IIOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE i\IEfvtORIES
123
Jay Martin:
Stanley is giving an answer to Millicent's question. He sti ll
believes that the political personality can continue to have elements of
truthfulness and facticity, and also survive. Millicent asked w hether there
is an essential human character. Stanley has given us an example of that.
On the other hand, I think there is a difference between the kind of
fictions that, traditionally, culture has been ab le to absorb, that have
allowed us to see reality through fictions, and the current political fic–
tions I have chronicled. There is a nice line in a poem by Edwin Arling–
ton Robinson that comes to mind. I think it goes, "Games people play,/
Good glasses a re to see the sp irit through." We a re accustomed, in tra–
ditiona
literature, even in
DOli
Quixote,
to see that the games, or the
fictions that people adopt, can lead us to a kind of core reality. On the
other hand, children who are questioned by professional investigators
about their responses to TV believe that the characters on the screen
have come through the television cord, the electric cord
to
the outlet,
and that somehow they've been put into the building from outside. This
is not so different from what the psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk described
as schizophrenia, messages that are projected into you from some infer–
nal machine in Berlin. The Surgeon Ceneral of the United States has
done more studies on the effects of television on human intelligence and
creativity than on the health effects of cigarettes. The conclusion is uni–
formly the same in all of these studies; that the fo ll owing message
should be seen on the top of every television screen: "This wil l be dam–
aging to your mental health." Every test that has been done shows thar
if you give peop le a measurement of alertness, intelligence, ability
to
solve puzzles, and then have them watch TV for an hour, whether it's a
sitcom, or an action film in which somebody is murdered, or an educa–
tional program meant
to
teach them something, their ability
to
solve
puzz les (and the rest) will decline. I think we have a situation in culture
that the politician has seized upon thar exists in the media and allows
for a different kind of fiction than the traditional fiction, which led us
into insight so that rhe culrure learned to ahsorb somerhing that will
provide insight. The fictions of roday do not provide insight.
Geoffrey Hartman:
Of course, one could say not
to
worry, since human
narcissism is without deprh, and that democracy
i~
hoth an intoxicant
and a disinroxicanL So the wheel conrinues
to
turn. There is an old
adage that mankind wants
to
be deceived. There is a very real need,
wish, desire in us to he elsewhere,
to
go in this fictive way, which has to
be recognized-a libido; ir's parr of our being. We recognize it, bur rhe
question is, what do we do with it? Television may make it too easy.
