I’m reading the most recent account of postmodernism in a venerable left magazine and listening, at the same time, to the Senate roll call vote on Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, it’s a little like attempting to hold gtwo opposing world views in the mind at once, for at no point does the postmodernist’s gleefully ironic vision of contemporary life intersect with the grim circus I’ve been witnessing all weekend on TV. for example, an on-air political analyst explains how, for many viewers, determining credibility in the Hill/Thomas episode hinged on perception. Anita Hill, it seems, looked too icily compoased to be true, while Clarence Thomas played it "hot" and was, therefore, believable. Meanwhile, the postmodernist enthuses over the "Twin Peaks" phenomenon as ineluctable proof of middle America’s hipness.

Widespread assent to the appearance of things–despite the logic of evidence, context, fact–has, unfortunately, become a cliche of public life in the age of TV. And while our inability to sift the reality from images may well be a postmodern phenomenon, it’s time to acknolwdge that the kind of postmodern theory that equates TV with cultural liberation is woefully inadequate to the task of addressing the politics of spectacle in the 1990s.

Thus, my sense of dislocation on reading this latest postmodernists’s narrative. The writer repeats a canard I’ve heard dozens of times from a surprising number of media scholars, one whoese foolishness never fails to astonish me: the contention that most people regularly resist or "subvert" what they see on television. Proponents of this idea on the academic Left (post-Lerft? New new-Left?) have been able to maintain this position only by avoiding the darker parts of our recent televisual past (like, say, Ronald Reagan) and by concentrating on the discourses of soap operas and "Star Trek" reruns, where subversive subtexts beg to be sussed out by a nation of proto-revolutionary viewers. Sounds like fun (sort of), but as a realistic assessment of the relationship between media and social power, it is wholly unconvincing. If so many people regularly challenge the authority of the "dominant" television text, why has it remained so much the same? Besides, pronounce all you want on the death of the Great White Male Western narrative, but our current administration–which has profited immeasurabley from turning that narrative into spectacle–hasn’t heard the news.

Operation Desert Storm alone should have dispelled any doubtxs that such naive theories of resistance have neither the bite nor the complexity to take on the realities of present-day media politics. The Gulf conflict, as the pundits reminded us a hundred times, was the first real television war. but the monumental communications apparatus that we were promised would finally reveal everything was instead used to ensure that we saw nothing–nothing, of course, that we weren’t intended to see. In his essay "On Being Sound-Bitten: Reflections on Truth, Impression, and Belief in a Time of Media Saturation," Todd Gitlin recounts how the selective use of images ina network interview effectively cancelled out his stance agaisnt the war. Throughout the conflict, the cuumulative force of such distortions took on a single, unifying intent, as the Pentagon and the White House–together with a shockingly compliant media–stage-managed what appeared to be the most uncontested nd bloodless war in history. And, for the most part, the public believed what it saw–did not, in face, wish to see anything else.

Of course, everybody knows that war is neither bloodless nor unequivocal. But given a spectacle more antiseptic than any Hollywood war sage (dissenting voices silenced; foul-ups, casualties, and atrocities carefully eited out), most viewers forfeited that knowledge–in part, as Gitlin notes, because we believe that images don’t lie.

Now more than ever, it should be the task of media pundits to figure out exactly how and why television made a difference in this war. That task has already been taken up by a number of journalists and scholars; for some, it began long before the war started. Others, however, cling tenaciously to arguments that seem to have been invented solely to protect a theory that simply doesn’t fit here. Last March an editorial appeared in The New York Times by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, two of academia’s more visible proponents of cultural studies, a discipline that relies heavily on the idea of viewer resistance. Despire the title, "Couch Potatoes Aren’t Dupes" isn’t motivated by a desire to give viewers credit for being smarter than TV. Rather, Ross and Penley contend that viewers are indeed stupid, but that war–not TV–makes them so. Televison is a "scapegoat," wrongfully blamed for the perverse pleasure of aggression and xenophobia that war naturally fosters. As if borrowing the logic of a notorious ad campaign for the National Rifle Association, the authors seal their argument with the assertion that "no one yet has been killed on TV."

This argument naively assumes that how we know war today can somehow be bracketed off from television–as if most people’s experience of Desert Storm could have been anything but primarily televisual, and as if that fact had nothing to do with our perception of the war. Coming from two people who’ve done a substantial amount of work in TV and film, these are pretty startling conclusions. They’re also radically ahistorical, assuming as they do that some sort of instinctive aggression plays a greater role in war’s outcome than specific historical circumstances. This is not to argue that the idea of war doesn’t foster all kinds of fears and emotions and bad attitudes, or that those attitudes don’t make people more receptive to propaganda. But to deny that TV alters the meaning and force of propaganda is a bit like arguing that there’s no difference between the effects of a hundred listeners attending to speeces at a pro-war rally and a million viewers (from all parts of the globe) witnessing smart bombs cleanly taking out their targets.

The reasoning here would be merely silly if its underlying assumption weren’t so scary. Ross and Penley contend that war in and of itself "encourages us to minimize the independent thought and action central to a democracy." But if a massive communications network harnessed for the purposes of propaganda had little influence on this process during th eGulf War, then the media committed to the public’s right to know whould have ridden roughsod over all appeals to reason. In other words, not only is there no reason for a public to be educated about the media ("people are stupid"), but the media can play no role iin educating the public.

Finally, "Couch Potatoes" is about understanding neither war nor the media; nor is it motivated by any passionate conviction abou tthe indomitable wisdom of the viewing public. It’s just an apologia for television, and for a theory that isn’t really about "resistance" at all, but about something that looks uncannily like its opposite. Meanwhile, such reasoning promotes the same thinking that people use to exempt themselves from examining their own credulousness; the same thinking that allows media workers to exonerate themselves for irresponsible reportage.

So it is with much current academic writing about television. Although books and articles on media currently flood the market, few offer a practical politics ofr any world that resembles the one in which we live–where, despite the omnipresence of Baudrillardian simulacra, real people suffer the hurts and confusion of real events and can indeed be fooled by the way those events are presented. This is not, as some have suggested, a view perpetrated on the common folk by elitist intellectuals who think they "know better." Today you’d have to be either a fool or a liar–or maybe Alan Bloom–to claim to know better all the time. As Todd Gitlin notes, even those of his friends who were experts in the business of reading images were taken in by a fairly commonplace bit of dissembling on the nightly news.

Contrary to grumblings about cultural pessimism, experiences like Gitlin’s are not recounted in order that we might all despair. They are told, rather, in the hope that some awareness might make it a little more difficult to be taken in the next time; that examining our own credulity will force us to ask the question of who benefits.

Sven Birkerts contends in his essay, "Into the Electronic Millennium," that the act of reading–even language itself–may be headed toward extinction as it gives way to an entirely mediated culture. While I share his sense that profound–and sometimes profoundly troubling–changes are underway, I’m not ready to declare the death of reading or of readerships. The printed word still has the power to influence, even if that influence has been diulted and altered by electronic communications. No doubt in the months to come, dozens of articles and books will be written about the media’s role in the Gulf War, the Thomas hearing, our upcoming presidential campaign. Most will probably miss their targets, be forgotten or ignored. A few may change some minds, make people think. And perhaps a very few will speak forcefully enough to generate public controversy. Their authors may appear on "Nightline," where their ideas will be abbreviated, and bereft of all complexity, but where they will at least reach an audience of millions. Such are the trade-offs of life in an electronic age. This may not be the stuff that revolutions are made of, but it’s preferable to mere theorizing.