Two Loose McLoonies

Back in the 60's, two young English professors attempted to translate their fealty to Marshall McLuhan to the classroom conditions they had just begun to face. Neil Postman was a graduate student at TC, Columbia, I was a Ford Foundation Fellow in New York. We served together on committees at the Television Information Office, the broadcasting industry's PR arm. He edited "Television and the Teaching of English" and a few years later I edited "TV as Art: Some Essays in Criticism". Both met our mentor in that annus mirabilis, 1955. Marshall McLuhan had come down from the Catholic St. Michael's College, at the University of Toronto to diffuse his unsettling ideas about the medium as the message.

But we came at him from different backgrounds. Neil was a secular Jew who had metabolized the meaning of Judaism, I was an about to be ex-Catholic philosophy major from the Jesuit University of Detroit with a flair for meliorism. I had the advantage of sneak previewing McLuhanism as a "Commonweal" Catholic, where his pioneering book, "The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man" (1951) had appeared as disparate essays in that magazine. Marshall was to astonish us early readers by disavowing "Bride" in "The Gutenberg Galaxy" where he confessed that he had been a "victim of print culture". (The book actually grew out of his confused efforts to understand the "foreign" culture of his freshman English students!)

Neil was fast morphing into a second generation McLoonie, as he and Charles Baumgartner collaborated on "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" which was attempting to bring the unsettling skepticism of the College Sixties down into the high school and elementary classrooms. My anthology had a more simpleminded format: commission nine thoughtful critics to address a specific literary problem in the new TV culture. (My pride and joy was to get Jesus College blue collar Raymond Williams to speculate on how to teach Shakespeare on TV.)

In my first teaching assignments while finishing my Ph.D.course work at Michigan State was to experiment with assigning media "works" to my eighth grade English/Social Studies classes at E.Lansing High School. It was an ideal venue for experiment: the most highly motivated students I ever had in thirty years of teaching, either the sons and daughters of MSU professors or GM professionals (with just enough blue collars to make it interestingly different.) We listened, with writing assignments, to the CBC's Lister Sinclair's luminous radio documentaries ("A Word in Your Ear: A Study of Language" and "I Know What I Like: A Study of Art") or Robert Lewis Shayon's landmark "The People Act" a radio series showing ordinary Americans solving their urban problems.

When I moved up to tenth and twelfth grade classes, I had the sophomores watch TV dramas like Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" or "The Catered Affair" and the seniors looked critically at Maurice Evans in "Macbeth" on the Hallmark TV Theatre. And we even fielded a weekly TV show,"Everyman Is a Critic" on MSU's just opened UHF TV Channel, on such topics as rock 'n' roll music, TV drama, or hotrod racing, one topic at a time.

I summarized my satisfaction with this approach to popular culture with my first published article, "Everyman in Saddle Shoes" in Scholastic Teacher in 1954, which I think tipped the scales in my getting a Ford Foundation Fellowship in New York (1955-56) to try out my ideas as radio TV editor of Scholastic Teacher. Eventually we got the networks to give us advance screenings or scripts so we could print one page "Teleguides" to give teachers in the boonies ideas on how to teach the programs. It was as far away from Marshall's increasingly incoherent theorizing as it was possible to be. I was frankly let down by my encounters with the Master. He was all so busy, it seemed to me, in devising new vocabularies rather than practical hints on how to teach.

I just now finally got around to reading Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985) in 2006. It is full of wit and sound judgment about how shallow American TV had become, but vitiated his prognostications, it seemed to me, by "epistemological" speculations on how human development from speech to print to TV image changed the metaphysics of teaching. Hoo Ha! It was McLooneyism on the loose.

After a long and particularly tiresome passage I turned on my German TV for relief to Sat 3: It was a Mozart concert, and the delicate and thoughtful intercutting from orchestra sections to individual performers, as the score suggested, was not only an enriched musical experience, impossible without TV, but a great surcease from the temporary sorrow of Neil's prose.

And I remember one incident in England in 1966. At a BBC party for world teachers attending their English on Radio and TV summer courses, we were introduced to Paddy O'Connor, a former bus inspector, who had just been elected the first Irish mayor of Camden Town. I asked Paddy if he could recommend someone who could kill two birds with one stone---let me visit an example of public housing and watch "That Was the Week That Was" with a roomful of blue collar Brits. He put me in touch with Phyllis O'Leary, a geriatric social worker. I'll never forget that inspiring night. The "uneducated" working class tenants were hilarious in their full spirited participation in a TW3's cerebral nonsense. It inspired me to organize at the 1968 Modern Language Association convention in New York a TWS Satire seminar.

I invited 9 (for the Muses) specialists in satire to watch the program in General Sarnoff's private room in the RCA Building (laughingly described by one network brass as the only color set really working in America). After the broadcast, the performers and staff came up and partied with us, the seminar aspect quickly blurring out in an alcoholic haze. Even my adolescent infatuation with the cast's jazz singer, Nancy Ames, got nowhere! The only memorable event was a classic tiff between (not yet then)Sir David Frost and Philip Gove, the editor in chief of the Merriam Webster Third Edition. David was sniffy about including naughty words and Gove was imperial in his explanation of the standards of lexicography. When I later had lunch with Sir David at his London club, he bravely allowed as how he had lost that one to Gove! On any credible IQ index the Camden Town lark would rate 9 on a scale of 10, with our egghead MLA assembly scoring a paltry four.

Now I completely agree with Neil that George Orwell's warning of totalitarian punishment was not as perspicacious as Aldous Huxley's fear modern man would amuse himself to death. It is the decrepit state of our culture that makes TV as dangerous as it is. Let me close with another anecdote. As the fully certified "Gofer" at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania (1958-61), I was assigned to go to the FCC in Washington for a daylong "scholarly conference" on TV license renewal forms. Scholarly enough it mainly was: Bernard Berelson of Columbia, Gary Becker of Chicago, and Ithiel de sola Pool of M.I.T. and me, a new Ph.D. in American Studies, but with some experience with local and network TV.

We spent the increasingly boring day going over the forms bit by bit. It slowly dawned on me that these Social Science Biggies hadn't the vaguest idea that most stations regarded these forms as very very pro forma. Promise them the moon, and forget all those promises until the next renewal time.

My "intellectual" superiors were miffed when I explained this simple verity to them towards the end of the day. My mentor at WFIL-TV, Tom Jones, who was letting me do TV pieces for the evening TV news, had explained the politics of broadcasting to me as I prepped as a cultural reporter for his station. The nadir of this Unseminar (after which I have had an abiding skepticism about the social sciences) was the appearance of the chairman of the FCC, Newton (TV's Vast Wasteland) Minow to congratulate these "scholars" for their important work for the American TV audience. Ugh.

But all is not lost when you look at TV as a global medium. When Neil (too sadly, too early) died a few years back, I was astonished, not to say completely, pleased at how both public TV networks ran long obits on Neil on the evening news, as if he were an important diplomat, which according to their public service values he was. But not alas by our tacky ratings-ruined television. It is not in our TV stars, that we are underlings. We get the kind of TV we put up with.