Not on Television

Back in the 1970s the black jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was angry that the struggle for civil rights seemed to be deteriorating around the assassinations of black leaders. But his famous jazz song, "The Revolution will not be Televised" was seen by many as a metaphor for widespread disgust with government secrecy and insensitivity. It ominously predicted that those who had waited for truth and justice in America were fed up and were ready to make it happen. The soporific of television commercials and hollow politicians would not do. From Xerox to Richard Nixon, it was all going down when the people took to the streets. America was simmering with injustice and lies.

"You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out...
Because the revolution will not be televised."

There was a keen sense in the nation that our society was out of whack, and something must done.

Heron was right. The revolution was live in the streets. Poor Black neighborhoods went up in flames at some final indignity. Anti-war protesters took to the streets, in Chicago and on campuses across the nation, including Kent State Ohio where the National Guard shot into the crowd killing four students. And then the Nixon presidency collapsed in the wake of a clumsy break-in of the Democratic party offices in the Watergate office building. There was a revolution all across America in the streets, on the campuses and down the halls of power.

But Heron got it wrong, too; the revolution WAS televised. We saw all that and more on the nightly news. We sat stunned as the LAPD shot up and torched the house where members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were holed up. We watched the footage come back from Vietnam and took in weekly body counts on the network news. We sat glued to the TV hour after hour as the Watergate hearings unfolded daily in congress.

We were shocked by the carnage, heartened that we were learning the truth and galvanized to turn things around. The on-the-ground reporters in Vietnam brought the truth home, and we were reminded of the toll in human life every Thursday when the networks reported the casualties. The corrupt and insidious Nixon White House was exposed because journalists, notably Bernstein and Woodward at the Washington Post, got the story.

The media, both print and television, aggressively dug out the stories, and exposed the lies, corruption and downright ineptness of our leaders and policies.

"The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live."

We lived it, but we also read it and saw it. It gave us faith that the truth will out.

But what about nowadays? Now our reporters are "embedded" with invading troops in Iraq, and they don't go looking for the real story, but stay close to their unit, rooting them on. And when they do get a whiff of the truth, they are discredited by the Bush administration because a minor detail is "uncorroborated." Additionally, news stories are often supplied ready-packaged to stations with administration spokesmen delivering the story as if they were legitimate newscasters. The journalistic estate is widely dismissed as unreliable; I think they are running scared. And indeed reporters are not out digging up stories, but rather waiting for Washington to tell them what is news. They are learning to keep their heads down.

But worse yet, is the public apathy. No one is taking it to the streets. Or shouting in outrage. I don't know what it will take. But it is not the conniving and secrecy of planning a nation's energy policy behind closed doors, or passing a Patriot Act that makes checking out a library book suspect. Nor is it the arcane sham of a prescription drug plan that doesn't really save folks money, or the mean-spirited attack on Social Security. And the snake pit of Abu Ghraib, the humiliation of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the ingenious scheme of flying prisoners to third-party torture nations have not been enough to rouse the American public. Have we been lulled by the Soma of the Brave New World of reality-tv, special effects movies, outrageous crime stories and rapid-fire connections across cyberspace, so that real-life injustice and iniquity does not touch us?

Like Bruce, who nightly asks his audience the crucial question, I, too, want to know, "Is there anybody alive out there?"