The McConnell quakes; the electric hearth blazes - reaction to 1994 Southern California earthquake - Column - Cover Story

It's the sort of episode writers love to self-righteousize over: just look how the medium converts private pain into tawdry spectacle. But there is, really, a world of difference between this coverage and, say, the "reenactments" of "Hard Copy" or the endless sniggerings over Michael Jackson or Tonya Harding or the Bobbitts. For while the NBC crew was covering the rescue, they, and the viewers, and, yes, even Doctor Bruce were also, in a funny way, being covered. This is important.

I said before that quakes are a form of ridicule because they are unpredictable. So are presidential assassinations in Dallas, urban riots, and little girls fallen down wells. So is the sudden pain in my chest, or the inexplicable numbness in your left hand, or the tingle in your scalp as you look into her eyes and realize she doesn't love you anymore. They are the moments that escape, or shatter, the stories of our lives we are constantly telling ourselves, and for which another name is "consciousness." And at such moments we become objective to ourselves, as in: Damn! I'm no longer telling the tale of my life, the tale's telling me. So then, since we are essentially (Aristotle and Aquinas both missed this one, though Nietzsche came close) the storytelling animal, what we do is, we make up another story to fight back from the third-person to the first-person narration of our lives. In our private catastrophes, this is the motive--actually the survival-value--of every tale from Gilgamesh to this morning's installment of Doonesbury or for that matter Mary Worth (yeah: I never miss it).

And it's why, no kidding, "I" became to a certain extent "the McConnell" on the morning of January 17--as did, with different agnominations, most of the inhabitants of Southern California: including the very people like the good Shockneck who were covering the quake even while they were in the midst of its chaos. What the Tube did for us all was, on one level, probably very like what happened when our hirsute ancestors huddled together in a cave during a thunderstom, drawing bison on the walls and sharing bits of tapir meat or whatever. But on another level--and this is one of the very fine things about TV--it brought us together, reinserted each of us into our first-person mode of storytelling, faster and more gently than maybe any means of communication conceivable before the last forty years. The medium has taken a bad, and often deserved, rap for turning "history" into "entertainment." But I think it important to take note that, in events like the quake, the Rodney King riot, the Challenger disaster, und so weiter, it can also turn the unspeakable into the bearable: and that is a quintessentially human act.

In the smartest book I've ever read on TV, No Sense of Place (Oxford, 1986), Joshua Meyerowitz observes that the most important single bit of information transmitted by the six o'clock news is just that it does come on at six o'clock. When Dan or Tom or Peter materialize at precisely 1800 hours, you know that today, at least, the world has stayed within the track of the comprehensible. And conversely, when as on January 17 the world, or part of it, slips the rails, the medium can at its best be a voice--not entertainment, not news, not even "fact," but a voice--that by reminding us that we can say "we," helps each of us back to being able to say "I."