Clicking your channels to kingdom numb.

Do the books and movies that a person

likes reveal anything about that

person's psyche? Of course they do. Then what about the collective? Do our bestseller lists and popular movies say anything about American society? Indubitably. Then how about our television programming? Is it in any way a mirror?

Let's hope not.

Last night I was too exhausted to read and too wired to sleep, so I flopped on the couch and flipped on the tube. After about five minutes of watching a lopsided NBA game, I decided to take a remote-control spin through the channels. Click, click, click, I pushed my way past bathetic sitcoms, a show on U.S. weaponry (which, strangely enough, runs rightly), a documentary on hyenas. Climbing into the higher-numbered channels, I clicked through a rap video, slowed by a roundtable on the economy, and finally hit the brakes at the so-called educational channel, where a rather fit, looking gentleman in his mid, to late sixties was being interviewed in a sparsely furnished white room. The hoary-headed man with ramrod posture would mutter a couple of sentences which were then translated from German into English, bow his head for a moment, and then bolt upright and spew a few more.

It was a special on Hitler's elite, the Waffen SS, exploring the role of the SS in the concentration camps. In between interviews with ex-prison guards and sundry supervisors, the producer beamed a series of images graphic enough to serve as shock therapy. You've seen it before: cords of corpses, haystacks of human hair, still shots of a grinning SS officer using his riding crop to separate those immediately doomed to the crematorium from those doomed to more slave labor and a later date with death. Then it was on to another guard, who offered a first-hand account of seeing a fetus of nine months ripped from its mother's womb and fed to the guard dogs in front of her. After that, well, it was time to go to the sponsors.

Commercial number one was from a well-known company specializing in baked goods. In this ad, the much animated dough-boy hawked a strudel in (can you believe?) a thick German accent. The coffee klatsch over, we took a spin through the desert in a Jeep. Then it was back to Auschwitz for a discussion of how difficult it was to hang young children because of their light weight.

There are television shows that insult the viewers' intelligence, but there are also programs that insult our character. What kind of numb soul does the station programmer take me to be that, in two revolutions of the second hand, I am supposed to be able to contemplate genocide and Jeeps with equanimity? But never mind the assumptions of television executives, there is a potentially instructive bit of irony here.

One of the most common responses to death-camp footage is: "Just imagine. These SS butchers would then go home for lunch and a romp with their kids!" That is, they would indulge in that mechanism of defense poetically de, scribed by psychoanalysts as "splitting", as in the splitting of the personality. On the one side, we have an efficient executioner, on the other, a dependable dad--with very little conversation between the two. Yet splitting up of the self is just what the mass death/strudel sequence demanded of its audience. For 12 minutes, we were supposed to be deeply concerned and (I suspect) horrified viewers of concentration camps--and then, presto, we're carefree shoppers wheeling along aisle six in search of coffee cake.

As much else in the world, it is odd--perhaps something worse than odd--that we don't find such juxta-positions disturbing. Take the film away, and it is like someone sitting on a swivel chair between an execution and an auction. Who would want to be able to do it? Have we become so numb that nothing will bring us around to proper feeling? Will nothing will revolt us? I realize that television has become the hearth, a symbol of home and continuity for Americans, and that one may as well protest against the human condition as suggest legislation restricting commercial programming, so I am not about to propose a new form of prohibition. However, even if the tube has become a nonnegotiable absolute, we can still watch the way we gawk and take careful note of the effects of staring for prolonged periods into the vibrant space of the picture box.

Not to flip the channel, but last year I taught a literature class in which we read Eli Wiesel's piercing concentration, camp chronicle Night. Recollecting his arrival in camp, Wiesel hurls this dark promise:

Never shall I forget that night ...

that first night in camp, which has

turned my life into one long night,

seven times cursed and seven

times sealed. Never shall I forget

that smoke. Never shall I forget

the little faces of the children,

whose bodies I saw turned into

wreaths of smoke beneath a silent

blue sky. Never shall I forget

those flames which consumed my

Faith forever. Never shall I forget

that nocturnal silence which deprived

me, for all eternity, of the

desire to live. Never shall I forget

those moments which murdered

my God and my soul and turned

my dreams to dust. Never shall I

forget these things, even if I am

condemned to live as long as God

Himself.

One very sensitive and as yet unbe-numbed

student in the class insisted that what drove Wiesel out of his soul was the fact that people could treat other people as the Nazis did. As this young man had it, the fact that we were not there to see our own mothers and sisters taken to the ovens should not make a difference. Wiesel's testimony ought to be enough to fix us on the rim of madness. Likewise, it would not, I think, be a completely inhuman response to sob for an hour or a week over some of the scenes that are daily zipped across our television screens. But we don't go mad. We watch, we sigh, we munch on snacks that the television has suggested to us and, when we've had our fill of skulls from Cambodia, we click along on our remote-control way. Again, I am not trying to topple any TV antennas; but on days when I have enough imagination and faith to fear for my spiritual health, it seems all too clear that, in searching for a few minutes of forgetfulness, I often subject myself to visual melanges that abrade all sense of anything's being sacred.

In his blistering critique of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that our sets have long been conditioning us to expect every parcel of information to come packaged as entertainment. Anyone who has tried teaching lately will heartily nod at this observation. In what may be a mild overstatement, Postman goes on to say that, for all their pretensions, we don't learn diddly from documentaries. Actually, I can think of a few facts that I have garnered from the umpteen hours I have spent in front of supposedly educational programming. Just the same, it is important to recognize that there are visual displays which only pretend to in, form, as though to ease our conscience about looking for diversions in other people's tragedies.

Not long ago, I caught one of these informative programs in which the viewer tags along in a squad car. On this particular evening, I was sitting in my recliner riding along with some amiable cops from Washington state. My partners were chatting away when we suddenly got a call about a crash at an inter, section. Sirens screaming, we rushed over to the scene of the accident and, the next thing I knew, the camera was zooming in on the twisted corpse of a woman in her mid-thirties. As if that weren't enough, the image collector followed along while some dull-witted sergeant obliquely informed her husband that life as he knew it was over. His wife was gone. Without any time to ponder whatever it was we were supposed to pretend to learn, it was then, quite naturally, off to our sponsors.

I have no idea what wisdom is to be taken away from this kind of footage. Certainly not that life is precious and fragile, because the diligent viewer can see a killing field on his or her screen every day. And yet, the documentary pretense was, I think, essential; with, out it, viewers (such as yours truly) would have been forced to look right into the eye of our voyeuristic impulses.

I am not suggesting that we snap off our news programs for fear of watching them for the wrong reasons. Every now and again, in its own fleeting and biased way, television will tip us off to a story that we might not have otherwise gotten. Just the same, we ought, I think, to acknowledge that there is a form of television viewing that is not at all unlike following a firetruck to watch an inferno. In this, the age of detailed discussions (frequently picked up by the networks) about strategies for enhancing our personal growth, we should consider keeping a little closer tabs on the images we ingest. More specifically, when we catch ourselves yawning as we watch smart bombs plow into apartment buildings, we may want to consider clicking on to something else, or perhaps even blanketing the Great Blue hue and going out for a walk.

Gordon Marino is a visiting scholar at the Virginia Center for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in the Atlantic, American Scholar, and Commonweal.