Was it Gibbon or Carlyle who said, “Nothing in history is as mysterious as the congruence of apparently diverse ideas which yet come together like two modest rivers and make a great flood”? Or was that Groucho Marx?
Whatever, I can only report the white-hot e-mails that are now passing between Washington DC and the headquarters of several television networks. The fertile minds in those two places are quietly agog (I say “quietly” because secrecy is everything in security — they will all of them dismiss this column as preposterous!) over plans to harness the imminent regime-changing excursion to places east of Cairo (they keep an open mind there, which is a kindness to the poverty of their geography) with the frenzy that exists in these United States for what is now known as “reality TV”.
Dialogue, story construction, artful photography, acting — these are things of the past now in the mob of talent shows, game shows, survival epics, and fraud-testing money-makers. Joe Millionaire, in which a bevy of attractive young women who seem to have packed only bikinis and thigh-slit evening gowns go to visit an alleged millionaire hunk (who is really a con!), is to be applied in the next few months to nearly every one of the solid American professions (stopping short of DC, of course — there is still room for tact and taste).
At the same time, the American public more or less has the understanding that sophisticated firepower and illiterate speeches are shortly to be dropped upon Arab heads, dhows and minarets. Sooner or later, it is supposed at television headquarters, the public will display some concern for such matters and will want the best possible live coverage of those corkscrew “clever” missiles seeking out every fleeing camel.
In other words, in the greatest of all nations, and in the cockpit of media modernity, we want to be there with “our boys”, “getting it done” and “going the long haul” — at least for six or seven weeks (before the return of The Sopranos).
Well, DC learns its lessons, such as it’s all the harder nowadays to fight a proper war if you’re subject to the intrusive journalistic techniques (not to mention the amendments to the Bill of Rights) that afflict a modern nation. The inside story on the 1991 war was that it was a triumph of keeping the media in the dark. And that is essential if you want to keep the public happy.
Thus we will have the chemistry, the synergy, of excluding television news reporting from the territories east of Cairo, while allowing the entertainment wings as much freedom as possible.
No small contributor to this policy shift was the startling success of a radically experimental Nickelodeon show, aimed at the under-eights, Find a Wog at Your Airport, which achieved viewing figures that the production company called “statistically impossible”, and which is also reckoned to be instrumental in the bankruptcy of three major airlines.
As a spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security put it, “Do we have these kids on red alert!” (So far no terrorists have been identified as part of the show but there are damage suits pending for over $400 billion. When asked about this outrageous sum, the same spokesman said, “We’re here to teach spineless Americans that they can’t expect to have the law look after them!”)
At press time, I could gather no official confirmations for this, but I have every reason (and the pilot proposals) to look forward to at least three new shows: Jeopardy — Behind Saddam’s Lines, in which an all-girls lacrosse team (with bikinis and thigh-slit dresses etc) crash near to Bagdad and have to survive.
There are reports that Jennifer (Alias) Garner will be part of the team; So You Want to be a Tank Commander?, in which high-tech, call-in cable patching may actually allow an on-the-couch viewer the full sensation of driving a tank across the desert and picking off enemy targets; and “Bring Me the Head of Saddam Hussein” — not quite the blood-thirsty trip it sounds like, but an authentic Pentagon-assisted maneuver to get Saddam out of Iraq.
(It is said that independent agents have already got the dictator’s promise to play ball in return for guaranteed protection, a walled residence in Palm Springs and a show of his own.) Michael Eisner, the head of Disney and thus the effective leader of the ABC network, is quoted as saying, “In a summer without Olympics or an election, this is a very American compromise. I see big numbers.”
Unofficially, an Al-Qaeda spokesman responded by saying, “It’s nice to think that our guys, from San Diego to Salford, can look forward to a summer of good old-fashioned entertainment — but how shameful that American women have so little to wear. What a lousy empire!”
