Cue the green God, Ted.

There has not been a political debate in the United States since the one that ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. From September 1939 to December 7, 1941, the ruling class of the United States was split between those who would join the Allies in their war against Hitler and those who would stay out. For three years there was fierce argument in Congress, the press, the schools. At my school, Exeter, there was a sharp division between the isolationists, known as America Firsters, and the interventionists. True to the populist tradition in which I was brought up, I was isolationist. Then, or as Lincoln once so bleakly put it, and the war came; and I enlisted in the Army, age 17.

Since the victory of 1945, the United States, as befits the leader of something called "the free world," has fought open and unsuccessful wars in Korea and Vietnam; and relatively covert wars in Cambodia, Laos, the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, Chile, the Middle East, etc. In almost every case, our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people. We justify our affection for fascist (or, to be cozy, authoritarian) regimes because each and every one of them is a misty-eyed convert to our national religion, which is anticommunism. Then, once our dictator is in place, we echo Andy Hardy: Hey, kids, let's put on an election! And so, in the presence of cold-eyed avatars of

Tammany and Daley, our general does.

To their credit, our rulers don't o bore us with tortured rationalizations or theological nit-picking. They don't have to. Since we have no political parties and no opposition media, there is always a semblance of "consensus" for these wars. Congress funds the Pentagon, which then responds to the national security state's directives to overthrow an Arbenz here or a Sihanouk there or - why not? - devastate a neutral country like Laos to show how tall we can stand in all our marvelously incredible credibility. Voices of dissent are either blacked out or marginalized, while known apostates of the national religion are either demonized or trivialized. Meanwhile, no one has noticed that the national security state, in its zeal to bring the national religion to all nations, has now deprived us of our original holy text - our Old Testament -the Constitution.

Every war that we have fought since 1945 has been by executive (or National Security Council) order. Since only Congress may declare war, these wars have all been in violation of the Constitution. To the House of Representatives was assigned, uniquely, the power of the purse. But, in thrall to those religious wars that we forever fight, our debts are now so great that Congress dares not prepare a proper budget. So the power of the purse has been replaced by a ridiculous formula, involving a blind arbitrary cutting of the budget should Federal waste exceed a certain arbitrary figure. Although the most militant of OUT national religionists enjoy calling themselves conservatives, they have not managed to conserve either the letter or the spirit of the Old Testament.

For some time knowledgeable foreigners have found it difficult to talk about much of anything to Americans because we appear to know so little about much of anything. History of any kind is a closed book to us. Geography is no longer taught in most public schools. Foreign languages make everyone's head ache -anyway, they all know English. As for politics, that's simple: It's either us (what the silver-tongued felon Spiro Agnew, or his wordsmith William Safire, so memorabldubbed "the greatest nation in the country") or them -foreigners who envy us our vast choice of detergents, our freedom to repeat as loudly as we want the national prayers, our alabaster cities to which, we tell ourselves, they can't wait to emigrate. On the other hand, the average American, when it comes to his own welfare, is very shrewd indeed. He knows that we are in an economic decline and that our quality of life, though better than that of Russia (all that really matters, our priests hum softly) is noticeably lousy. But the reasons for our decline are never made clear because the corporate ownership of the country has absolute control of the populist pulpit -"the media" -as well as of the schoolroom.

David Hume's celebrated 1758 Of the First Principles of Government has never been more to the point than now:

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity- much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is no time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions intended, like the avowed commercials, to keep docile huddled masses, keep avid for products addled consumers.

I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed government officials who could not dispose of a brand-new car in Spokane, think-tank employees, etiolated from too long residence 'neath flat rocks, and always, always, Henry Kissinger, whose destruction of so many Asians and their once- charming real estate won him a prize for peace from the ironists of outer Europe. The level of the chat on those programs is about as low as it ispossible to get without actually serving the viewers gin. The opinion expressed ranges from conservative to reactionary to joyous neofascist. There is even, in William Safire, an uncloseted anti-Gentile.

I was once placed between two waxworks on a program where one of the pair was solemnly identified as a "liberal"; appropriately, he seemed to have been dead for some time, while the conservative had all the vivacity of someone on speed. For half an hour it is the custom of this duo to "crossfire" cliches of the sort that would have got them laughed out of the Golden Branch Debating Society at Exeter. On air, I identified the conservative as a liberal and vice versa. The conservative fell into the trap. "No, no!" he hyperventilated. "I'm the conservative!" (What on earth they think these two words mean no one will ever know.) It was the liberal who got the point; from beyond, as it were, the tomb he moaned, "He's putting us on."

I have been involved in television since the early 1950s, when it ceased to be a novelty and became the principal agent for the simultaneous marketing of consumer goods and of national security state opinion. Although I thought I knew quite a bit about the ins and outs of the medium, I now know a lot more, thanks to Ben H. Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly ("second edition completely updated & expanded') and Manufacturing Consent, a study of "the political economy of the mass media," by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. These two studies demonstrate exactly how the few manipulate opinion. To begin with: The average American household keeps the set throbbing seven hours a day. This means the average American has watched 350,000 commercials by age 17. Since most opinion is now controlled by twenty-nine corporations -due to be at least one fewer if Time-Warner or Paramount-Time or, most chilling of all, Nation-Time comes to pass, one can then identify those twenty-nine C.E.O.s as a sort of politburo or college of cardinals, in strict charge of what the people should and should not know. They also select the Presidents and the Congresses or, to be precise, they determine what the politicians may talk about at election time -that famed agenda that never includes the interesting detail that, in peacetime, more than two-thirds of the Federal revenue goes to war [see "How to Take Back Our Country," The Nation, June 4, 1988]. Although AIDS can be discussed as a means of hitting out at unpopular minorities, the true epidemic can never be discussed: the fact that every fourth American now alive will die of cancer. This catastrophe is well kept from the public by the tobacco companies, the nuclear power companies (with their bungled waste disposal) and other industries that poison the earth so that corporate America may enjoy the freedom to make money without the slightest accountability to those they are killing.

The invention of the talk show on television was, at first, a most promising development. Admittedly, no one very radical would ever be allowed on, but a fair range of opinion could be heard, particularly as the Vietnam War began to go bad. On the original Today show, Hugh Downs and I would talk off and on for an hour as news, weather, commercials floated lazily by. But Hazel Bishop, an obscure lipstick company, changed all that. The firm began running commercials not linked to specific programs and it was soon determined that the thirty-second commercial duplicates exactly the attention span of the average viewer. Therefore, no in-depth interview can last for more than seven minutes; three minutes is considered optimum. Recently, I found myself confronting the amiable Pat Sajak. I was all set to do what I think of as my inventing-the-wheel-in-seven-minutes (why what's wrong is wrong and what to do) when my energy level crashed. I did say that if you wanted to know what the ownership of the country wants you to know, tune in to Nightline and listen to Ted Koppel and his guests. The effect of this bit of information must have been surreal. Since no voices other than those of the national consensus are heard, how could a viewer know that there are any other viewpoints? I was made aware of the iron rules in 1968, when William F. Buckley Jr. and I had our first live chat on ABC at the Republican Convention in Miami Beach. I was billed as the conservative; he as the pro-crypto -or was it the other way around? Anyway, were were hired to play the opinion game in order to divert the audience from the issues. Buckley Junior's idea of a truly deep in-depth political discussion is precisely that of corporate America's. First, the Democrat must say that the election of a Republican will lead to a depression. Then the Republican will joyously say, Ahhahhhhh, but the Democrats always lead us into war! After a few minutes of this, my attention span snapped. I said that there was no difference at all between the two parties because the same corporations paid for both, usually with taxpayers' money, tithed, as it were, from the faithful and then given to "defense," which in turn passes it on to those candidates who will defend the faith. With that bit of news for the national audience I revealed myself not only as an apostate to the national religion; I came dose to revealing what I really am: a dedicated anti-anticommunist, a category far more vile to the true believer than a mere Communist. Although my encounters with Buckley Junior got ABC its highest ratings, I was seen no more at election time. Last year, Peter Jennings proposed to ABC that, for old times' sake, it might be a good idea to have me on. "No," he was told "Hell just be outrageous."

In 1972 the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote the U.S. Chamber of Commerce proposing that they "buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses." One wonders, Stronger than what? But the advice was taken. Also, as corollary, keep off prime-time television those who do not support corporate America. During the 1960s and early 1970s I used, once a year, to do a "state of the union" analysis on David Susskind's non-network, non-prime-time television program. Many people watched. In the summer before the 1976 presidential election, Susskind wanted to produce a series of one-hour interviews with the twenty or so leading candidates of the two parties. For one hour I would question each candidate about politics, history, economics -whatever came up. Since I favored no candidate and neither party, I could not be said to be partisan. PBS agreed that this sort of program was precisely why PBS had been founded and funded. All the candidates, save President Ford, affected delight. As we prepared for the first program, the head of PBS affiliate WNET, Jay Iselin, canceled the series without explanation. Then the intrepid producer, Hillard Elkins, took over. He ha"a good relationship" with Home Box Office, which was "hungry for product." HBO manifested delight in having its hunger so cheaply sated. Then, just before the first taping, Andrew Heiskell, the overall capo of Time-LifeHBO, canceled us. In due course, I was advised that it was not in the national (that is, corporate) interest for so many expensive presidential candidates to be questioned by me in a -what was the phrase? -"nonstructured format." Now, of course, with the megacorporate ownership of the media becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, structure is total, indeed totalitarian, and the candidates can no longer be discerned through the heavy blizzard of thirty second spots.

Currently, the principal dispenser of the national religion is Ted Koppel, a very smooth bishop indeed. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting-noble, doomed enterprise-had a study made of just who appeared as Koppel's guests during a forty-month period from 1985 to 1988. White male establishment types predominated. Henry Kissinger (Koppel's guru and a longtime cardinal in the national security state's curia) and Alexander Haig (by his own admission, in one of many moments of confusion at the White House, "a vicar") each appeared fourteen times, the maximum for any guest. Yet the cardinal's views on almost any subject are already known to anyone who might be interested in looking at Nightline, while Haig's opinions have never interested anybody in the course of a long busy career climbing ladders so that he could be close to those with power in order -to be close to them. The next two champ guests, weighing in at twelve appearances each, were the mendacious Elliott Abrams (Koppel assumes that although Abrams will lie to Congress, he won't lie to Koppel) and Jerry Falwell, a certified voice of God whose dolorous appearance suggests a deep, almost personal grief that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution are not yet repealed. Most of the other guests are hired guns for the national security state.

The Koppel explanation for this bizarre repertory company is that, well, they are the folks who are running the country and so that's why they're on. Well, yes, Ted, that is why they're on, but there are other more interesting and more learned - even disinterested - voices in the land and, in theory, they should be heard, too. But theory is not practice in bravery's home. Of semidissenters, only Jesse Jackson and Studs Terkel have been honored with solo interviews with the bishop, who insists, by the way, that the guest face not him but a camera in another room, preferably in another city, with an earphone but no monitor. Good television one-upmanship.

To my amazement, just before Mikhail Gorbachev spoke at the United Nations, on December 7, 1988, I was asked to contribute a tiny prerecorded (and thus easily edited) cameo. I suppose that I was asked because I had attended Gorbachev's famous antinuclear forum in Moscow two years earlier. I spoke to a camera. I predicted, accurately, that Gorbachev would say that Russia was unilaterally disarming, and that we were now dangerously close to peace. To the question What will the United States do without The Enemy? - a pretty daring question from those whose livelihood depends on the demonizing of Russia and Communism - I said that, thanks to television, a new demon can be quickly installed. Currently, the Arabs are being thoroughly demonized by the Israel lobby while the Japanese are being, somewhat more nervously, demonized by elements of the corporate state. But neither will do as a long-term devil because the Arabs are too numerous (and have too much oil) while the Japanese will simply order us to stop it; should we disobey them, they will buy the networks and show us many hours of the soothing tea ceremony. I suggested that the new devil will be the threat to our ecosphere, and the new world god, Green. None of this was used, of course, but a man who writes Russians-Are-Coming thrillers was shown, frowning with intense anguish at, What, what! does it all mean? Because you godda be real careful with these guys. Fine show, Ted.

The unloved American empire is now drifting into history on a sea of red ink, as I predicted in these pages on January 11, 1986 ["Requiem for the American Empire'], to the fury of the few and the bewilderment of the many. Thanks to money wasted in support of the national religion, our quality of life is dire, and although our political instituti ons work smoothly for the few, the many hate them; hence the necessity of every corporate candidate for President to run against the government, which is, of course, the corporate state - good fun. In due course, something on the order of the ethnic rebellions in the Soviet Union or even of the people's uprising in China will take place here. Too few have ripped off too many for too long. Opinion can no longer disguise the contradiction at the heart of conservativecorporate opinion. The corporate few are free to do what they will to customers and environment while the many are losing their freedoms at a rapid rate. The Supreme Court, the holy office of the national religion, in upholding the principle of preventive detention, got rid of due process two years ago, and now the Court is busily working its way through the Bill of Rights, producing, as it goes, a series of bright, crackling autos-da-fe, among them not only the hectic flag but children and mental defectives.

Significantly, our prison population is now among e world's largest. Certainly, it is right up there, per capita, with the Soviet Union and the Republic of South Africa. Now the few are proposing that if the war budget is to be, tragically, reduced, the army camps- perfect symbolismcan be used to house our criminal population, particularly weak-fibered drug users. Thus do the few now declare open war on the many, as millions of citizens are now liable to mandatory blood, urine and lie- detector tests, while an electronic bracelet has been invented that will make it possible to track its wearer wherever he goes. Theoretically, half a nation can now monitor the movements of the other half. Better we enslave ourselves, the priests chant, than they do.

Lately, the language of government, always revealing, grows more and more fierce and commanding (due to so many wars lost? so much money wasted?), and military metaphors abound as czars lead all- out wars on drugs. Yet, at the risk of causing both offense and embarrassment among even the not-so-faithful, I feel obliged to say that I do not accept the authority of any state-much less one founded as was ours upon the free fullfillment of each citizen -to forbid me, or anyone, the use of drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, sex with a consenting partner or, if one is a woman, the right to an abortion. I take these rights to be absolute and should the few persist in their efforts to dominate the private lives of the many, I recommend force as a means of changing their minds.

Meanwhile, let us hope that opinion will respond to recent events. For instance, despite millions of dollars spent in the last presidential election on trying - successfully -to obscure every political issue while demonstrating-unsuccessfullythat there was a dramatic difference between Dukakis and Bush, 50 percent of the American electorate refused to vote. When a majority boycotts a political system, its days are numbered. The many are now ready for a change. The few are demoralized. Fortunately, the Messiah is at hand: the Green God. Everyone on earth now worships him. Soon there will be a worldwide Green movement, and the establishment of a worldwide state, which the few will take over, thus enslaving us all while forgetting to save the planet. That is the worst-case scenario. The best? Let the many create a new few.

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Title Annotation:	Ted Koppel; politics on television; our television politburo
Author:	Vidal, Gore
Publication:	The Nation
Date:	Aug 7, 1989
Words:	3576
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Topics:	Political psychology Portrayals Television and politics Analysis