COlEnE BROOKS
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Television, in fact, serves much the same function in American
life as does the car; in terms of its greater ease of reach, one might
consider it the cultural successor to that venerable but place-bound
vehicle. Both the television set and the car are contemporary equiva–
lents of "the coach"; each transforms experience into spectacle. That
this represents a particularly distant relation to the world is, of
course, inarguable, but this may constitute much of its appeal . Like
the car, television privatizes experience; we watch it alone or at most
with a handful of others. Fears that television exacerbates the isola–
tion of modern life are, however, most certainly exaggerated, if not
unfounded; television simply fulfills desires that Henry Ford, for
one, astutely identified decades ago. In the 1940s, before Alaska and
Hawaii were admitted into the Union, photographer Edwin Ross–
kam characterized the highway as "the forty-ninth state"; constitu–
ting, one would suppose, less an actual locale than a state of mind.
Today, it is tempting to term television our fifty-first state, an in–
tegral part of our psychic landscape, an immaterial network which
stands at the ready, like the road, twenty-four hours a day.
MAP: A
representation normally to scale and on a flat medium,
of a selection of material or abstract features on, or in relation to,
the surface of the Earth or of a celestial body
- Dictionary of Technical Terms in Cartography
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. is in–
scribed with the name of every American serviceman known to have
been killed in that conflict. Whether one regards this stark record as
a testament to sacrifice or simply a litany of waste, the act of nam–
ing, in its startling specificity, infuses this black wall with in–
disputable power. It is the power of
fact,
the force of fifty-eight
thousand names strung out in succession , and it effectively con–
founds response. What is delineated here is not the war but the con–
dition of loss itself, a condition stripped of political, social, or
historical reality, placed beyond contingency or accident of cir–
cumstance. The memorial wall resembles, oddly, those exhaustive
colonial catalogues of all that was to be found in the New World–
the "infinitude" of strange plants, flowers, and other forms of life
which confronted those early settlers. Then, as now, fear and
disorientation were held in abeyance by the calming effect of order,
