Young for his age: the tube, the music & the shadow

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by Frank McConnell

Over the last few years, my g-g-generation has found an amazing new analgesic for the pang - and that's a serious word - of just sticking around. It's called television. One of the very wisest things I've read is the very first sentence of Samuel Hynes's beautiful memoir of being a World War Il bomber pilot, Flights of Passage (Beil, 1988): "Every generation is a secret society." That, for me, beats any sociological or biological definition of "generation" by a couple of furlongs. Forget birthdates. If you share the public secrets of a group - share them in Newman's second sense of "knowing" - then you're a member of that generation. If not, then not. It's why Saul Bellow, say, Nobel Prize and all, seems to be so irrevocably, culturally prior to Norman Mailer, even though their careers are nearly contemporary and Bellow (1915) is only eight years older than Mailer (1923). ("Prior" is "other": not better or worse.)

And it's why I (1942), though some five years early to be a baby-boomer, but always a slow developer, belong to the open conspiracy that has now ascended to power - media power, the only kind that counts - and that writes, produces, directs, and markets shows like "The Wonder Years," "Murphy Brown," "thirtysomething," and especially the brilliant CBS miniseries, "Middle Ages." And what those shows have in common are the Three Great Secrets of their targeted audience: television (in lower case because it's the medium in which we swim, our real environment), The Music (in caps because it is, beyond the possibility of quarrel, our mythology) and, seldom mentioned but always, intolerably, present, Vietnam (because it is our Shadow).

Little Danny Quayle sends his cholesterol-friendly, fundamentalist constituency into delighted shivers whenever he attacks the "media elite," but the fact is that he's a member, and a prime one, of the club. No white middle-class American born after, say, 1948, can help but be (generations, unlike other secret societies, enlist you). Because none of them knows a world without television, and a world where television was not somehow a crucial paradigm of "real life." (I can remember, vaguely, listening to radio shows with my grandfather, but that's my all-but-gone previous incarnation.) "I know it's true, Oh so true, Cause I saw it on T.V.," sings John Fogerty - of everything from Howdy Doody to J.F.K. in Dallas to Saigon and beyond. The arresting sixties' pre-teens in "Wonder Years" and their screwed-up older incarnations in "thirtysomething" have this in common, so deeply that it need hardly be articulated: their lives are bound up with the very medium that is reinventing their lives. That is also true, of course, of Slick Bill Clinton, whose Elvis-gig on "Arsenio Hall" may be one of the memorable moments of the presidential campaign.

Which brings us to The Music. A candidate playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on tenor on the Tube? Yes, and again yes. It was - and for once the phrase isn't P.R. hype - a defining moment. As Greil Marcus, probably our best cultural historian, keeps saying, rock-and-roll - innately subversive, generationally divisive, a mass-marketed insider's music (America creates such paradoxes) - was the communion (the Clintonesque "new covenant"?) that bound our youths, at least from the fifties to the seventies, together. Or as Chuck Berry, even more eloquently than Marcus, put it: "Hail, hail, rock-and-roll/Deliver me from the days of old."

But look at this tangle of thorns. The tube and The Music - both, of course, leviathan-like mass phenomena - are, or pretend to be, Abel and Cain. Television, from "Ozzie and Harriet" to "Cosby," has been preponderantly the carrier-wave of the "days of old," of those Velveeta-and-saltine family values that got the Republicans in Houston so sweaty. And rock-and-roll, whatever the lyrics may say, has always had one and only one message, articulated by one of its chief theorists, Jim Morrison, as "break on through to the other side." Without that brimstone whiff of anarchy, The Music has no moral point whatsoever.

So here are the boomers, growing up and being told that life is supposed to be a very long episode of "Father Knows Best," but also being told, with overwhelming force, "Have you heard the news? There's good rockin' tonight." A crucial - no kidding - point in our psychic history was when Elvis, in 1956, finally performed on the "Ed Sullivan Show" (against Ed's previous "read my lips" pledge), but was shot only from the waist up. Symbolic castration, anyone?

And then fell the Shadow. The boomers either fought or didn't fight in that indelible national disgrace: and even if they didn't, they did, hey? And learned - the good ones - that both the domestic suasions of the tube and the apocalyptic promise of The Music were dangerous half-truths (think about Bom on the Fourth of July and The Doors as mirror-images of the great disillusionment). They grew, in other words, up: and that's always bad news.

And now, as I said, they run the networks and the ad agencies and they're old enough to be president. And the scary thing about getting that old is realizing that you're a flawed Abel - now you're the role-model you've tried so hard to imitate - or a failed Cain - now you're what you used to think you were rebelling against. If you're really cursed with smarts, of course, you find you're both.