MCLUHAN
435
public hangings would
involve
people. The distant statistical fact –
"At 5: 30 this morning so and so was executed" - that's hot. Wash–
ington is still fighting a "hot" war, as it were, by newspaper means
and the old technologies. The effects of the new technologies on
war coverage is not something Washington is prepared to cope with.
In Washington people do not concede that the news on TV and
news in the press are dissimilar.
TV has begun to dissolve the fabric of American life. All the as–
sumptions - all the ground rules - based on visuality, superficial–
ity, blueprinting, connectedness, equality, sameness - disappear
with TV.
STEARN:
If
you shut off TV, then we would end the war in Vietnam
and at the same time set back the civil rights movement?
MCLUHAN:
Oh yes. But there is an alternative: Put hundreds of
extra lines on the TV image, step up its visual intensity to a new
hot level. This might serve to reverse the whole effect of TV. It
might make the TV image photographic, slick, like movies: hot
and detached. . ..
Now it isn't one's conditioning by print culture that creates this air of
affable nuttiness. You could print these remarks, hear them sung by
the Fugs, watch them dance in a TV cartoon or see them spelled out
on the Astrodome scoreboard, and they still would conjure up the
dense cross-purposes of Absurdist comedy. It plays into McLuhan's hand
to get angry about such talk, but its dramatistic qualities are worth
examining.
Here the character named "McLuhan" (clearly the star part) has
a number of voices and roles at his disposal. He can be numbingly
platitudinous "("TV has begun to dissolve the fabric of American life"),
vocally just a halftone from the Sunday-supplement moralizer's deter–
mination to rescue us from life as it is. But this voice has a way of
going a little askew, as a surprise term galvanizes the cliche with a
twitch of pseudo-life - "without an informed public there would be
no
war"
is like an unexpected gift you don't quite know how to accept.
Another voice delights in the offhand analogy that proves exactly what
it doesn't want to, like the remark about hangings. Public hangings did
indeed "involve people," but as Boswell's case reminds us, those people
- the avid spectators and the pitifully histrionic victims - were involved
in a way that made hangings seem as necessary to popular health as
prostitution and cheap gin. (We achieve the present hope of at last
dispensing with legal murder only after decades of secluding executions
from the public theater, making them impersonal, routine,
boring
acts
of sanitary engineering.) But this character rushes disarmingly past his
