In the last installment of Newt Gingrich’s college course called
“Renewing American Civilization,” which ran (and is now re-running) on
the Mind Extension University cable channel, Gingrich played, for
some reason still obscure to me, that crowd pleaser, that favorite
cut, that “best of” gobbet from Ken Burns’s hit “Civil War” show in
which an actor reads the last letter of Major Sullivan Ballou to his
wife over a weepy violin. Mr. Gingrich was himself not unaffected
emotionally and had to brush away the tears. “I get teary,” he
explained simply to the boys and girls of Reinhardt College, Waleska,
Georgia, who looked on in curiosity or embarrassment.
Why, I wondered, did I get exasperated rather than teary? Why,
indeed, did it seem to me, who cry in movies with some frequency,
ridiculous to well up to a TV show?
I think it has something to do with the nature of
the medium. Tears that come naturally in response
to a man speaking to men are lost
when a mass of producers and technicians
intervene between us and the words. Or rather, perhaps, the
technology requires that the producers’ manipulation of emotion must
remain ever on display and unconcealed by the sort of art that is
customary with such relatively low-tech media as books or even
movies.
By its very nature, that is, TV is shamelessly manipulative.
Nothing can appear on it that is sincere and unaffected, in the
old-fashioned sense, because it is constantly advertising the
