Summer VI. Peace and war + the internet & “good” at TV

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer IV-V. Sabbath

Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever heard beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the inmates? Most men’s experience would seem to justify them in declaring that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists. I, knowing at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has quitted the world) could I have named a single example.

It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even under the most favorable conditions, without some shadow of mutual offense. Consider the differences of task and of habit, the conflict of prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is probably the same thing), which quickly reveal themselves between any two persons brought into more than casual contact, and think how much self-subdual is implicit whenever, for more than an hour or two, they co-exist in seeming harmony. Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows...

... Quit the home and quarreling is less obvious, but it goes on all about one. What proportion of the letters delivered any morning would be found to be written in displeasure, in petulance, in wrath? The postbag shrieks insults or bursts with suppressed malice [and he didn’t know the Internet]. Is it not wonderful -- nay, is it not the marvel of marvels -- that human life has reached such a high point of public and private organization?

And gentle idealists utter their indignant wonder at the continuance of war! Why, it passes the wit of man to explain how it is that nations are ever at peace! ... As a matter of fact, no two nation are ever friendly, in the sense of truly liking each other; with the reciprocal criticism of countries there always mingles a sentiment of animosity. The original meaning of hostis is merely stranger, and a stranger who is likewise a foreigner will only by curious exception fail to stir antipathy in the average human being... A hundred years hence there will be some possibility of perceiving whether international relations are likely to obey the law which has acted with such beneficence in the life of each civilized people; whether this country and that will be content to ease their tempers with bloodless squabbling, subduing the more violent promptings for  the common good. Yet I suspect that a century is a very short time to allow for even justifiable surmise of such an outcome. If by any chance newspapers cease to exist...

Talk of war, and one gets involved in such utopian musings!

Alpha.

That poor naïve man, he thought newspapers were the problem. He was so fortunate as to not live into the age of the Internet and experience the true -- trolling -- nature of mankind.  The seemingly natural quarrelsomeness of nations is nothing compared to the vileness of people online. He wrote during the heyday of Yellow Journalism but far worse was to come.  

Beta.

I learned the term “good at TV” from the Snark Squad. Sometimes there’s a “meta” spin to being good at TV: for example you often see a small group of people you’ve never seen before on your screen but only one of them speaks. You forget that in real life everyone tends to say something, but Lorraine (my favorite Traumateer of the Snark Squad) will point out that the person with the SAG card (the person in the Screen Actor’s Guild) says whatever needs to be said in the scene. But mostly, being “good at TV” means being aware of the tropes, the conventions or poetic devices TV people use to tell us the stories they want to tell and we want to see. Often communications -- even in the age of cell phones -- breaks down at the crucial moment. Often the “good guys” have instant access to information or physical spaces they wouldn’t actually have (and that you wouldn’t want them to have).

My excuse for including this topic here is that Ryecroft could, by moving as he did to the edge of Devon, largely exit the cultural space of his time. Today, the cultural space is everywhere. You can avoid some or most of the frequencies of TV, as you might filter out bands of electromagnetic radiation, but some of it is bound to leak though. I imagine Ryecroft would find this appalling and I would both sympathize and laugh at him.

My favorite example of people who are bad at TV are Gleeks -- fans of the TV show Glee. The premise of Glee is brilliantly simple: Take a mix of either quirky or attractive “high school students” (the actors were actually twenty-somethings even at the beginning) and have them perform songs that are either currently popular or that have been popular in the past. Then add choreography and an emotional context to the songs. Since a very large percentage of popular songs are about falling in love or breaking up, to make these performances resonate the characters on the show have to do a lot of falling in love and breaking up. This is what makes the show work. And yet if you read the comments on YouTube, commenters -- who I assume are mostly young people, raised on TV -- whine about why X had to break up with Y. Snark Queen Lorraine would have seen this coming from day one. The actress who excels at emoting disappointment, heartbreak, and any and all dramatic emotion, is frequently thwarted or disappointed. The actress with amazing legs appears in skirts that keep shrinking. This is simply good TV.

Most of my favorite TV shows have not gone past the initial run of 13 episodes. Of the few that did survive, few made it past two seasons. Of the few that made it past two seasons, most died out at season seven or eight -- but should have ended a year earlier. And then there’s NCIS. 

I’m currently watching the ninth season of NCIS -- “the most watched scripted show on American television” -- on DVD and it remains excellent. In part this is because it adheres to my “adhoc family” theory of TV, where the characters, and vicariously the viewers, identify with a self-chosen family. And they are a self-chosen family involved in work that has meaning -- another common characteristic of popular TV shows. 

This continued success is because NCIS has avoided all the third rails of TV like marriage and babies. Years ago they lost one beloved character only to pick up a character that people loved even more. Now, in season eleven, she is gone and I don’t know if they will survive that but I think they probably will. The show’s creators are most certainly good at TV.

Next: Summer VII. International politics + war, revisited.