Only a short
time ago a two line letter from Krista McAuliffe
was auctioned off and bought "as history"
by a collector for about $800. That was about six
weeks after the Challenger exploded during what
has been termed a "seriously flawed" decision
to launch.
To put that decision into some kind of perspective,
let us turn to a few of the probing questions asked
during the grilling of the NASA officials (who bore
the responsibility for the launch) by the
investigating committee. Had a decision-making
official reacted to the red light flashed by a scientist
by snapping, "When do you want me to launch,
next April?" Had the proximity in time to Reagan's
Inaugural speech (and a successful launch would
have been a plum) applied any pressure, however
subtle? Had the engineers of Morton Thiokol, who
had refused to OK the flight, simply been overridden
by the management team of their company,
and, if so, what were their scientific reasons
for going ahead or were they solely reasons of the
"bottom line"?
We may ask, in turn, however -- will anyone
be proven culpable, or will the technical jargon
so flood the argument that little will remain but
our frustration as we know that something
went very wrong here while no one, even now is being
held criminally or civilly responsible? What was
the basis for the "judgment call"? Can-do/macho
as opposed to "wimp"?
As we bury the questions and the story itself (and
the bodies) perhaps it is fitting that the trivialization
of this episode be completed with the establishment
of a traffic in the letters of Krista McAuliffe,
to accompany our sense that the words, the jargon,
the dead weight of the weightless, value-free
frothy words of the investigation are going to move
the argument from us as waves move kelp and leave
us beached, lonely, and somehow deprived on the
sand.
Let us remember the weight of what was involved.
Man dreamed of flying for millennia, even before
Daedalus fashioned waxy wings for his son, Icarus.
Leonardo himself worked on the drawings for a flying
machine 500 years ago. The effort and genius of
countless thousands, living and dead (and the expenditure
of hundreds of billions by this and previous generations)
brought us to the cold morning at Cape Canaveral
and the launch. Could this total human experience
have been trivialized by the mole vision of a few
puny minds with their interest engaged in momentary
gratification and momentary expediency?
Yet this was not the first of such trivializations
in the course of this effort. It was learned, after
the moon shot, that one of the astronauts had carried
some unauthorized (and therefore potentially unsterilized
and potentially dangerous) mail during the
trip so that these souvenirs could be sold
for some thousands of dollars when and if (having
placed the flight in some jeopardy) he returned.
Space flight and the dreams of thousands of years.
The highest of high tech. And souvenirs. And the
reckless yielding to momentary pressure and momentary
gain. One small step for mankind indeed.
We find it more and more difficult in this strange
world, which is being deformed before our eyes,
to differentiate the weighty from the weightless,
so beset are we by the urgencies (or so they
seem) of the immediate. It is not hard for us to
be led to the trivial as meaningful. There is a
radio host who plays "Fame is Fleeting,"
who offers the audience a selection of five names
at a time of people who made the spotlight for an
instant, and then asks them to identify the people
and tell why they were famous. (Andy Warhol has
already promised us that each of us shall be famous
for fifteen minutes --although he didn't say how
or under what circumstances -- or why that would
be important.)
There is no event immune from instant reduction
to the trivial. The brutality and repression of
the twenty-year reign of terror of Ferdinand Marcos
against his own people, during which thousands were
slaughtered, comes down to 3000 pairs of shoes for
Imelda filmed over and over and over again as though
that single image encapsulates him and his cronies.
The Lindenauer-Manes corruption scandal which corroded
the very heart of a city came down to three images
-- Lindenauer in police custody wearing a slouch
hat, Manes reading a prepared statement from a hospital
bed, and a picture of a car, an empty
blue car, with police markers roping it off.
Even as we are watching, the unfolding events are
becoming the banalities they will be tomorrow.
The medium is indeed the message and we have become
a world of watchers, idle on-lookers, voyeurs.
"And how did you feel when your son was shot
seven times in the chest and collapsed here in the
hall with the blood running all over the -carpet?"
"Oh, terrible. Terrible." The body doesn't
even have to be there -- just two suitably touched-up
blood stains (brought closer by zoom lens) will
do the trick. People magazine and Lives
of the Rich and Famous pour millions into and
get millions out of the products they produce as
well as those they advertise. Fame is fleeting.
Titillation. Not quite bread and circuses, but it's
a different Age.
For every action there is, of course, a reaction,
and, we may surmise, motion is implicit in reaction.
Not necessarily so. Can we discern a soul in the
act of shriveling; a mind emptying; the green
corpuscles of the brainwashers seeping into our
bloodstream by osmosis? Nor is it terribly simple
to discern where the TV ends and our lives and our
world begin. Even when TV is being honest
(or seems so) it cannot help but serve up to us
the mirror trivializations of where we are. Along
with millions of others I watch Hill Street Blues
each week. If I were to enter police work tomorrow
I have a rough knowledge of what I'd be likely to
encounter. The paradox is that this is not all to
the good. As I am totally ignorant of the human
body, I can regard it as a temple, a vessel, Prometheus,
and venerate each cell, each articulation. If I
studied to be an intern, I imagine that one pair
of healthy (or unhealthy) lungs might look like
any other. Thus, the very brilliance of the observance
of the minutiae in any study creates for us a kind
of information overload. Where this high charge
of information intersects with what we may call
fundamental morale, we are placed in a troublesome
position, no longer naive and outside, but now inside,
part of it.
After all, I reason, I didn't auction off the McAuliffe
letter; I didn't carry mail to the moon, potentially
endangering the voyage and my fellow passengers
for whatever money I had been promised. I don't
condone bribery and corruption. I have not only
opposed Marcos but also the friendship our government
has shown him from his very first day in office.
Ah! But in all these cases I was on the outside,
I had not been riveted to the events, they
were not of my doing or to my- knowledge. How different
with Hill Street Blues. I know my
way around that squad room, that basement, those
lockers, Furillo's office, those interrogation rooms
-- and I know the Chief of Police and the
Mayor and Jesus and the Assistant DA. I'm participating
(as voyeur) in a reenactment, an honest reenactment
(as I take it) of life on the streets in a big city
in my own country.
It is the lead storywriters, the TV personalities
who anchor me with the weight of their trivializations.
We help Marcos load millions of dollars of
freshly printed pesos onto our
airplanes to help him steal from his own
people. Instead of indignation, we are shown one
image, an old man being helped down the steps of
an airplane by a US official with pictures of closed
crates surrounding him on the tarmac. Where's
the anger of the anchorman? What does it mean?
Eastern Airlines was accused of almost eighty thousand
safety violations, any one of which could
have cost me my life. Without admitting guilt,
they agreed to pay a fine set at nine million dollars.
Assume 200 passengers per flight and it works out
that 16,000,000 lives were put at risk for which
Eastern was assessed about a half a buck each. Is
it possible that no one did that arithmetic on
the air? Where's the outrage? When hundreds
of E. F. Hutton people were charged with bilking
banks out of millions of dollars in a concerted,
unified mode, in dozens of their branches all over
the country, they were fined a paltry sum of money
(for a firm that deals in billions), and not only
did no one go to jail, but the top management
claimed that they had had no notion that such
a terrible thing was going on. And in their own
brokerage house, too. And the beat goes on.
I return to Hill Street Blues and feel my
own soul shriveling as they bargain, taking
all meaning out of crime. Of course, I come
to the program washed, laved, bathed by the thousands
of images I've already absorbed, ready to
accept this trivialization of justice. I feel I'm
in some souk in Nablus trying to buy a rug.
"$500." "Don't be crazy. I'll give
you $10. Cash." "OK. I see you’re
a man who appreciates quality. I'll go $400."
"Forget it. . . . " Etc. Except that this
is not a rug we're talking about. This man is a
rapist, or a dealer of dope, or a murderer, or a
child abuser. "We have enough to get you 20
to life, not up for parole in less than 7. You finger
the right people, we make a deal." "No
deal. I wouldn't rat even if I knew. Besides you
don't have any 20 to life." "You can take
that chance, but we have you cold. We make a deal,
you plead to a lesser charge, get maybe 5 to 10,
up for parole in maybe 3." And the beat goes
on.
I have become a participant in their technique.
Where is the moral indignation one should feel
about someone who has just killed an old lady for
$6 and change? Where is the anger at someone who
has just committed rape again while on
parole? No indeed, instead of 20 I'll offer 7 --
no I can't go 5 but I'll see what I can do. I am
no longer a citizen feeling a citizen's disgust
at the perpetrator of a heinous crime, I am one
of them, an insider, making the deal.
Next, as we make war on the Sandanistas more openly
(already on the horizon) maybe my government's soldiers
will bring their tortures into my living room so
that I can help the interrogators extract information
from a captured "enemy" by means of a
wire attached to his genitals. Once they have told
me all this, made me privy to their actions, have
they not made me complicitous, have I not
agreed to accept their methods (it's a dirty job
but someone's got to do it) without acquiescing
to anything out loud?
In this fashion, do they get us to measure out our
lives in coffee spoons, none of us daring to sink
our teeth into the peach, that fruit being nothing
less than our willingness, more, our desire, our
need to wrest back our very lives from them,
our right to be appalled at that which is appalling,
to demand that justice be meted out to rich as well
as poor, to demand morality from our civil
servants.
I get Mad as Hell when I hear on every side that
justice in this country is a joke, not enough judges,
not enough jails, the System's tacit permission
in the face of these lacks to allow the jails to
become jungles, the unbelievable waste of manpower
and money on this antiquated and inefficient system.
I don't find that joke funny. Instead, I find it
deadly serious that in a world where the bottom
line is all that counts, details are almost
quaint and simply get in the way.
That's how Reagan gets away with knowing as little
as he does. We claim that Libya fired on
us (but we also claimed the Tonkin Gulf Incident
which turned out to be a lie). We then sank two
Libyan ships and destroyed a shore installation
and many lives, including those of children. Forget
the details, even those of who fired first. The
message, the big fat message is there. We are big
and tough and ready to take chances. Just watch
yourself, Buster, and don't cross us too readily.
No details are needed for that message.
Thus, as the big decisions are being made for us
(and in our names), we come to realize that there
are probably thousands of bits of information which
have been filtered through their sieve and
thus kept from us. Why not content ourselves then
with Pursuit of the Trivial? It is what they have
left us.s
-- Jeremiah
This essay first
appeared in the newsletter Jeremiah: I'm Mad
as Hell (Volume 1, Number 6, June 1986).
back
to top
