What hath Phil wrought?

Phil Donahue, he says, is retiring. This will be his last season hosting the talk show he's stage-managed for coming-on thirty years. He's already appeared on "Larry King"--Larry being one of the very many mutations he's spawned--where, bathed in adulation, he got to be sensitive and sincere about his commitment to truth, justice, and the American Way, express his regret at hanging up the spurs, affirm his decision to move on, and perhaps do even greater good in the future.

Now Phil has always been great at sensitive and sincere. In fact-one-trick pony that he is--that's about all he ever has been good at. And that was enough to make him, his show, and his Weltanschauung one of the phenomenal events in the evolution of TV culture--and one of the most influential. Donahue is the afternoon talk show; and, conversely, the afternoon talk show--currently America's most thriving form of performance art--is Donahue. So, as the grand old man of the genre takes his final bow--and believe it, he's going to take a lot of final bows in the months to come, like a coloratura whose pipes are shot but whose fans are still rapid--it's worth talking about what he actually accomplished and what he leaves.

What he leaves behind, of course, is the plethora of talk shows that, now and for the imaginable future, infest the cable: Leeza, Oprah, Geraldo, Richard Bey, Tempest, Rolanda, George and Alana, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, Gordon Elliott, Montel--Gawd! Ever had ants--I mean ever really had ants--in your kitchen? You watch the little buggers troop along in insouciant phalanx toward the one crumb of fried chicken you dropped in your midnight snack, and their single-mindedness is so invincibly stupid, or stupidly invincible, that you just want to crawl back into bed and make believe they're not there.

William Bennett and several other of our self-appointed moral pit bills, to be sure, don't want to crawl back under the comforter. They've raised a hue and cry--a donahue and cry?--against the talk shows altogether as a worsening and demeaning of the national sensibility. And they're partly right. Check out any of the afternoon fare. The subjects of the shows are increasingly the stuff of small up one-liners: "My Boyfriend Slept with My Sister"; "My Mom Dresses Like a Slut"; "My Husband Has a Live-in Gay Lover"; and on and on, like the column of ants in the kitchen, tiny tragedies--though to the victims no tragedy is ever "tiny"--willing, even eager to spread their shabby, inexpressibly sad wares and woes to the host (who may or may not adopt the mask of sympathy), to the alternately jeering and applatiding studio audience and the vivisectionist eyes, of course, of the millions (with TV it's always at least millions) of viewers for whom the ghastly pageant is played out.

TV seems to have found a really new way for humans--guests, host, audience, and viewers all--to debase themselves. This is tantamount to inventing a new sin, and should be recognized with appropriate respect. And it's truly appalling (trust me, I've watched this stuff), like a car crash on the side of the road or the homeless six-months-unwashed guy on the other side of the street and you just try not to look. So to that extent, Bennett and his scattered ilk are correct in their condemnation, and Phil Donahue is the fountainhead of the plaque, patient zero.

But: Bennett & Co. get what's wrong about TV talk wrong. And Donahue, though he's the progenitor of the monster is also, like Frankenstein, its victim. His retirement was all but forced: his show has been dropped from the New York market, which is the TV equivalent of the splendid Yiddish proverb, "When five men tell you you're drunk--lie down."

Okay, he did more than his share of transvestite-lesbian-nazi-nuns-and-the-men-who-love-them shows. But he also did a lot of shows on issues of some moment, on feminism, racism, on political candidacies, and all of them conducted without the pub-brawl shouting that is nowadays the dreadful norm. Try to imagine Sally Jesse Raphael or--feh!--Richard Bey doing an hour with Jesse Jackson or Jerry Brown, or even trying to pass the time of day with George Will.

And that was Phil's problem. A good Notre Dame, ex-catholic boy converted to White Liberalism (a faith with only one dogma: if thou carest, thou art saved), and caring as all hell, he crafted a form of TV whose darker possibilities he either ignored or misunderstood, until the proliferation of those shadows drove him out of the ratings. He just couldn't get as down and dirty as he, himself, had made it possible to get.

Which is part of what Bennett gets so wrong about the talk-show phenomenon. It's not that the creeps--and creeps they generally are--who serve as guests debase the national soul by airing their tacky agonies. There've always been tacky agonies, and there have always been ways of airing them to the community, and the community has always been ravenous for them. Anybody who says he doesn't dig tawdry gossip is either a liar or a saint, and saints don't watch TV and liars just push up the ratings.

Donahue's great coup de theatre, the key to his success, and his dreadful legacy, is to have elevated gossip to the level of information, and thereby debased information to the level of gossip. Look: as that awful man and sublime writer John Cheever said, there are facts and there are truths, and they are not the same. Susan Smith watched her two kids drown so that she could be sexier for her boyfriend: that is a fact. And Newt Gingrich says that the Smith horror is an indication of the dangers of the liberal agenda: thaus a pseudo-truth (or he) based on a tabloid-mentality, gossipmongers confusion of fact and truth. And it's a confusion that wounded-deer liberal Phil and charging-bull conservative Newt share.

Before Donahue, talk shows (Dinah Shore, Joe Pine, Mery Griffin, Mike Douglass) had a different look. Host and guests sat around a table or on a sofa, onstage, while the audience looked on. Donahue broke the invisible fourth wall between spectators and spectacle. Prowling the bleachers with hand--held mike, firing questions at the guests--physicists, poets, or perverts--literally imprisoned in their chairs on the stage, he became not the host, but the ringleader: of the mob in the studio, and by implication of the mob watching in their dens. It was the democratization of TV talk--quite graphically, power to the people (with Phil as the ultimate vox populi); and its noxious side-effect was to make the audience, the crowd, the phone-ins, the polls, the final arbiter between fact and truth. And, for all the good intentions of the change, how could coarsening not follow?

Today, almost every talk show on the Tube follows the Donahue populist format. And we have a Speaker of the House who speaks like a talk-show host, and a president whose main talent seems to be acting like the perfect talk-show guest. And Donahue, in the waning months of his career, does more and more shows the old-fashioned way, seated onstage at a table with his guests. Is he just tired? Or does he, maybe, realize that the mindset he largely created is, in the last analysis, both a cause and a symptom of our present exile into silliness and triviality-masquerading-as-earnestness? Wer weiss?

Poor Frankenstein. He meant no harm; but did little good.