Age of Empire

Posted on: Friday, 17 November 2006, 06:00 CST

By Bosworth, David

I.

American Immaturity, Then and Now

A. Now: Saving the World for Game-Show TV

Afghanistan and other troubled countries cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets... To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim.

- Max Boot, The Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001

If the rude yoking of the picayune to the profound is a characteristic feature of the postmodern, then the private act of remembering has always been a porno activity. While we are trimming the pork chops, rotely flattering a customer, or deleting yet one more emailed solicitation for "penile enlargement," we're suckerpunched by a news flash that stamps those dog-day coordinates with the seal of the significant. A volcano blows its top, the market collapses, a prominent leader (JFK, RFK, MLK) is fatally shot, and then, years later, when we reel back that catastrophic event from the swampy depths of our unconsciousness, it emerges festooned with those feckless private facts, ridiculous in themselves but now infused with memorial gravity by the force of mere coincidence. Most Americans know what they were doing when they first heard that the twin towers had been hit, but history also has its second acts and slo-mo phases. So it is, and shall ever be, that the Watergate hearings are inseparable in my mind from the routine of doing sit-ups on a Cambridge basement floor while listening to the Rolling Stones' Hot Rocks album. My private replay of John Dean's pale-faced confessional is forever laced with the looping soundtrack of Mick Jagger's voice (half-sneer, half-pout) soliciting "sympathy for the Devil"... as if He needed it then or now.

Such experiences have forewarned me. Although it's too soon to be sure, I fear that I already know which class of feckless images will be dredged up decades from now when I recall the second phase in America's payback for the awful attacks of 9/11. For from late 2002 well into the summer of 2003, while the Bush administration was promoting, executing, and (as it turned out) massively botching the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I was busy watching television - a lot of American TV.

Deliberately, I should add - a self-assignment, part of a much larger project of cultural investigation. Nor was I alone, of course. Tens of millions of my fellow citizens were tuning in every night, the networks' ratings plumped at that time by the latest craze in programming: a reinvention of the game show laughably dubbed in the newspeak of the day as "reality television." The intensely ironic interplay then between "reality" as conveyed by the day's grave news and "reality" as pitched by the evening's entertainments made for a dizzying spectacle of pain and folly. Awful archival pictures of wailing Kurdish women who'd been widowed by Saddam's chemical weapons cohabited in my mind's eye with the puffily bruised and cross- stitched faces of would-be Cinderellas who had won the chance to be born-again via cosmetic surgery on Extreme Makeover. The martial bluster of talking-head TV's many arm- chair patriots, who were predicting what "we" would surely do to the Republican Guard, eerily echoed the macho posturing of contestants on Fear Factor prior to their submergence, say, in a tank of writhing snakes - which was, after all, not a bad metaphor for our plans to invade and then righteously school a venomously factional Middle East.

And then there were the many secrets promiscuously spilled during this same period: all that titillating intelligence, wrested from both foreign capitals and cloaked domestic hearts, freely dished to an audience of millions. By day: Colin Powell at the U.N. or Dick Cheney on Meet the Press unveiling clandestine links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, or displaying satellite photos of supposed bioweaponry. By night: Amber and Jason detailing bitterly to a hand- held camera how their "alliance" had been betrayed by Shannon and Chad.

"Elimination" had distinctly different emotional resonances depending on whether the threatening vehicle was an Iraqi nuclear missile or the vote of a game show's "tribal council," yet the overall shape of these suspenseful narratives was much the same. One way or another, we were promised, the fantasy would be fulfilled - abracadabra, the rescue accomplished. Our victorious soldiers would be showered with flowers on Baghdad's streets, the "oppressed peoples of the Middle East" given both a "beacon of hope" (as laser- beamed by the "shock and awe" of our smart bombs) and a tonic dose of freedom (as clinically dispensed by the "shock therapy" of radical capitalism). And someone, another "real" person just like you and me, would indeed win a mogul's mansion or a starlet's breast- line, the true love of their life or that recording contract which had always been their dream. Do you believe in miracles?... We do, we do, as the impresarios of both sorts of show knew all too well. Simon Fuller, executive producer of American Idol, shake hands with Paul Wolfowitz, original creative consultant for the now long- running series Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As Wolfowitz and others were brandishing their own fear factors to maximum effect then, alternating threats of nuclear doom with promises of miraculous intervention, their intellectual allies and advisers (such as Max Boot and Richard Perle) were busy rescripting the idea of an American empire into a missionary venture - this even while many were sitting on the boards of corporations which were all too ready to exploit the occupation commercially, the "free market" living large on the largesse of the same "big government" whose other interventions it ritually scorned. For as it turned out, one could do very well, thank you, by doing good for "the oppressed peoples of the Middle East" - especially when the contracts were no- bid, the inflated salaries tax-free, the governmental oversight by political allies and so rarely felt or seen.

That our every actual good deed in Iraq has been tainted by an association with such "private contracting" shouldn't prove surprising. Whether the uniform consists of pith helmets and jodhpurs or white-shirt-and-tie, the underlying motive of all imperial adventure is unrepentant greed. The martini fueling its temperamental swagger might have a tonic dash of noblesse oblige but the primary ingredient is the raw gin of rapacity: the drunken license not only to raze and plunder but to gloat then over the humiliation of the conquered. The appalling images from Abu Ghraib weren't aberrations so much as frank visualizations of the reptilian appetites that commonly corrupt unchecked power. They were pictures streamed directly from the id of the imperial psyche, wherever its home base.

Iraq was a moral sinkhole before we arrived-even the Administration, so obtuse in the solipsism of its self- righteousness, got that right. And there were other supporters of the cause, genuine idealists whose noblesse oblige wasn't merely fronting for the profit motive. Nevertheless, "reality" as broadcast by American TV was calling into question the underlying judgment, if not the sincerity, of even those more honorable proponents of the occupation. Noblesse oblige presumed, after all, the status and duties of a benevolent paternalism. Due to the accidents of history and the good fortune of wise ancestors, America had managed to progress to an elevated state of political consciousness and culture. And as we had once been called to rescue a ravaged Europe from tyranny's ruins, we would now reconstruct a barbaric Iraq after our own civilizing image.

Yet at the very moment when we were rushing to school the region's Sunnis and Shiites in the ways of democratic maturity, the programs I was so diligently watching were portraying a culture incapable of simple common sense, much less paternal wisdom of a higher order. In the place of mature judgment, childish fantasy prevailed. The shows, like their ads, were proselytizing a Peter Pan worldview, both expectant and impatient, in which belief was sufficient to make reality morph, at megaherz speed, into the shape of our-fondest-dreams-come-true. Do you believe in miracles?

This time, I fear, the usually senseless link between the mundane memory and the catastrophic event makes all too much sense. After the adolescent hijinx of the Clinton years, we were promised a government of grownups. But did the reasoning implicit in ber- grownup Donald Rumsfeld's hit-and-run plan for rescuing Iraq - or in Wolfowitz's Jiffy-Pop version of postwar planning, or in Cheney's prediction of Iraqi Gunga Dins kissing the cheeks of their candy- bearing conquerors, or in the President's bijou-scripted bluster, daring the Devil to "bring 'em on" - did any of this administration's expectations, when enacting the gravest decision any government can make, really differ in quality from the juvenile fantasies pandered nightly on game-show TV? As the pilot series for American imperialism, wouldn't their show have been better named: Extreme Makeover, the Global Edition?

B. Then: The Real (and Raw) Deal of Game-Show TV

Commodity, the bias of the world... - Shakespeare

My subject, then, is this: the "juv\enilization" of the American character as it can be read in today's TV programming. I am well aware that many will dispute the newsworthiness of such a thesis. American TV, after all, was aptly described decades ago as a "vast wasteland," and any credible claim that we've gone from bad to worse in the interim admittedly requires some kind of comparative measure- a challenge I plan to honor by setting the standard exceedingly low.

Nowhere was TV's early investment in promoting a decadent decline into immaturity made more symbolically vivid than on one of postwar America's most popular game shows, Let's Make a Deal. Produced and hosted by the dapper Canadian, Monty Hall, whose slick and sly deportment suggested an upscale mall's appliance salesman, the show had an extraordinarily long run, from 1963 to 1991 (Kennedy to almost Clinton) - some 4,500 shows; and thanks to the unstinting appetite for video programming induced by cable and satellite TV, it still can be seen in the perpetual "ever after" of rerun heaven on the Game Show Network. There, the once desirable prizes (Chevy Vegas, early versions of video games, erstwhile stylish clothes now reduced to the iconography of porno irony-the "cool" plaid suit reborn as "camp") supply an especially vivid archeological exhibit of American consumption in the postwar years, fetish after ephemeral fetish.

Like most game shows, Let's Make a Deal was an advertisement wrapped in a commercial enclosed in a promotion. The prizes to be won, and even the clothes that Monty wore, were as much the commercial message as the official sponsors' two-minute slots. In contradistinction to its cousin, the quiz show, however, Let's Make a Deal never bothered pretending to test its players' knowledge or intelligence. Forgoing such masquerades of meritocracy - the winking pretense that some socially redeemable quality of mind, separate from the performance of consumption itself, earned one the right to acquire the prizes - the game focused solely on the psychological dynamics of purchase and possession. Avidity was the immediate as well as ultimate motive, the commerce of acquisition not only the culmination but the very content of the show. As in today's enclosed mall where the apparent diversity of goods on display conceals an actual reduction in the kinds of free choices we are permitted to make (to buy or not to buy, that is the one prevailing question), every moment of the game was framed as an anxious and exciting consumer decision: whether or not to "make a deal" in a world whose options had been radically reduced to cash or commodity, and whose motives had been narrowed to making a killing (or at least to avoid being gulled) while on the show.

Alternating the roles of Thomas Carlyle's "convertible personages," Dupe and Quack, Monty would flash wads of crisp green cash, offering to purchase worthless items from selected members of his audience for ridiculous amounts-five hundred bucks for a pack of gum, or a ball-point pen, or even a person's shoe. But once so enriched, the player would then be tempted by the possibilities that lurked within a closed box or behind an array of blank curtains: prizes that could range, depending on her luck and nerve, from glamorous speed boats and Caribbean vacations to the humiliating return of toothpaste tubes or a year's supply of disposable diapers. Should the player keep her cash, or should she "make a deal" by purchasing whatever mysterious commodity lay hidden behind one of three curtains? And if the latter, which curtain should she choose? And once she had made that choice, should she stick with her selection if Monty offered her even more cash before she had a chance to look? And once she had a chance to look, should she swap the perhaps middling prize she had just won, the microwave or stereo, for another chance at a grander one? Would she then win big or would her deal go bust?

By merging the avidity of consumption with the drama of gambling, the show induced an emotional intensity which was further magnified by the social pressure that naturally attends any spectator sport. During her hesitation over these grave decisions, the anxious player would be urged on by conflicting advice shouted from the audience, whose members were participating vicariously in the great expectations of the imminent deal. (And who, by doing so, served the same function as the laugh track on a network sitcom, audibly and contagiously demonstrating how the TV audience at home should feel.)

The staging of commercial products as the ultimate icons of American desire; the deliberate reduction of all decision-making to deal-making, all value to cash value; the constant alternation of quackery and dupery (with its implicit message that someone is always being conned in the exchange); the clever manipulation of an emotional climate which played the avidity of hope against the fear of humiliation and drew on the gambler's addiction to anticipation- the perpetual imminence of the next deal, the next; the carefully engineered mass hysteria of the crowd; and the frantic shop-til-you- drop tempo throughout: for some twenty- eight years, Let's Make a Deal projected the decadence of the consumer ethos in parodic excess.

For our current purposes, though, the relevance of the show to the juvenilization of the American character emerges most acutely through the way its contestants were selected: the prerequisites for becoming a deal-maker at all. Whereas other programs tended to pick their players ahead of time, Let's Make a Deal cleverly enfolded this process, too, into the drama of the show. The front of the audience would be filled with adults (mostly women in the early years) who, as per instructions, had dressed themselves in childish costumes - as clowns or Raggedy Ann dolls, in bunny suits or Shirley Temple outfits. And when, at the start of the show, Monty would step into their midst, they would all beg on cue, jumping up and down around him, hands raised and waving, each pleading with the omnipotent show-biz personality pick me! pick me! A group of middle- aged adults, reduced to begging from their "host" while dressed in ridiculously juvenile outfits, as though an unruly kindergarten class vying for the right to pet a duckling on their visit to the zoo: even for postwar TV, which programmatically undermined the dignity of the individual, this self-demeaning spectacle seemed extreme, the stuff of the most outrageous satire.

And yet the culture didn't laugh, nor was the long-lived popularity of the show based on the perception that it was camp. Few seemed to recognize how clearly the show exposed the nudity of our emperor's new clothes: how, under the guise of innocent fun, its game was reenacting the public shaming of that sovereign consumer, whose so-called rational choices would soon be celebrated as the very soul and substance of our democratic superiority. This was the show's manifest yet unacknowledged message: toenterpomocapitalism'snew"kingdomofheaven,"we would have to become (yea, I say unto you) like little children again. As with many forms of coercive brainwashing, the seductive conversion to consumerism required an emotional regression, the juvenilization of the American public: an induction into psychological dependency masked as a passport into the carnival of material opportunity. The license to "make a deal," to be "empowered" with the chance to make a killing on the curtained stage of consumption's idolatry, required first this characterological enfeeblement: democracy's self-reliant citizen recast instead as Raggedy Ann or Andy, pleading with the grownups for a chance to play the game.

This enfeeblement had three phases, reenacting a seductive regression commonly favored by the confidence game of consumerism. After initiating the emotional juvenilization of the contestants by inducing them to dress in silly costumes and plead with Dad for a chance to play the game, the sequence continued with the ^rationalization of their decisionmaking. For in contrast to other popular shows at the time such as The Price Is Right and What's My Line?, Monty Hall had designed a game which deliberately supplied no reasonable basis for winning or losing. Memory, deduction, induction, savvy about human character or statistical probability: all varieties of effective human intelligence had been rendered irrelevant by the task at hand. Even as the game spotlit and intensified the individual's freedom to decide - Hamlet's "to be or not to be" recast as consumerism's "to buy or not to buy"-it removed every basis for reasonable decision-making. Reflecting a common strategy of salesmanship, Let's Make a Deal flattered our innate capacity to choose even while actively decommissioning the very mental capacities that ought to guide it. Instead, in the absence of any relevant evidence, the players had to rely on a gut-feeling hunch or a superstitious faith in the coincidental alignment of numbers. To play the game was to return again to the never-never land of Disneyism, where the price of entry was a willingness to believe, just believe in the pixie-dust promise.

Temporarily stripped of both emotional maturity and analytical reason, the contestants then entered the third and final phase of their regression, which was as well the climax of the game itself. The masquerade of sovereignty (that is, the way in which the freedom- tochoose was both accentuated and emasculated by the rules of the game) immediately flipped into a state of anxious passivity as each player awaited the results of their necessarily clueless choice. Forced to guess and so utterly dependent on "lady luck," the players invited and endured that either-or melodrama which is well-known to gamblers of every sort. To win or to lose. To make a killing or purchase a lemon. The curtain they have chosen is about to be raised and behind it awaits either immediate celebration (one's drea\ms come true "out of the blue") or instant humiliation (getting zonked in the parlance of the show).

The pace, intensity, and noisy group-think cheering of the game helped to conceal its programmatic enfeeblement of the players. In most instances, after all, swapping reason for superstition and emotional maturity for childish wishfulness are the predictable makings of a very bad deal. When pursued as an occasional respite from adult responsibility, such regressive role-playing might indeed prove tonic, the sort of mental vacation that renews and revives. But by the 1960s this variety of carnival game was no longer a marginal and seasonal side show in conventional American culture but a central and perpetual occupation. As with Disney's many entertainments. Let's Make a Deal's promotion of immaturity as "innocent fun" was reflecting instead a now orthodox strategy of salesmanship. Its game was both reflecting and reinforcing the credo of an economy increasingly dependent on "great expectations" - on our willingness to believe (against all reason) in the imminent arrival of the Magic Moment.

II.

Reality TV in the Age of Empire

A. Fame Game: Simulating 'Real' Celebrity

Asked if he could insult the contestants the way modern gameshow hosts do, Hall said, "I can't. I don't like it. It's an anathema to me."

- Monty Hall interview (ohio.com - March 4, 2003)

In March of 2003, as American troops gathered in Kuwait, just days away from invading Iraq, Let's Make a Deal had a brief revival as a new production. And although this born-again version failed to attract the old popular following, both the nature of the competition it faced and the transformation of its own format within that competitive context demonstrated all too neatly the downward slope of populist TV programming, season after season slip-sliding its way into tabloid pandering via a delirious and dollar-greased pursuit of ratings - the more of which, it is simply presumed, must equal better. This competition, as much as any other feature of millennial America, revealed the actual character of the radical capitalism that was also fueling the giddy fantasies of a global empire. Just ten years before, the wry Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had fashioned the memorable phrase "defining deviancy downward" to describe our gradual and culture-wide acclimatization to behaviors once broadly deemed illegal or immoral. And despite Moynihan's own opposition, the concept later helped to forge a bipartisan consensus on reforming the nation's welfare system, some of whose policies seemed ironically to have subsidized the very social pathologies they were meant to assuage - seemed, that is, to have helped define deviancy downward. Such programs, however, were the step-children of government, and since the Reagan era it had become a truism that governmental agencies were, by the very nature of their original sinfulness as public institutions, sluggish and incompetent in all their duties.

In the pursuit of this perverse objective at least, the now conventional political wisdom has been confirmed, for in "defining deviancy downward," entertainment executives have been far more productive than social service bureaucrats. In the ongoing race to the ethical bottom, mammonite private industry beats paternalistic big government hands down. And although you would never guess this fact from watching its news division, TV broadcasting's entrepreneurial leader in this downward spiral was none other than Fox television, the so-called conservative network, which is owned and hands-on operated by the yellowest of bigleague yellow journalists in the porno era: arch vulgarian (and right-wing sugar daddy) Rupert Murdoch.

Feasting on the culture wars. Fox's talking-head politicos programmatically scorned the ethical deliquescence of well-known liberals. They were particularly adept at highlighting instances of rank hypocrisy: profeminist politicians caught womanizing with their underlings, radical academics found to be squelching free speech on the campus green, and left-wing actors who touted the environment publicly only to degrade it with their private purchases. But this is postwar America, and here, as Deep Throat advised the ambitious but still callow Woodward and Bernstein, it is always wise to "follow the money." In this case, thankfully, retracing the dotted- line of the dollars doesn't require a dedicated team of investigative journalists - all one has to do instead is lean back in one's Lay-Z-Boy and stay tuned to the same network's channels. In return for riding the high horse of their highly selective righteous indignation, these same commentators were being paid (and very well, thank you) by a corporation whose contribution to conservative family values included Married with Children and Temptation Island, and who defended the sanctity of marriage against the laxities of the decadent left by staging Who Wants to Marry a Multi- Millionaire?.

Given the downward spiral of programming standards, as accelerated by the bottomfishing Fox and quickly followed by its competitors, one could appreciate the challenge faced by those charged with reinventing Monty's original concept for today's increasingly jaded TV audience. By contrast, the intellectual version of such programming, the old quiz show, had a far easier time adapting to the new cultural climate, as was demonstrated by the extraordinary popularity of the British import, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Defining deviancy downward in this instance simply required dumbing down the content of the quiz, primarily through expanding the categories of allowable questions to include all manner of pop cultural trivia. The obvious intention was to "democratize" the potential contestant base and thereby attract a huge viewing audience who could more easily imagine themselves in the winner's seat. But insomuch as it did succeed at that narrow task, the reinvented range of the quiz show question also reflected an actual and ongoing recalibration of the nation's memory.

This shift in the content of what we commonly recollect supplies yet more evidence of the saturation of the public mindscape by marketeering and the transformation of values that has accompanied it. For within the new quiz-show format, knowing which actor supplied the voice-over for a car rental ad was just as likely to be the winning answer as properly identifying the inventor of the cotton gin or a poetic line by Emily Dickinson. On the pseudocommons of TV, meritorious knowledge had been so revised that factoid and fact, the cinematic wise guy's scripted comeback and the religious martyr's epitaph, were of equal and interchangeable value... a value always set to the U.S. dollar.

But as we just saw, Let's Make a Deal had never pretended to be meritocratic, much less intellectually so. The atmosphere its game simulated was the boisterous carnival of pomo shopping and not the earnest exam of classroom achievement. The show's long- lived allure had been rooted in the sheer spectacle of consumption, and the savvy of its structure consisted in its enfolding within the rhythm of the game that whole sequence of psychological regression (juvenilization, derationalization, submission to the Magic) commonly favored by the consumer economy's confidence game. Still, Monty was being sincere in a way when, in the interview cited at the start of this section, he confessed to being repulsed by the notion of insulting his contestants. Although implicit throughout the design of the show, Let's Make a Deal's egregious demeaning of individual dignity had always been masked by an aura of benign paternalism. The show had debuted, after all, in 1963, just prior to the sexual revolution and the women's liberation movement, and at a time when divorce was still as rare as the two-career family. In his search for higher ratings, Monty, too, had sedulously minded his time and place, designing a game which reflected not only the era's obsession with shopping but also postwar America's characteristic form of domestic relations - the wage-earning dad and stay-at-home mom.

Surely this, too, was a key source of its original allure: the decision to costume the game in gender roles as we liked them then. In the theater of the show's deal-making, Monty had cast himself as something like the era's ideal male spouse. As host, he played husbandas-doting-father-figure, the good and generous provider, an identity overtly signaled by a) the stylish suit he always wore, clearly suggesting his executive status and b) the thick wads of new cash which, filling that suit's pockets, he gladly gave away. So it was that the game always opened as if, like a million other North American dads, Monty had just come home for work, where, crossing the threshold and into the audience, he was then greeted by the era's ideal female spouse (or, really, by a harem of potential ideal spouses): the wife- as-adoring-daughter-figure, a postwar version of Ibsen's silly Nora, who, on cue and in fetching costume, begged her hubby-dad (please! please! please!) for some cash to play with.

These were crude cartoons, of course. The show had recast traditional gender roles as the nation's marketeers most liked them then, dumbing down the mostly female contestants to fit the psychic specs of the avid Dupe - an approach that would soon be applied to men as well, and with an equal-opportunity fervor. Nevertheless, however gross the distortion and venal the intent, the show's two roles of guest and host did reflect a still timely sociological reality in 1963: a preferred American household in which men tended to specialize in earning the money, women in spending it. And insomuch as, following the logic of that specialization, the housewife naturally became the target audience for most advertising then, the contempt implicit in the show's design was especially directed at the nation's women.

Yet, true to the prevailin\g ethos of the day, the masquerade of that design also required that its scorn remain tacit. An instinctive conformist like all master salesmen, Monty Hall intuitively grasped that any overt expression of mockery on his part was, as he noted above, "an anathema." Such behavior was taboo because, like an employee cursing in Disneyland, it "broke character" with that fable of innocent fun which the game was staging to sell its products. To stay in character - that is to sustain the pose of benign paternalism - required that the game- show host radiate, at worst, a playful condescension. Dressed in the garb of the generous father, Monty, after all, got to give away the cash. It was the game as a whole which insulted his guests, routinely reenacting the regressive conversion of democracy's self- reliant citizen into consumerism's passively pleading shopper- Lexington's vigilant Minuteman into Anaheim's credulous Mouseketeer.

But the attempted revival of Let's Make a Deal came in 2003 and much had changed in America in the ensuing forty years. In an era when many women had careers and when one out of every two marriages ended in divorce (often leaving a caretaking mom with kids to support on insufficient alimony), the sight of adult women pleading for cash from a dapper male host risked appearing either ludicrously archaic or painfully offensive, depending on which segment of the old target audience was watching.

Just as problematic was Monty's insistence that a game-show host should rigorously eschew insulting his guests, staging instead the old masquerade of innocent fun. One inevitable result of relentlessly "defining deviancy downward" for forty years was that the fakery necessary to the pretense of post war innocence had become much harder to sustain. In a culture relentlessly informed by tabloid talk shows, pornographic cable channels, and slandering Web sites; a culture familiar with the distinguishing marks on the presidential phallus (as "brought to us by" his supposedly puritanical political opponents); a culture intimate with the reproductive failures, dysfunctional relationships, and substance abuse problems of its actors, athletes, and politicians who, through the boundary-busting blender of the electronic media, had mixed and merged into the undifferentiated slurry of "celebrity" - in such a reconfiguration of the communications industry, as driven by the race for better ratings, sublimation and discretion were tactics long out of favor.

By 2003 "transparency" had become the reigning imperative. Opening up was the unavoidable admission price to public life: no zipper left unzipped, no secret habit unconfessed, no closet contents unexamined by Geraldo's leering camera. Just ask any of the nation's thousands of communications experts who advised the ambitious, and who (opening up themselves) made their analyses promiscuously available to any camera at the first piquant whiff of a national scandal. Their broadcast advice then was largely the same: the savvy move for the suddenly exposed, experts agreed, was to "get ahead of the story." Getting ahead of the story meant letting it all hang out. Only by coughing up the full and rancid corpus of one's sin could one win the chance to be born again as bankable celebrity or electable pol.

Less publicly acknowledged but broadly understood was that the beast of porno America's publicity machine not only haphazardly feasted on such scandals - it demanded them. For both the aging celebrity who had gone out of fashion and the average citizen who longed to escape the perceived irrelevancy of his anonymity, this, the media market's blood lust for gossip, supplied the easiest route to claim (or reclaim) their fifteen minutes of broadcast fame. In a ruling value system where more attention (in the form of ratings) must equal better, the scandalous life could be as "good" as, and sometimes "better" than, the traditionally virtuous one.

All these changes in the public mindscape of millennial America had an inevitable impact on the old game-show format. By 2003, at the height of its prime-time revival, a pomo self- consciousness had been built into most of the new programs, a paparazzi-style insistence on exposure. Now, in the midst of the five- or ten-week long game, the audience at home could overhear the scantily clad players confess their "secret" loathings and (listings, or could participate vicariously in their Machiavellian plotting, the whispered hatching of the latest betrayal. Later, in a staged reunion, the erstwhile competitors might watch together taped excerpts from the show. Waxing nostalgic with laughter and tears, they would then submit to a group interview, during which (just like Julia Roberts before Barbara Walters) they would "open up" about their feelings and philosophize retrospectively about the meaning of "the game."

But whatever the intricacies of the specific game in question, or the profundity of the meaning that a particular player had milked from its passage, a once tacit truth about the game-show format had now become transparently obvious. The ultimate prize, the allure that transcended the Caribbean cruise or even the jackpot million, had always been the dramatic transformation of one's social and psychological status. Stronger even than the avidity for commodities was the desire to be noticed, to be known - the craving for notoriety. Every game was, at heart, a simulation of the media's "fame game." Each program supplied that rarest and so dearest of opportunities, granting the average Joe or Joelene the right to cross over to the other side of the camera's avid eye and assume, however briefly, the cherished station of celebrity. After a lifetime of admiring and applauding from afar, just one of two- hundred million anonymous and unrequited Echos, each contestant had a chance to play Narcissus for a day.

The populist revival of the prime-time game show had been dependent, in large part, on updating the standards of simulation for that game-behind-the-game. Just as the same special effects that had sold a sixties action film couldn't draw a mass audience in 2000 because they no longer passed for "real," the old game- show formats had lost the authority of semblance - they didn't seem sufficiently like the media fame-game as it was currently being played in millennial America. To enhance the appearance of reality, the new generation of shows added both breadth and depth to their simulations. Breadth - the "democratization" of desire in pursuit of market share - had been a standard approach for all forms of consumer commerce since its emergence in the late nineteenth century. We have already touched on a revealing example of its strategic application with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; for although, as a member of the home audience, your actual chances of appearing on the program were as nearly infinitesimal as they had been back in the fifties, the decision to dumb down both the questions themselves and the format for answering them had created an effective simulation of accessibility. True or not, it did seem now like you really could be the one sitting in the spotlight across from Regis - that regular fellow, who, with a little help from his phonelinked friends and the studio audience, could nail that "final answer" and ascend to the magical status of the millionaire.

In fact, the literal use of spotlighting was a shameless feature of the game's simulation. After a finalist won a chance to play, he would first submit to some personal questioning by the affable host, just like one of the "real" celebrities on Regis's morning talk show. Then the set would go dark, ceiling lights would swirl and, with a flourish of melodramatic music, a bright funnel of light would suddenly illuminate the lucky player. The symbol of ritualistic passage couldn't have been more transparent: this chance to play the game also afforded one the even dearer right to participate in the game-behind-the-game. As the Puritan American had once been struck by the sudden saving light of grace, elected for sainthood by his omnipotent God, the postmodern American had been selected for fame by the media's all-powerful publicity machine. Disney's fabled Magic Moment had been revived. Regis's guest had been allowed to cross over to theotherside, stepping onto the set of mammon's Magic Kingdom.

But if the breadth added to that simulation of celebrity had been achieved through a clever tweaking of the traditional format, the new depth was more an artifact of the surrounding culture. Although there were some very notable exceptions, the fame of the old game- show contestants had tended to evaporate instantly; for them, Warhol's fifteen minutes was an all too exact prescription. But in an era when even Newsweek dished and local news shows shamelessly flogged their network's stars in hopes of boosting their own ratings, a prime-time contestant's adventure in celebrity could easily be extended. Even this week's loser on Survivor got his interview with Bryant Gumbel on The Early Morning Show, and in a time slot equal to and interchangeable with an actual movie star or prominent politician. Even that runner-up on Bachelor, whose hopes for a hunky hubby had been dashed on the nextto-last show, might win an agent, publicist, and modeling contract - or even a chance to star in the next spin-off series, Bachelorette. Mammon's media beast needed to be fed. As industrial America had once massproduced widgets and washers, postindustrial America expertly manufactured its seasonal celebrities, ever ready to imagineer yesterday's nonentity into today's hot property.

Within this cultural context, the enhanced special effects of the new game show seemed especially convincing. Just as the choreography of the old cinematic cowboy fight now seemed comically fake while today's martial combat, as staged by Ang Lee, could pass as breathtakingly real, the new-and-im\proved format appeared authentic. Watching its erstwhile average contestants being magnified by the prime-time spotlight, and then following them as they were being interviewed on David Letterman and gossiped about in newspaper columns, the audience at home found it easy to believe that you or I, or even that shy co- worker two cubicles over, might become a "real" star.

B. Dumb & Dumber: The Demise of Dignity in the Guise of Celebrity

But like the jealous Jehovah of old, Mammon's fickle publicity machine now demanded of those it elected the harsh transparency of full disclosure. To audition for "real" celebrity in 2003 also meant to play by the new rules of the fame-game as established by conservative moralists like Rupert Murdoch. Any effective simulation would also require this dimension of the "star treatment" - that Joe would have to undergo the same proctological examination as Rob Lowe, Joelene the same gynecological invasion of individual privacy suffered (and sought) by Britney Spears. As a consequence, the once more-or- less tacit degradation of the game-show guest had now come fully out of the closet. Sedulously minding their time and place, the most successful new producers had rendered transparent the demeaning intention that had always lurked behind not only "the game" but also both the game-behind-the-game and the confidence game of salesmanship which was sponsoring the whole show.

The motivational link between these three interlocking games was and is temperamental as well as Ideological in nature. Under today's Evangelical Mammonism, all activity is shaped to serve avidity's Golden Rule-that more (profits for the seller, consumption for the buyer) must equal better. Yet since that rule is not only fundamentally untrue but inherently antisocial, its practical application stirs the currents of hostility. So it is that, as close cousin to the colloquy of Quack and Dupe, the starfan relationship of the porno media is subterraneously being driven by the same complementary pair of darker emotions, envy and contempt, that characterize the confidence game. The marketeer's flattery of the customer fronts for the scornful belief, so necessary to his own success in an economy of unnecessary salesmanship, that the customer is a fool to fall for his pitch - an attitude most concisely expressed by P.T. Barnum's avid faith that a sucker is born every minute. In a parallel fashion, the fan's "adoration" of the star (like those would-be wives' "love" for the wealthy bachelor) effectively masks an overweening desire to consume or replace him: a psychological cannibalism whose most extreme expression is the celebrity stalker. At the temperamental level, then, the real question lurking behind the rhetorical question Who Wants to Marry a MultiMillionaire? was this: how insulted and demeaned, how exposed to public rejection are you willing to be, for a chance at instant fame and mucho money? This was the psyche's version of the body's casting couch, the requisite submission required to become "a player" in the game.

And so it came to pass, in the downward spiral of deviant disclosure as defined by the likes of Wayne Bobbit and Ken Starr, that the ritual humiliation of the game-show contestant became a frank and foregrounded feature of the show. Sometimes, as in the case of America's Funniest Home Videos, it constituted the show's sole content. Insomuch as, unlike the bachelor programs or Temptation Island, America's Funniest Home Videos not only proved noncontroversial but also still clung to Monty Hall's increasingly archaic, temperamental masquerade of "innocent fun," it might seem an odd show to examine next. Yet the very fact that this program was so broadly accepted - its contents presumed to be, like Disney's fare, "good for the kids" - commends it as representative of mainstream culture.

Financially, the show's concept was exceptionally savvy, allowing for what surely must have been one of the cheapest productions on prime-time television. Exploiting the fact that most middle-class families were already playing/wiparazzi to their own domestic lives, the producers simply asked the public to comb their video cams' archival footage for the "funniest" (that is, most embarrassing) moments: accidental collisions, wedding-toast malapropisms, all those literal or figurative wreckages that transform the average guy's would-be swan dive into a gut-busting belly flop. Flooded with submissions, the producers selected the "best" of those personally worst moments, and then invited the finalist families onto the show, where their past follies would be replayed, to much laughter, before a live audience.

But this was still a game show, after all - which is to say, a competition, at the end of which there must always be a winner. All cultures play games, and to win at a popular one normally means to be adjudged the best at something highly valued by your community, skills that can vary from jousting in medieval Europe to chess- playing in postwar Russia. But here in pomo America, in a hyperextension of democratic culture's aversion to the uppity individual, winning now meant gladly exposing one's silliest and most embarrassing moments. Both the show's popularity and the presumption that it was all in innocent fun suggested the degree to which the willing humiliation of the individual before the group had now become a conventional virtue. As a kind of Grated and more action-oriented version of the tell-all talk show, America's Funniest Home Videos supplied yet another vivid sign of the old Protestant selfs total demise.

The moral supremacy of group conformity over individual dignity was further reinforced by the judging which, rather than being assigned to a panel of "experts in the field" (professional comedians, say), was the responsibility of the audience itself. After each round, those in the studio were asked to rate the tapes against each other and submit their electronic vote. Which of the three had been the "funniest" home moment: Dad falling off the roof in his Santa suit? Mom's flambe dessert setting the dinner party's table cloth on fire? or little Jason being nailed in the 'nads by a wiffle ball and keeling over in pain and humiliation before his guffawing pals? As the much publicized talent search for the Scarlet O'Hara role had shown, Americans had long yearned for the center- stage spotlight, but something had changed in the ensuing fifty years. This wasn't the glamorous chance for a torrid kiss with a highly desirable leading man in the era's most anticipated film, Gone with the Wind. The families of millennial America's middle class, once the proud nesting ground for democracy's self-reliant citizenry, were now competing instead for bit parts in the latest sequel to Dumb and Dumber. And who knew, really, whether the winning entry (that is, the democratically assessed dumbest activity) on Funniest Videos was itself real? Might not the new Ozzies and Harriets of Duluth or Elk Grove have faked their own instance of innocent ineptitude?

Here, too, that early master of faux innocence for self- centered profit, Ronald Reagan, had supplied a prophetic preview. Despite convenient lapses of memory through which he placed himself, quasiheroically, as a live witness to the liberation of the Nazi death camps, Reagan had spent the entirety of World War II stateside, making movies for the military. Within the industry at that time, it was a well-known secret that Reagan's studio, Warner Brothers, put together its own private version of Hollywood's funniest home movies, splicing outtakes of the year's cinematic "bloopers" - collapsing props, misspoken lines, salacious asides between famous actors. And when his Air Force superiors requested a copy of this then rare glimpse of the "real" Hollywood, rather than offend either of his bosses, Reagan decided to fake one instead. Gathering a group of actors, he staged and filmed his own series of funniest moments: deliberate "accidents," scripted "slippages" of the tongue, feigned bursts of "spontaneous" laughter. The military brass never noticed the difference, and as Reagan himself boasted, some of these feigned bloopers were included in later collations, the phony accidents intermixed indistinguishably with the authentic ones.

Reagan was unusual for his day both in the range of his experience within the new communications industries (first radio, then film and TV) and in the degree to which he had internalized the soft duplicities of showmanship that prevailed within them: what came most naturally to him was feigning authenticity. But by the 1990s most Americans had been raised from the cradle in front of a camera. One didn't have to be a professional to have become accustomed to the slick deceptions of showmanship. Who hadn't experienced a real-life event that had to be reenacted because the photographer had run out of film or had missed the best (that is, most authentic) moment while flirting with the bridesmaid or chugging a margarita? By the 1990s, blooper shows were common fare on TV, and given a generation far more cynically savvy than Ronald Reagan's had ever been, it was hardly surprising that the producers of America's Funniest Home Videos were routinely finding phony submissions among the some 1500 they received each week.

Surely, too, the original contestants on shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, or The Mole were being subtly (or not so subtly) coached by the producers into the sorts of "intimate" poses and "frank" revelations most likely to boost the program's ratings. And by the second season, the new contestants, having had a chance to observe the first, would have already internalized the necessary skills and approved attitudes-not just for "the game" but for the game-behind- the-game as well, more naturally supplying the sorts of juicy asides and sotto voce confessions that, in one of those win-win situations, earned the progr\am higher ratings and the contestant more screen time.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had been one of the earliest to caution America about the demise of the Protestant self, as it was being driven by a flight from public and private truthfulness. Within his fictive world, the cruelties that followed from failing to admit one's darker motives were inseparable eventually from the self- induced punishment of an existential loneliness, a warning he explicitly voiced at the end of The Scarlet Letter: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" But a century and a half later, in the fun-house mirror of postmodernity's simulacrum, best and worst had been inverted. False propriety was hardly a pressing problem in a conventional economy increasingly dependent on televisual notoriety. It took the full length of the novel for Hawthorne's secret adulterer, the Rev. Dimmesdale, to drag himself into the public square to admit his sin, after which, like Shakespeare's Lear, he literally died from the agony of his self- exposure. But in porno America, where one could go to the bank rather than to the grave on the wages of one's sin, thousands of Dimmesdales were fighting for a chance to expose themselves on talk- show television, ready to clutch the soggy kleenex of confession for the sisterly Diane Sawyer or to toss on cue the furniture of their rage for a winking Jerry Springer. Today's Dimmesdale might fake his sin for the rare opportunity to cross over to the other side, or he might even commit the sin with the specific motivation of making himself a more suitable subject for "opening up" before the avid camera.

By 2003 the inner muddle of motivations that had so obsessed Hawthorne had been projected outward to become a very public babble, and who could tell the difference, really, between the true confession and the staged? the actual human tragedy and the made- for-TV movie? between a genuine threat to national security and the mushroom-cloud rhetoric penned, polled, and focus-group tested by Demagoguery, Inc.'s political technicians?

C. Fast-forward Decadence: The Demise of Monty Hall's 'Principled' Broadcasting

In "Auguries of Innocence," William Blake had written that all the motions of eternity might be spied in the compression of an hour. On a smaller scale, in a kind of fast-forward version of defining deviancy downward, the entire cynical cycle of truth's public befuddlement could be discerned during millennial America's game-show revival, a summary of whose competitive one- upsmanship might have been aptly entitled, "Auguries of Decadence." In Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, the first of America's bachelor shows, the prospective brides mustered the masquerade of their love for the eligible Rick Rockwell, while everyone knew, without quite saying so, that their tacit motives were immediate fame and serious money. Just like "real" celebrities, then, the multimillionaire and his instant spouse, Darva Conger, were investigated by the nation's army of tabloid journalists and quickly found to be scandalously wanting. The groom, it turned out, had been accused of physical abuse by an ex-fiancee while the bride had plumped her application with a bogus claim to being a Gulf War veteran. Winning a quickie annulment, partially on the grounds that she had refused to consummate the marriage, Conger then promptly exposed to the nation what she had refused to surrender to her would-be mate, baring all in Playboy for a reported half-a- million, in poses which she adjudged to be "tasteful." Meanwhile, after touring the talk-show circuit with the sad tale of his exposed and broken heart, the jilted Rockwell tried, without much success, to jump-start his second career as (could it be more perfect?) a stand-up comedian.

In the initial aftermath of the scandal, it appeared that the bachelor game show was dead on arrival. Even the bottomfishing Fox was momentarily embarrassed. Sandy Grushow, chairman of its entertainment division, told the New York Times that the one-time special was "hardly reflective of what we hope to accomplish," pledging that such shows "are gone; they're over."1 But what really bothered TV's mood merchants was the shocking realization that the contestants had proven to be as fraudulent and corruptible as their own production teams - a flaw easily amended with better pre-show research. And if the post-game publicity had been bad, "the numbers" had been outstanding. An estimated 22 million had tuned in to watch the couple exchange their hasty vows, nearly double the ratings that Fox had scored in the same time slot the week before with its highbrow concept, The World's Sexiest Commercials; and since, in fact, such numbers are exactly "reflective of what [commercial networks] hope to accomplish," this decadent extension of The Dating Game concept was quickly revived and cleverly retooled.

By extending the length of the pseudo-wooing from a two-hour special to a full series, ABC's The Bachelor Mowed the overwhelmingly female audience sufficient time both to bond with the eligible hunk and to select their favorites among the competing women. Now the producers could stretch out the drama of public humiliation via romantic execution. They also had time to supply up- close-and-personal interviews, a kind of video diary revealing the contestants' "feminine wiles" and hidden feuds, and offering you- were-there peeks at evening dates, which, just like those of the "real" stars, always took place in glamorous locales, and where the bachelor and his try-out spouse would "open up" about their feelings over bubbling champagne or a frothing hot tub. This was bread and circuses, American-style and in a feminine mode. ABC was pandering a gladiatorial voyeurism for the chick-flick set, with the same cheesy insincerity as its masculine equivalent (also recently revived for prime-time viewing): professional wrestling.

How could one possibly top (or is it, bottom?) such an exercise in omnidirectional cynicism? Leave it to Fox, our conservative network, to find a solution, and one truly reflective of its primary accomplishments as the nation's fourth network. Just as the women had mustered their seductive facades, cosmetic and emotional, to seduce the wealthy bachelor, Joe Millionaire now staged a tit-for- tat masquerade on them. For despite a castle-sized mansion whose pretensions would make Jay Gatsby proud, the eligible guy this time wasn't the wealthy heir whom the producers had promised to the contestants. Off-camera in real life, he was instead (get it?) just your average Joe, a blue-collar worker with zero status and minimal dough. The audience at home had been let in on the cruel joke so that they could savor the piquant irony throughout. All that anxious strategizing, all those weeks of submitting to the prying camera with the strong likelihood of being publicly humiliated, and the sole survivor, the so-called winner, would have the royal red carpel pulled out from under her at the very moment of her apparent triumph, at which point she would have to face yet another test of character. Would her love remain true when confronted with the revelation that her Joe wasn't a millionaire, after all? Would she still stand by her man when she learned that he was, really, just a carpenter?... ("If I were a carpenter / And you were a lady, / Would you marry me anyway? / Would you have my baby?")

But as it turned out, the joke was on the viewing audience as well, for thanks again to the intrepid legwork of tabloid America's investigative journalists, we soon learned that, despite the network's promotional promises, Joe wasn't just a carpenter either. Rather, just like Rick Rockwell, Fox's first and supposedly genuine multimillionaire, he, too, was a show-biz aspirant: someone who, contrary to the profile of your average construction worker, once had modeled (could it be more perfect?) men's underwear.

Lies within lies, winking pretense allied with disingenuous credulity, avid cynicism staging deliquescent sentimentality by (and for) the numbers... This Plato's cave of shadowy representations - the sideshow exchange of Quack and Dupe projected outward into a virtual Vanity Fair accessible to millions - was not Hawthorne's native terrain. To get an early gauge on deception of this scope and to this degree of shamelessness, we have to move from the settled townships of Massachusetts to Melville's steamer on the Mississippi, where in The Confidence Man the marginal commerce of quackery prophetically suffuses every conversation.

By the brilliant final chapter, the con man, who has taken on many guises throughout, has settled into the role of "the cosmopolitan." Now more an arm-chair anthropologist of folly than its active agent, he observes as the next generation of American grifter, in the allegorical form of a young boy, plies the traditional trickster's trade, inducing fear and greed to pitch his products: a lock for the steamboat passenger's cabin door and a money belt to keep his cash secure. The boy goes one step further, though. He offers his current dupe, an elderly rural traveler, this special bonus gift: a free copy of "the Counterfeit Detector," with which, he promises, the old man will be able to identify all the false currency in circulation-an infallible aid to separate at last the real from the fake. But, of course, the trickster being the trickster, his free Detector is itself a fake, yet another dimension in the shadowy play of seductive simulation, and one that multiplies, with malevolent intent, the same confusion it pretends to resolve.

And it is in this second or meta-level of cynical deception (the falsification of the very instruments of truth detection) that we can find the successful strategy behind millennial America's new game-show productions. The bouncy immediacy of the mobile camera, the sisterly inti\macy of the whispered confession, the casting of "real" people rather than studio actors in what nevertheless proved to be reenactments of old soap opera plots: using the latest techniques and technologies, the shows had acquired the "look-feel" of the documentary. Like Ronald Reagan in wartime Hollywood, TV's mood merchantry had found new ways to make the phony appear natural. As with Ang Lee's updated version of cinematic combat, their simulations were sufficiently adept to let the audience believe, once again, in the reality of the Magic.

For reasons that ought to be obvious now, all these changes presented major challenges to Monty's new production team. Given that 2003 was the fortieth anniversary of the show's debut, they had hoped to ride the wave of marketing's perpetual nostalgia craze, but the translation between eras was proving problematic. How were they to restage an arresting spectacle of degradation within and against this new field of "reality television" while still holding true to the show's founding format, including Monty's principled prohibition against overt insults? Dressing up as a turnip while pleading like a toddler for a chance to play the game seemed pretty tame compared to eating sun-warmed cow brains, flecked with flies (Survivor) or submerging oneself in a tank of dead squid (Fear Factor). Getting zonked by curtain #2 paled before being romantically dumped before an audience of millions (The Bachelorette) or having a B-list celebrity-judge publicly scorn your voice, posture, hair style, or breast size in the latest amateur star search (American Idol).

If we need a vivid benchmark for the nation's defining deviancy downward, this will surely do: by 2003 Monty Hall's original vulgarian concept was too principled to succeed in TV's current marketplace. Even updated, his revival of Let's Make a Deal failed to take off-although in their attempt to attract the New Woman, Monty's team did display the sort of there-ain't- no-valley-low- enough hustle that might have merited applause from Rupert Murdoch himself. In one segment of the reinvented show, the producers replaced the old boring boxes and patternless curtains with three very buff young men, all dressed in tartan kilts - and shortish ones at that. To find out what they had won, the contestants, all female, had to pick a laddie and then reach up under his kilt to receive their "prize" (get it?). Here we have a handy physiological mapping of the human progress which, we are told by earnest advocates of the Chicago school, necessarily follows the Market's brave and restless search for profits: the cash that had once emerged from a pocket of Monty ' s stylish suit was now attached to a faux-Scottish studmuffin's bare upper thigh.

This, on NBC (the nation's oldest network), at eight p.m. (still a so-called family viewing hour), and hosted by the glib and chipper Billy Bush (former coanchor of the tabloid news show, Access Hollywood). During the week of the show's debut, the most popular program on each of the four main networks was "reality-based," lottery ticket sales nationwide were about 850 million dollars,2 and the New York Times cited recent Gallup polls which had found that 48% of Americans believed in creationism.3 After only three airings, Monty's new production was abruptly canceled - its deal got zonked. The announcement came on March 19, 2003. Late that same evening Billy Bush's cousin, exuding self-confidence in a white shirt and red tie from the Oval Office, interrupted the networks' regularly scheduled programming to address the nation. Operation Iraqi Freedom, the pilot series for the new and enlightened American imperialism, had just been launched.

III.

Spirituality in the Age of Empire

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all...out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away. You shall not make my Father's house a house of trade." - John 2: 15-16

A. Money Note: The Juvenilization of Educational TV

Just to be certain that my argument doesn't appear to be "class warfare" in reverse, I want to emphasize that a parallel downslide was taking place on PBS, once the proudly prim site of both educational programming and anglophiliac entertainment. This descent, too, was partially initiated by privatization. Movement conservatives had succeeded in cutting public broadcasting's federal budget, with the intention of forcing its managers to submit to the great moral discipline of the marketplace, and as a consequence of that trip to the libertarian woodshed, PBS programming during this same period rapidly descended into one long how-to, self-help infomercial, targeting the chattering managerial classes.

How to filigree period molding. How to make four-star mozzarella. How to cure oneself of the incurable through the latest spiritual regimen or herbal remedy. How to become a five- star lover in one's sixth or seventh decade. Each of these self- help sermonettes would be interrupted by a seemingly endless phonathon, the station's assistant manager pleading for donations in exchange for (depending on the "level" of one's generosity) a video tape of this evening's show or the entire collected works of its expert host - who might even be there, in front of the phone bank, to take viewer questions, her every helpful answer a chance to pitch the full product line of her commodified wisdom. This was the public domain's pathetic version of corporate "synergy," charitable donation shamelessly cohabiting with commercial self-promotion.

Still, the look-feel of the programming retained a semblance at least of its old identity. Although Evangelical Mammonism has fully saturated the nation's mindscape, its ethos is inflected differently within our various classes, professions, and cultural niches, assuming in each case the specific guise of the local traditions preceding its triumph. As the audience demographics of Fox and PBS differed dramatically, so too, then, did those networks' ch

Source: Salmagundi

More News in this Category