Recently I seem to be losing patience with people blaming and being so polarized; while at the same time jumping quickly for band-aid answers to complex questions rather than delving deeper for lasting solutions. I have also been watching my own black and white thinking and the difficulty I often have in holding ambiguity for long. I started asking myself, " How did this happen?"
I think the answer may be found by exploring four television genres: crime dramas, family sitcoms, reality shows and the news. While the contribution of each is different, four overarching themes seem to emerge -- life is simple, all problems are resolvable in an hour or less, authority is not be trusted and what we feel passionately trumps objective facts.
The 1950's are often referred to as "The Golden Age" of television. Whether that is because we tend to look back on what was with a certain fondness and selective amnesia is open for debate. But as TV was growing up, so were the boomers. The 90-minute drama was evolving into its present one hour (actually 44 minutes if you don't include commercials) form, the sitcom was being refined, the evening news lasted an hour and was in fact news, and the Sunday morning opinion shows were cool, calm and collected. Unlike today, where exposes are the norm, Edward R. Murrow's pieces on hunger in America and the Army-McCarthy hearings not only informed, but also shocked us all.
The drama, with its classic Aristotelian three-act form reassured us that good always triumphed over evil. The format was simple. A really bad guy did a really horrible thing to a really innocent person and appeared to get away with it. But the really bad guy never seemed to take into account the power and determination of the really good guys, almost exclusively men, who had the intelligence, guile and gumption to "get their man" even when hamstrung by judges who it seemed had only one job, to make their job more difficult. And let's also mention the really good guy's bosses, who by insisting on proper procedure, seemed to be always getting in their way. But get their man they did, and always in 44 minutes. The lessons taught -- that life is a simple battle between good and evil in which good triumphs and problems are resolved quickly -- have been refined over the decades, but remain firmly entrenched.
The lessons of the sitcom were just as simple. We learned that most authority figures, dads and high school principals in particular, lovable as they were, were fools. We learned that there was a way out of pretty much every situation, especially if we were cute, popular and adept at lying. We learned that while there might be consequences to our actions, they were short lived indeed. And we learned even before the cable 24/7 news cycle and reality programs that he who blusters the loudest, most often wins. Our notions that life was simple were reinforced, this time in a half-hour (22 minute) format. And we were beginning to get the idea that not only did feelings matter, they were way more important than facts.
Reality programming has brought us a whole new set of norms. Foremost among them is that attitude is much more important than achievement. Why anyone would care about the gang from the "Jersey Shore" or the "Bad Girls Club" is beyond me, but here we are mired deep in Afghanistan and high unemployment and the women of The View are interested in chatting with the President of the United States about Snooki. The President going on the View seems surreal to me. Can you just imagine Lincoln appearing on the View? But hey, Michelle watches "The View," so do it!
We've learned that life is a contest in which you are asked to leave by either a panel of judges or worse still, be voted out by people pretending to be your friends. We've become convinced that the best way to choose a life partner is by a series of short interviews, surveys and a process of elimination of those who are the least photogenic. And we've learned, that if America indeed has talent, it's up to noted talent experts Howie Mandel, David Hasselhoff and Ozzy Osbourne's wife to find it for us.
And finally we come to TV news where the line between commentary and news has become so blurred as to become unrecognizable. We have come to accept gossip as fact, innuendo as evidence and yelling as logic. That is, we have come to see the world as a simple place, where all problems are solved in under an hour, by the forces of good against the forces of evil (who are aided in their evil ways by one governmental agency or another). And we, the really good guys, are the ones who yell the loudest, hurl the craziest epithets and show our patriotism (left or right) with our passion, proving that what we feel deeply has much more validity than what the facts prove logically. We revel in the blame and feed off of the polarization as did the Roman's watching their perceived enemies fight to the death in the coliseum.
I guess I can blame it on TV... Or look to myself and my judgments... I get it..