BP Disaster – Has TV Wrecked Our Brains?

If this doesn’t work, we’re going to fire up the Bat Signal….

Every civilization becomes the product of it’s central event.

For the ancient Greeks, it was the Agora, the marketplace, the Acropolis. A place of constant public discourse.

The Agora gave birth to a dozen schools of thought, from Epaminondas of Thebes to Isocrates of Athens to Plato. The world’s Parliaments today, places where ideas are supposed to be ‘talked out’ to reach an intelligent conclusion are the direct descendants of the open dialogues of the Agora.

We are not a culture of the Agora.

We are a culture of Television – a place where we sit passively for 5 hours a day and ‘watch’ problems miraculously resolved before our eyes.  As the Greeks came to understand that problems would be best solved by dialogue, we have come to understand, in a very fundamental way, that problems are best solved by ‘watching’.

This inculcation of our culture toward watching, and waiting for the ‘miracle solution’ that always comes at the end of every episode of House or Law and Order is so deeply engrained in our culture that yesterday, The White House announced that they had enlisted movie director James Cameron to assist in the trying to solve the apparently unsolvable disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

What James Cameron knows about fixing an oil leak 1 mile beneath the surface of the ocean is probably what BP Chairman Tony Hayward knows about directing movies. I mean, he has seen movies. How hard can it be.

James Cameron is a movie director. Movie directing is a very controlled event. Very controlled. The ‘disasters’ in movies are not real disasters. They are made up disasters. They are about as dangerous as going on a ride a Universal Studios in Florida. What is happening in the Gulf is not happening at Universal Studios.

As the world’s best ‘watchers’ of television and movies, we often don’t see the distinction between the real and the movies. Many years ago, I was watching the Today Show when they had the stars of Das Boot, the movie about a German submarine, on the show.

“What was it like being trapped down there in that submarine”, Maria Shriver asked the stars of the movie.

They showed a clip of them crammed in their tin can of a submarine, water leaking out of every pipe, British depth charges shaking the crap out of them. Sweat pouring off their brows.

“What did it feel like?” she asked.

I picked up the phone and called NBC News.  “They’re not on a submarine”, I yelled into the phone. “They’re on a sound stage in Hollywood”.

Another nut on the phone, I am sure someone at NBC News must have said before they hung up the phone.

“Do that again, and I am leaving you”, my now ex-wife threatened. (if only then!)

If you want to get someone with some experience, why doesn’t the US Government bring in the scientists at Woods Hole who taught James Cameron how all this stuff works!

James Cameron.

Jeez… next it will be Kevin Costner because he made Waterworld! (Well, this is about water, isn’t it).

We have a deep, (very deep) belief in some ways that the fictional world with which we have now surrounded ourselves is somehow as real as the real world, which appears increasingly unpleasant and too hard to deal with.  For a culture that spends 8.5 hours a day staring at screens (computer, TV, iPad and iPhone), this is somehow both predictable and reassuring.  Every movie has a happy ending, every TV series resolves itself in 44 minutes.  The same surely must happen in the Gulf… eventually, if only we could get the right Director on board.

This morning on CNN they had some no-name reporter trying to drive one of these undersea robotic machines, except he was doing it in a swimming pool. “Boy, this IS hard”.

Great.

Just great.

In the end, it’s always the stuff that you’re not paying attention to that gets you.

For the Ancient Romans, a lot of people now think it might have been the lead in their water pipes and drinking glasses. Longer term lead poisoning destroyed the minds of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the Empire.  Could be.

Perhaps in a few thousand years, historians will look back on the USA and say, ‘TV Poisoning.  The constant exposure to TV destroyed the minds of the people of America. Made them lose the ability to differentiate between real and fiction. Lived in a dream world.”

Could be.

Could be.