The question is what this huge round-the-clock intake of the “war on terrorism” is doing to America. How will we manage the steady stream of secret anthrax shipments and night raids on Afghanistan? Will it make the country more mature–or scare us into a more or less permanent crouch? George W. Bush said in his post-Sept. 11 address to Congress that a nation discovers itself “in adversity.” Many of those discoveries are made in front of a TV set. I’ve heard some people say that it’s a good thing 24-hour coverage wasn’t around in the old days, but TV has always been the baby boomers’ best political educator, the force that brought us together and shaped our views of war and peace. And I think that’s happening again now, with younger kids not only using the Internet for news but depending on the same thing their folks relied on to learn about the world: TV. In the short run, obsessive coverage may frighten some people. But in the long term, the more people invest their time and their emotions in the story, the more they are going to be invested in the solution. If we do our job right, a whole new generation will find itself engaged in a public sphere that’s too often seemed more soap-operatic than substantive in recent years.
Watching politics on television is certainly the most intense, and most mesmeric, experience I’ve ever had. When I was 9, I came home from St. Christopher’s School to find an unusual sight: the TV was on. It took me decades to calculate what the attraction had been and what it said of my Irish Catholic mom’s social attitudes. She was watching the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 gavel to gavel. I can assure you that the woman born Mary Teresa Shields was not rooting for the Army.
In 1960 I watched both the Democratic and the Republican conventions around the clock, switching loyalties at least twice. As a freshman at Holy Cross College three years later, I raced to a campus TV to see Walter Cronkite take off his tear-fogged glasses to say that JFK was dead.
In 1968 my grad-school roommates and I never left the TV for a week during the Democratic convention in Chicago. We cheered Abraham Ribicoff when he stood at the podium and condemned “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” and jeered Boss Daley when he ran his finger across his neck to demand that Ribicoff’s mike be cut off. I’m sure those days of watching the convention, leaving the apartment only for food, moved me farther to the political left than I’d ever been before or would be again. And I remember Cronkite’s signing off one night of the ‘68 convention telling us to “get some sleep” and that he’d see us 10:30 the next morning.
Today the cable networks are doing to every story what the antenna networks did for big stories then. So, pre-Sept. 11, my children’s experience was not much different from mine. My oldest son, Michael, now a college freshman, says he recalls the Iran-contra hearings of 1987. Though he was not yet 5, he recalls sympathizing with Col. Oliver North. “He was taking the blame for what the president told him to do.” He thought that North was “brave to go to the TV hearings” in the first place.
He also rooted for the person he saw as the underdog in the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Although just 9, he thought Anita Hill was being unfairly treated, especially when a senator accused her of getting her testimony from William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist.” The hearings, Michael recalls now, “had all the workings of a circus.” My son Thomas, a high-school sophomore, was 9 when he watched the O. J. Simpson hearings but remembers technical points with uncanny detail.
But my boys have been exposed to an irreverence for politics unknown to me: the world according to Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Watching the cast satirize Dan Quayle and the Thomas hearings, the late Phil Hartman do the smooth Bill Clinton, even Darrell Hammond’s imitation of “Hardball,” I’m not surprised they have less respect for the political establishment. Like me, they root for the good guys and jeer the bad guys, but they have far less faith in the contest.
So the war spirit, which still seems so fresh, may be hard to sustain and sell to kids in the long twilight struggle ahead. The World War II generation faced the same problem in engaging us boomers, however, and they did fine. We all have to tell our kids they’re growing up in the safest country in the world, but there are risks. Fear can actually be a leavening thing; we’re huddling together more today than we were over Labor Day. And if some of that huddling is around a TV, engaging the world, so be it. After all, we’re watching the story of our times.
