Inner Tube

By Paul Gray

FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mcmder Morrow; 371 pages; $11.95 hardcover, $4.95 paperback

Pipe arguments are the equivalent of pipe dreams. The farther they wander from probabilities, the more fun and fury they produce. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were experts at such arguments: Is too much energy being wasted transporting ham and bacon from farm to dinner table? How pleasurable to insist that pigs must fly. Author Jerry Mander's treatise offers precisely this kind of joyous irresponsibility. The world knows that the megabucks technology of television is not, repeat not, going to be eliminated. On his final page, Mander himself acknowledges that he has no idea how to get rid of the box. But until that terminus he offers the intriguing notion of a society without aerials, reruns or Howard Cosell.

Mander begins well. People who bother to read books at all are usually not proud of the hours they spend staring straight ahead; a book about destroying the tube can be a nice assuager of guilt. And Mander, a former advertising and public relations agent who grew disenchanted with his meal ticket in the late 1960s, exhorts with all the zeal of the convert and enthusiasm of the initiate. He rattles on like a college freshman who has just been alerted to the difference between illusion and reality. In fact, Mander argues that TV created this difference: "Unlike ordinary life, in which whatever you see actually exists outside you before you let it in through your eyes, a television image gains its existence only once you've put it together inside your head."

Throughout, the author displays a certainty about what is concrete in ''ordinary life" that would have baffled 2,000 years' worth of philosophers. All of his arguments hang on the Tinkertoy division between what is real and good (trees, marshes, noble savages) and what is deceitful (all artifacts of civilization, especially TV). From this it follows that television 1) obscures the true and the beautiful, 2) turns people into standard-issue consumers, 3) bombards them with artificial light and foreign images and 4) blots out all messages that are inimical to its own survival.

Much of this may be true. McLuhan covered some of the same terrain and saw it was good. Mander hollers that it is horrible. But he punches so wildly that he arouses sympathy for The Gong Show. No source is too doubtful or irrelevant to cite, provided it can somehow be mobilized into an attack on the target. "It is known," Mander states ominously, "that light affects the testicular growth of sparrows." The author writes with such urgency that simple distinctions get trampled: "As you may have noticed, a lot of people seem to be going crazy these days. People are shooting each other as never before, walking the streets with blank stares, lying in doorways, making jail a way of life, or living off welfare."

Such inattention to nuance does not in spire confidence. Neither does the author's refusal to notice opposing views. He claims that TV cannot accurately convey ecological issues or the plight of groups like the American Indians who are opposing invading technologies. "But if the battle were fought in books," he says, "Indians might win." In fact, when the battle was fought only in books, the Indians were getting clobbered. The causes Mander espouses became nationwide concerns during the same period that TV was cementing its grip on the country. Coincidence or cause? Mander does not evade an answer. He suppresses the question.

Still, television is the most watched and least perceived invention in history. Despite its weaknesses and unintended hilarities, this book is a reminder that looking at TV does not always mean settling down on the sofa with a beer. At the very least, Mander's prose comes in short digestible chunks, perfect for nibbling at during commercials. -- Paul Gray

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