The stupefaction of America.

Dan Rather has popped a cork. So has Janet Reno. So have Newsweek and ABC News. The source of their ire? The degenerative effects of TV entertainment, with its emphasis on violence, flash and trash, crudeness and stupidity. Beavis and Butt-head - cartoon characters! - have become headline news, epitomizing TV's celebration of bad taste, anti-intellectualism, and gratuitous violence. ABC News ran a week-long series on how TV violence causes real violence, and Newsweek gave its cover to TV's role in the stupefaction of America.

Now I'm as fed up as Janet Reno with the splattering of intestines that's meant to pass for entertainment in America. And I'm as disgusted as Newsweek by the nightly appearance of two monosyllabic pinheads primarily concerned with blowing up animals and passing gas. But we are witnessing, as we always do when this kind of media-bashing occurs, an age-old exercise of marking off what's deviant as a way to legitimate what's okay. Through this kind of media cartography, Beavis and Butt-head is out in the wilds, beyond the pale. It thus stands in an almost diametrically opposed relation to what allegedly occupies the high ground - political talk shows, where men in suits and ties solemnly discuss world events.

But if you watch these talk shows with a jaundiced eye, and keep Beavis and Butt-head in mind, you can see how the pundits play a less obvious, but equally pernicious, role in the stupefaction of America. These shows, too, seem predicated on the notion that the viewer's mental capacities are no greater than a twelve-year-old's, and that his or her political calculations cannot transcend the good guy/bad guy motif of Popeye and Bluto.

Let's consider the discussions about Somalia. This Week with David Brinkley devoted a show to this topic. The first thing to hit you like a two-by-four was the entire lack of black faces. Not one African politician, not one Africanist scholar or expert.

Instead, we heard from Admiral Jonathan Howe, U.N. envoy to Somalia who, according to Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, hides in his office praying and pees in a jar rather than venture outside to use the john, let alone ascertain what's really going on in Somalia. The others meant to educate us about the Horn of Africa were white men in Washington: Bill Bradley, Les Aspin, and George Will, who told us absolutely nothing about Somali politics. But they debated the merits of "staying in" or "pulling out," which, in only slightly altered terms, could easily have been heard on MTV or Geraldo.

Then the either/or frame moved from coitus interruptus to a gangster movie, with General Aidid in the role of Al Capone, a thug who wants only violence and anarchy. Here George Will articulated the important question: Will the United States be so naive, weak, and stupid as to negotiate with this scumbag? Apparently, none of these people had talked to Jimmy Carter - which Sidney Blumenthal of The New Yorker did - to learn of Aidid's efforts to enter into binding negotiations with the United States.

Discussions about NAFTA are equally impoverished. Nowhere on any of the talk shows has there been a spirited debate about the merits or perils of this treaty. (Staging such a debate would, of course, mean giving air time to union members and environmentalists, two types deemed extremist and irrelevant by the mainstream news media.)

Instead, the merits of NAFTA are assumed to be transparently obvious, and the discussion moves to content-free predictions about whether it will or will not pass. Those who stand to lose from NAFTA - workers who want to earn more than eighty-seven cents an hour and people who think having unpolluted air and water is a worthy goal - are ignored. There is only one person who can win or lose here: Bill Clinton. John McLaughlin described NAFTA as "a hafta" for Clinton, repeating a little rhyme coined by William Safire in The New York Times.

If you want to talk about insults to intelligence, check out that Safire piece. In it, he maintains that NAFTA will be good for business, "and what is good for all business is good for all workers." Right. Remember twelve-hour days, child labor, and the hiring of scabs? Or the relocation of factories, with little or no warning, to underdeveloped countries with dirt-cheap labor? All just fabulous for workers.

Safire likened those who oppose NAFTA to "skinheads." And he asserted that NAFTA would give Mexico a "bright capitalist future" and "higher wages." This is exactly the conclusion reached by a female worker interviewed on PBS. She worked for GE and was four months pregnant. When she began to feel ill and started bleeding, her supervisors refused to let her go home or to offer her medical attention. Her bright capitalist future begins with her losing her baby. But you'd never hear about this on The McLaughlin Group, which is sponsored by GE.

On The McLaughlin Group, GE brings good things to life.

For really dumb commentary, one rarely need look farther than Fred Barnes. In castigating the verdicts in the Reginald Denny case, Barnes insisted that "if this had been white guys dragging out blacks, they would have thrown the book at them." Gee, that's right, Fred, just like with the Simi Valley verdicts in the Rodney King case.

But here's my favorite: Barnes cast the TCI-Bell Atlantic merger - the largest corporate merger in U.S. history - as "a force fighting monopolies." McLaughlin fretted that the interactive television TCI-Bell hopes to bring America will grant too much "media empowerment" to the population. After hearing this, you not only feel that your intelligence has been insulted, but also that you've walked through an especially warped looking glass.

So I agree with Reno and Rather and Newsweek. TV is playing a major role in making this a dumber, more violent country, and there's plenty of evidence to back them up. I just don't think they go far enough.

As far as I'm concerned, except for their brain-dead "huh-huh-huh" laugh and their obsession with fires and farting, Beavis and Butt-head aren't much worse than many of the TV pundits - in degrading public discourse, trivializing the value of thinking, and skewing us toward a more conservative, paranoid, and mindless view of ourselves and our place in the world.