I’ve never been on the set of a television program, but I have been on location for the execution of a death row inmate, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Strangely enough, Phil Donahue was also there. As time ran out for the convicted felon, time was also running out for Mr. Donahue, who scurried about from warden to lawyer to bored camera crew, attempting, up until the final moments, to procure permission to film and later televise the execution. Outside the prison, death penalty protestors held candles and waited in the evening drizzle, caught up in prayer or quiet reflection. Across the street, death penalty supporters were having cook-outs, popping champagne corks, loudly singing, "na-na-na-na, hey hey, good bye," and screaming, "We’d put Bill Clinton in the gas chamber too, but HE DON’T INHALE!" Had both sides of the street been polled on their opinions of Phil Donahue’s attempted televising of the event which everyone was gathered here to commemorate in some way, the public sentiment would have been unanimous. Sure, televise the execution. Donahue’s motivations for trying to procure the rights to do this might be self-serving and crass, a morbidly opportunistic attempt to boost ratings through the exploitation and objectification of another human being’s murder, and his self-justifying squawks on behalf of freedom of the press and the public’s right to know might seem transparent and cynically contrived, but on the other hand, transparent or not, what about freedom of the press and the public’s right to know? The death-penalty opponents might hope that actually seeing what it is that the state is doing to real people would shock and galvanize the public, and that the general fence-sitting talk show audience would be moved to join them during the next drizzly vigil. The pro-death set would just want front row seats; they’d be delighted to grill hot dogs over the electric-chair-charred body.

Personal politics notwithstanding, there is a broad cultural consensus that TV makes things more real. "The right to know:" my earliest memories of television are of Walter Kronkite, with his white mustache and crinkly eyes, whose face I transposed into the face of God whenever as a child I imagined heaven and the good Lord staring benevolently down upon me, crinkling up his eyes with understanding and universal concern (except that in my imagined heaven, he wore a toga, not a rumpled three piece suit). Walter Kronkite’s luminescent head was propped up by the dinner table, his eyes at eye level with my own, making him a de facto family member, although he rarely got a plate and never asked for seconds on potatoes. Kronkite dominated the conversation, delivering in monologue that day’s events, never once pausing to ask me how my day in pre-school had been.
The family sat rapt with attention: in all fairness, nothing that earth shattering ever happened in pre-school, and Kronkite, earnest and even-toned, seemed to have something really serious and important to say every night.

What I was unaware of, being too young to understand, was that history was being made in my dining room on those evenings. Both real history and television history- no, actually, something more profound than that: what was going on was that history and television history, in occurring simultaneously, were becoming inseparable and indistinguishable. My parents, like pretty much everyone else in the U.S, were watching televised footage of the Viet Nam war, a war that television made seem very "real;" not only were people sending their loved ones off to do combat in a foreign place, they stood a chance of seeing that loved one (or a similar terrified, mud-soaked kid, whom they could easily extrapolate into their own), covered in his own blood, weeping, killing an enemy soldier in cold blood. It was a little too "real." Television became not only a reflection or documentation of what was going on in the world- it informed and influenced public opinion, transforming itself from a piece of high-tech furniture into a sentient historical actor, changing the course of actual events. Walter Kronkite was, almost literally, a "real" person at dinner tables all across America, not just feeding off of the world outside the box but shaping it.

But TV is not real, it is a cathode-ray simulation of the real. As we’ve bought in to the simulation as our sphere of discourse, we’ve lost the ability to have the conversation out here, where we live, in the 3-D real time of our actual lives. The profound power of the medium might have stirred hopes, initially, that it would act as a democratizing force in society: look at how it influenced the public’s perception of the war, look at how it shaped and changed political discussion and debate, where now suddenly politicians with bad on-screen presence could be more easily identified as "weak" and "evil." The next war, in the Persian Gulf, was better television and far more deficient reality; nice graphics, good pacing and suspenseful buildups to climactic explosion-sequences, some exciting major characters and minor love interests. No blood, no mass incineration of civilians on crowded highways or trenches full of Iraqui soldiers being buried with US bulldozers. The high ratings of Viet Nam without the uncomfortable ethical implications, and without the ensuing social strife. The inherent error in putting faith into technology to manufacture some assembly-line egalitarianism is that technology, as a rule, does not democratize, it just shifts power into the hands of those who control the technology. Those hands seem to remain depressingly the same.

I feel that I’ve got a (reasonably good) grip on reality, and, from my vantage point, I can say that what we’re living in currently is not it. Political protests occur and the organizers are less concerned with actual numbers of attendees than with arranging them so that it looks like an infinite swarming mass for the cameras. The actual numbers can always be fudged later by some spokesperson at a press conference. What is important is not that the people involved feel some sense of empowerment or that the cronies in the government building we’re marching by peep out from behind their French-revolution-era velveteen curtains and feel a chill go down their spines at witnessing the assembled might of the perturbed population; all that matters is getting that precious few seconds of "air time." We rush home from our protest or the talent show or the rodeo we won first prize for cow-jacking in, and if we don’t catch a momentary glimpse of ourselves on the evening news, wedged between an old lady’s cat stuck in a tree and the guy who’s been making pretzels shaped like presidents since 1936, we feel that it didn’t really happen, that we don’t exist.

In the media, the rules change with stunning, fiber-optic speed; in the sluggish and sentimental synapses of the human brain, though, it’s still 1950 and the old reliable black and white RCA is just fine, thanks. At the death penalty protest the terms of debate are stuck in the Kronkitian era of a simple information-debate-progress loop. Thus the protestors, remembering the horrified silence at the dinner table, believe in the transformative, morally leveling power of media to influence people to believe in the "right" things if they are only exposed to the "truth." The warden, freaking out about this Phil Donahue fellow with all his cameras and microphones and inherently suspicious nasal yankee accent- the warden being himself, perhaps, a Viet Nam vet and remembering how it was guys like this that lost the war on the home front, who incited bus-loads of hippies to come spit on him when he returned from battle- staunchly refuses to let Donahue into the execution chamber with all his gear. And both the warden and the protestors are completely wrong. What they fail to take into account is that this symbiosis of history and television history is not some sort of "your chocolate in my peanut butter" scenario. It’s more like matter and anti-matter: in the synthesis of something real and something fake, one or the other had to lose out. Fake won.