The Wicked Messengers

Emedia Professional, Dec, 1998 by Stephen F. Nathans

While we're attacking frontally, watch Brink-l-ey and Hunt-l-ey Describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost, no need for you to miss a minute of the agonizing holocaustl ...

Who could forget "So Long, Mom," Tom Lehrer's immortal comic vision of a World War III beamed straight into your living room in dazzling Technicolor and wrapped up neatly in an eminently digestible "hour and a half from now," to return you to your regularly scheduled programming just in time for Jack Paar?

I couldn't forget it if I could actually remember it, If I'd been alive to watch those classic episodes of "That Was The Week That Was" on which ex-Harvard math instructor Lehrer sang his 90-second satiric political mini-sermons. I played his records incessantly as a kid growing up in the '70s, well after Lehrer's pre-Vietnam-escalation prophecy had already come true, and television, the ascendant media technology of the day, had transformed the war into Nielsen-friendly prime-time viewing material. And whether you thought the war (or conflict) was America's greatest shame or a noble undertaking dragged down by misrepresentations, mixed motivations, and internal dissent, nobody could deny that the explosive new media of television had shown more of the war's pain, pathos, and downright ugliness than you wished you'd ever seen.

So it's fitting, if frustrating, that the latest national spectacle is unraveling on the international stage through the miracle of the latest media innovations. Just as television made the horrific ignominy of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Vietnam, and Watergate matters of graphically public record, so have the Internet and DVD emerged as the real stars of the recent presidential scandal. Through either the flying fingers of the most blindingly efficient scan-and-HTML-encode team on the planet, or merely cleverly calculated premeditation in the Independent Counsel camp, the Internet beat even the speediest print organs to the publication punch, delivering the Starr Report online a good 18 hours before any newspaper special sections hit the streets. Which should be, I suppose, a significant point of pride for information-liberation populists and the technology amen corner alike. And it's dearly the Internet that stood head and shoulders above the papers in giving the people what they Want--delivering the goods via search engine-enabled instant access to the Report's juiciest tidbits, and sparing bottom-line voyeurs unwanted commentary that wasted their time with politics and such.

But the Internet was only the vehicle for the Independent Counsel's report reaching the masses. Back in Washington, the electronic media of choice was none other than CD-R. A recent press release from INSC, "Congress Enjoys the Convenience of CD-R Technology," found the CD duplicator manufacturer boasting that "the infamous Start Report" had been distributed throughout the House of Representatives on CD-Rs "quickly duplicated by way of INSC's CD Copier standalone systems." So SIGCAT was right all along--CD-R and Capitol Hill did have a date with destiny. But who knew how much kissing and telling that date would entail?

So I suppose we are to assume that it's from initially perusing the report's contents on CD-R that the House determined that the material was Internet-ready in tote and thus decided it would be a good idea to undress the presidency online. Whatever happened to the more civilized days of the Freedom of Information Act, when you had to want federal documents badly enough to scale a Mt. Rushmore-sized heap of red tape to get your grubby little hands on them?

Thanks to the electronic media revolution, we not only have the capability to move beyond that sort of formal secret-safeguarding, we also bring the expectation that we'll get to enjoy every iota of information access that technology, now allows. And that's where DVD has since pushed the envelope even further, throwing open the door to the presidential confessional by publishing Bill Clinton's full four-hour testimony on a generously indexed DVD-Video that's selling for an ostentatiously populist--are you gettin' the spirit now?--two cents per disc. Thanks to the magic of DVD navigational controls--has DVD ever harnessed so effectively the power to pander?--you can jump instantaneously to any of your personal favorites, be it "So Your Definition of asexual Relationship is Intercourse Only?" or "Clinton Avoids Question on Oral Sex." Published by Scotts Valley, California-based NetFlix--and distributed so cheaply to draw consumers to their DVD-Video rent-to-buy site (http://www.netflix.com)--the disc contains no fewer than 99 chapters for easy navigation via any DVD player remote control, and had already received 2,000 advance orders before shipping September 30.

Part of the stow here that makes DVD-Video such an disconcertingly good match for the Clinton scandal, content-wise, is the affair's legitimization of pornography, or at least explicit sex talk. My sources back home in the ever-prudish South tell me that the whole affair has church-going ladies in hairdressing salons tossing about taboo body-fluid terms like they were standard Vacation Bible School fare. So it would only be fitting if some savvy DVD-Blue developer were to take porn's real contribution to DVD innovation--aggressive exploitation of the "multiple angles" video viewing capability inherent to DVD-Video's application layer--and give purchasers of Clinton-scandal souvenirs the "below-the-Oval Office-desk"-view option so many thrill-seekers covet.