Philosophers are always saying things like Man is Man, and animals are not Men, chiefly because Man has the power to dream. Or they make the claim for our nobility because we have the ability to laugh, because we have the opposable thumb, or because we have curiosity. I went searching through a wonderful book called The Senses of Animals and Men by Lorus J. and Margery Milne, in an attempt to find out if my own personal we-have-it-and-animals-don’t was valid, but there wasn’t a word therein, so I’m going to assume I’m right until some naturalist in my readership smacks my pinkies and corrects me.
The reason Men are greater than Animals isn’t because we can dream of the stars (as I’ve said in sf stories from time to time, because it’s a nice thought to hold), it’s because we have something they haven’t. Greed.
I can think of few motivations as strong in the history of our species. Churchmen will no doubt remind me of love of God, and I’d go for it, I suppose, except I keep remembering the Crusades were senseless slaughters fought in the name of the Holy Grail, which in truth were fought merely for the kings of England. Have you any doubt, I recommend the series of novels and histories by Zoé Oldenbourg. And for sheer monstrousness I have never been able to reconcile all that Christian charity bullshit with Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, also fielded in the name of God. Mother love is a strong mover, and so is survival, and so is curiosity…but for really getting it on, nothing compares with down-home, earthy greed.
Bringing me perforce to the subject of today’s sermon, albeit through the musty pages of history.
Television is about to undergo a tremendous improvement. Yes, Virginia, the millennium is at hand, through greed, and not nobility.
It’s a simple enough conclusion at which to arrive, and I don’t take any special credit for having stumbled on it. What amazes me is that the three major networks—with all their trend paraphernalia and pulse takings—didn’t get hip to what was happening long ago. (Radio was on to it fifteen years ago.)
The core fact is this: people under the age of thirty-one simply don’t watch tv any more.
Oh, sure, under the age of thirteen kids still groove on The Archies and Land of the Giants, but kids that age have nowhere near the money to spend on gross national product, and the big buying these days is being done by affluent Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. (And speaking of the national product, it gets pretty gross indeed when discussing The Archies. But that is another column, another time.)
All of which sums up to mean that the largest segment of the purchasing public is ignoring the most widespread, most effective, most expensive advertising medium in the world. The alter knockers who used to be the big consumers of cars, clothes, condiments, and crap—now they hoard their pennies and wait for better times. So we see automobiles slanted toward the “youth market.” We must go—spiked and helmeted—onto streets amuck with Mustangs, Cobras, Barracudas, Cougars, Falcons, Darts, Chargers, Thunderbirds, Road Runners, Gila Monsters, Leviathans, Piranhas, and other symbolically named implements of sudden death and painful disfigurement…all of which are grotesquely over-powered for streets and freeways on which they will never legally be allowed to exercise maximum output.
We see advertisements in which all the actors are youthful, “beautiful” people, selling everything from Love Blush cosmetics to vaginal deodorant (and one can only sit back and smile in wonder at the implications of that one, fellow sex maniacs). Nowhere do we see those crinkled, spasmed senior citizens this country spent so many decades assuring us were the golden fruits of years of honest toil. Silva-Thins being lipped by a Dirty Old Man? Never! You can take Salems out of the country, shot at Sun City instead of Antibes? Hardly.
The trend has long been up. We are a youth-oriented, adolescence-crazed nation in which it will surely soon be a felony to be old and withered. Growing old gracefully simply ain’t good business.
So tv isn’t getting the audience with the money—only laundry detergents, seemingly, are holding their own—the unliberated household drudges still flash on the soapers and dutifully buy the sponsor’s sheet whiteners, also seemingly, so they can one-up their neighbor lady, who has been crapping cookies because her laundry is only dazzlingly white instead of supernova white. And not getting the money makes the sponsors unhappy, which makes them make the networks unhappy, which means pretty jackrabbit quick somebody’s going to have to start rethinking the situation.
For a moment: why aren’t the movers and shakers and buyers watching tv? Certainly it’s no worse than in years past—though admittedly that’s like saying your cancer hasn’t gotten any more terminal—and in terms of public affairs programming and technical quality, it is startlingly impressive. The answer, like the entire concept, is quite simple. TV is no longer relevant for them. They are out moving, shaking, and occasionally buying. But their moving and shaking is in terms of the whole culture, not the mythical little dream worlds proffered on network television. And when they buy, they go to the boutiques—not Sears or Monkey Ward. The alter kockers go there, and that means that almost 50 percent of the purchasing public is being bypassed by tv advertising.
So. When Nixon comes out in favor of the eighteen-year-old vote, it means even that cinderblockhead has gotten hip to the power of the young, and can the dunces of the major networks be far behind? And the only way they can grab you and me and the kids of all ages who reject the pap sloshed out across the tube, is to make it more relevant. Immediatize the medium, as the boys in the ad agencies would phrase it, clever lads that they are.
Which means, ergo, that very soon we’re going to see some tv fare that will speak to the times, some programming that conceives of young people as something more than receivers for endless pop music and acne commercials.
To bring 50 percent of the American people back to the glass teat means dispelling the mist images of what network programmers think we want to see; it means abandoning the refurbishing of old series ideas with new casts and miniskirts; it means getting into things and taking stands and to hell with Spiro.
(And so you won’t think I’ve forgotten him, here is the latest. I heard him referred to last week as The Great Kiwani. For those of you who’ve attended Kiwanis or Elks or American Legion rallies or parades, you know what loveliness that accolade contains.)
It won’t happen next season, or maybe even the season after that, because the big advertisers aren’t hurting that badly yet. But when 10 percent of their buying audience croaks in the next two or three years, they’ll begin to understand that young people today have had eighteen years of this drivel and simply ain’t going for the okey-doke. Then the tremors hit.
Then they start demanding the networks come up with a more immediate product for them to subsidize. Then, in the only way it can happen, through the motivation of naked greed, we take over the mass media. Then the ground swell trends from the Great American Heartland begin to go in the direction of peace symbols rather than crummy phony American flag decals. Then love-it-or-leave-it vanishes and change-it-or-lose-it becomes the modus operandi. Then all the good guys who want to get it together will have their chance to put this sinkhole back in functioning order, and guys like me who cry for blood can go back to our pipes and slippers, rocking back and forth on our back porches in the setting sun.
Sure we can.