RORSCHACH TV BAGHDAD BUILDING A BLANK SLATE.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I am watching a building. You know the one. You've watched it too.

It sits somewhere in downtown Baghdad. It's a concrete modern building, two stories tall, with a high, wide public entrance at street level and a larger second story standing on isolated supports.

There's a mosque across the street to the left, and a curious rotund structure on the roof that looks a little like a large beehive.

The international press pool planted a video camera across the street from this building - perhaps in hopes it would be blown up - and you and I have been watching the images from that camera, night after night, day after day.

Every time air raid sirens sound over the Iraqi capital, the whole world watches this rather mundane, still undamaged building.

Why do we do that?

When my hometown of Lafayette, Ind., got cable TV back in the early 1960s, it came with a public access channel. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before and nobody knew what to do with it so the local bank plugged in its lobby surveillance camera - about the only video camera in town at the time.

Showing my first symptoms of couch potato-dom, I found bank-line TV strangely compelling. I was far from alone. It wasn't a building in Baghdad, but it was a minor hit.

From 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. - banker's hours, remember? - people passed up their soap operas and ignored their children to watch their neighbors stand in line, and shuffle and stand, and shuffle and stand some more.

Bank-line TV lacked plot, protagonist and point, so audience members supplied their own. The images fueled their imaginations.

``Did you see Emma in line today? She must have gotten a check from Bob. I guess he got that job in Texas.''

``Really? I thought she was cashing a check for his ticket home.''

Some people came into the bank just to appear on camera, some stayed away out of shyness and the bank eventually settled the confusion by pulling the plug.

A TV executive recently commented, unknowingly, on the strange popularity of this original ``Reality TV'' when he observed that audiences turn off a mediocre sitcom after 20 to 30 seconds but even lousy reality TV rivets their attention.

Maybe that's because of the mechanics of television. A video image is painted right in front of our eyes - a new 525 lines of dots - every 57th of a second.

The screen is energy always in motion and perhaps that constant flicker excites some long-dormant Paleozoic hunter's pathway in our medulla oblongata.

Perhaps addicted couch potatoes are just the victims of an evolutionary behavioral appendix, attempting to deal with a modern device that unwittingly mimics some long-dead prey.

Or maybe we're just easily entertained.

Look, a bus just drove past the building in Baghdad.

The book ``The Boys On the Bus'' told the story of the 1972 presidential campaign, and the author tried to explain the triumph of television images over print news that year by relating the story of an Associated Press reporter who in 1963 observed other reporters mesmerized by a small black-and-white television showing the images of President Kennedy's coffin and his blood-stained widow descending from the rear door of Air Force One, an event taking place in reality no more than six feet behind them. They never looked up. They preferred the TV image over reality.

So what if we become a global village, all watching the same building in Baghdad, all waiting for something to happen? What's wrong with that?

Well, as a philosopher once noted, ``Only the hand that erases can truly write,'' and the problem is television never erases. It simply writes right over what it wrote wrong before.

Rewriting implies consideration and correction but television never corrects. It merely reports ``new'' facts, leaving the old facts still out there, floating in the airways, hovering like a disinformation bomb over our heads.

We found an Iraqi chemical weapons plant. Then we didn't. We captured Umm Qasr. Then we didn't. We secured the southern Iraqi oil fields. Then we didn't.

A victorious military campaign equals a confused mess because that's the way television reports it, accurate and inaccurate information presented from the same view. The viewer is the context.

I think the building in Baghdad is a government office. My wife thinks it looks like a bank.

Tune in tomorrow and see what you think.