If History Has a Future It's in Television--Watching the January 6th Committee Yesterday

What most soap operas offer is a depiction of people made unhappy by privilege. Perhaps it’s time for a soap opera that’s a depiction of poverty and misery—a soap opera of homelessness for instance. In any case something always has to happen in a soap opera, some new disturbance to keep us interested enough to keep watching but that is never actually resolved.

Soap operas and classic mid-century 1950s and 60s tv came to mind while I watched the January 6 Committee hearings yesterday. Since Television is now the official medium of all things newsworthy for the Right, Left, and Libertarian Center, I thought of the shows I used to watch and love as a kid—The Andy Griffith Show, Leave It to Beaver, Perry Mason, The Rifleman. Since Donald Trump’s a child of that era, as I am, and since he made his name and gained a great deal of his popularity, at least enough to create his ‘base’, in a genre called ‘reality tv’ for a reason still unclear to me, I kept seeing the proceedings in that light: a television show with heroes and villains that might run for a few more episodes but will no doubt be relegated to damp air-conditioned cellars in the national archives where they’ll only be occasionally resurrected for nerdy high school civics students or future Ken Burns documentaries.

So what does matter most in this current tv spectacle? That the incompetence of the Trump administration was vast and covers the waterfront with a breathtaking barrage of stupidity and ineptitude, featuring men and women who should have had names like Goober and Gomer and Aunt Bee rather than Mark and Rudy and Sidney? That the country itself seems to be suffering from a mild case of self-hatred as so much of the national ‘mood’ seems to be made up of deep personal unhappiness and discontent, manifested by both the Left and the Right? That Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentifrice when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care?

This other Twilight Zone-ish thought also came to me: could the hearings actually present the curiously perverse possibility of gaining Trump and his sort fresh new recruits?

The Roman poet Terence famously wrote, “nothing human is alien to me” but perhaps he hadn’t anticipated the minor monsters in our midst. Robert Frost said a poem is “a momentary stay against confusion” but he read a poem at JFK’s inauguration in an era that had a much longer attention span than ours.

After watching most of yesterday’s January 6th Committee hearing and later seeing highlights on the nightly news, I went to bed, setting the alarm so that when I woke I’d remember to call and remind myself to take two aspirins in the morning.