Kent State and soap operas

IT'S TOLD that Vice President Agnew's house caught on fire, completely destroying his books-all three of them. And one he hadn't even coloured yet.

Judging by the ineptitude of the Nixon Administration's handling of its public speeches in the past bloodstained weeks, it's not difficult to believe.

We have watched Nixon on television twisting and turning, always with the same two expressions, now attacking all students as 'bums', , then retracting in the face of the enormous split within his own party and the whole ruling class.

'The Times' American correspondent hints openly at the Nixon regime being little short of a military, racist despotism. Members of the Republican administration resign in protest at the new extension of the war into Cambodia and at the killing of the four students at Kent State.

Before dawn A hater of any kind of radicalism Nixon goes down before dawn to talk to the demonstrators gathering outside White House-a move which he orders senior government men to follow. Pare atod too tures, Clumsy, too He must now begin to do more to keep the middle class with him for the coming great movements amongst and against the American working class. more open. And they're trying Armed to the teeth, bristling with all the violence of imperialism in crisis, the American bourgeoisie is divided about just what to do and to whom.

But there's no comfort in that. The complete dominance capitalism Authority in the form of a America, its penetration and control, its ruthlessness when survival is threatened, make the tasks for the construction the revolutionary formidable DUL critically was acy weektacking snee was bitterly attacking the American press and television reporters for the few liberal stories that get through.

In Britain ministers have been • cutting the commercial television levy with one hand and initiating Prices and Incomes Board investigations, threatening a Royal Commission and issuing warnings about 'violence' with the other.

'Left wing'

Leading Tories have given clear indications of their plans for broadcasting by attacking the financially crippled BBC for being : too 'left wing' in some of its programmes, and have balanced their outpourings by suggesting the need for even more commercialism in television and radio revenues.

In Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation(CBC) was previously established on lines similiar to the BBC; it is now forced to get a proportion of its income from running commercials and there is already clear evidence of the effects of such a change.

Its president, George Davidson, has been issuing warnings that the CBC both remains short of money, especially of the capital necessary to make it truly nationwide, and is adamantly opposed to any further recourse to commercial funding.

Here, smelling the way the wind is blowing, and after its desperate attempts at reorganization, Lord Hill has been making similiar pronouncements.

In the new BBC handbook the Director General, Charles Curran, says despite a predicted combined deficit of £8 millions by March 31, 1971, to introduce commercial financing for the BBC would be a form of slow suicide-an apt phrase to describe capitalism trying to stave off its death throes.

These men put up their fight as best they can, given the job they have to do.

They fight to preserve illusions that have served system so well.

But then no one wants the present behind-the-scenes forms of control to become everything to avoid it. But they can't afford what it costs.

Cheerfully •

New drips of blood passed into the hardened arteries of Independent Television headmaster of Charterhouse as the new boss, a man who cheerfully admits a complete ignorance of television, looks pretty • insubstantial medicine.

But then no doubt he's been mindful of the advice Lord Derby gave to Disraeli appointing him, self-confessedly ignorant, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 'Don't worry; they'll give you the And that's just it; the figures they're giving and getting don't add up to the promises in the commercials of a good life for all.

Four bullets (filmed by a student cameraman, not a network reporter) shot dead any last illusions and show the real promise for the future.

The four students killed, the rising working-class militancy in N Ireland, in Italy, in France, in Britain, the thrust closer to war with China, all illuminate the old order in its clearest form.

Breakdown

Meanwhile, this is a rough breakdown of an hour at peak-time on American television This is how we're supposed to 'relax and forget the cares of the day'. ~ 8.05 p.m. Apollo 13 special report.

8.06 Soap opera about a middle-class father bringing up his dead wife's child and struggling to inculcate all the values of competitiveness and violence necessary for survival in American society. (The second one of its kind since 7.30 that evening.)

8.12 Commercials.

8.13 Soap opera continues.

8.24 Commercials.

8.25 Soap opera continues.

8.27} Commercials.

8.29 Third soap opera begins; this time : about nice teacher and kids in high school; sure they have problems but they sort them out fine. Monogamy, morality and decency win the day.

8.30 Commercial (15 sec.). Soap opera continues.

8.41 Commercials.

8.42 Soap opera continues.

8.54 Commercials.

8.55 Soap opera continues.

8.56 Commercials.

8.57} Soap opera end titles.

8.58 Station identification, trailer for coming sports show, commercial.

8.59 Johnny Cash show; a folksy, cynical job with the occasional glimmer of the underlying poverty and misery and determination that produced the music.

9.10 Commercial.

9.11 Apollo-13 special report.

9.12 Johnny Cash continues.

9.15 Commercial.

9.26} Johnny Cash continues.

9.27 Commercial and station identification, etc.

Not so bad And in case anyone is congratulating themselves that it's not so bad here after all, just look at an evening on commercial television here and think about the implications for the near future of the crisis the industry faces.

Also, as the social tensions grow, so television must reflect them, even negatively. Its job is to supply the lie and the beer and circuses.

But none of that is so easy these days. This is not the 1930s when the film moguls grew fat on romantic melodrama.

The world working class has seen and heard more of the truth than it yet knows.

Very often we experience something, think we understand it, but don't in fact grasp its full meaning. Later, by months, years or even decades, and in a different situation, it suddenly becomes luminously clear-and concrete. 7.05 7.30 8.00 8.50 9.10 10.30 11.00 11.25 8.50

We are now on the threshhold of such a qualitative transformation. The violence of imperialism in SE Asia, in Africa, Greece, S America, the Caribbean and the violence of the western and the killerthriller, all poured out to oppress, to delude and to numb us, can just as suddenly be inherited in its true meaning.

The very absence of television on workers' struggles can become a positive and glaring gap. Why did we never Why did they go on promising all and giving crumbs? That violence is not something to be wished away by moralists or ministers.

The mourning father of one of the students shot in America was filmed reading a prepared statement. Has come to this? he asked. Millions are asking the same question and in looking for the answer are beginning to make vital connections.

Connections between their own experience in the factorNIXON: Twisting and turning, always with the same two faces. ies and down the mines (fighting the speed-up, battling for more wages to maintain a halfdecent standard of living, pushing back attacks on trade union rights) and the experience of those peoples fighting the same enemy in Vietnam, being massacred quickly at My Lai rather than slowly on the line, between those in the ghettoes of the US and S Africa and those brutally evicted by the state's police here.

The fundamental connection that the National Guard contingent who shot down the students had just come from being used in • violent battles with workers in a Teamsters' strike in Akron, Ohio. The same forces doing ditterent parts of the same dirty work.

Same thing

We've seen it, we've heard it, we've read about it—mostly in a distorted form. But now it's more and more clearly part of the same thing. There Marxism begins, there the building of the mass party also enters a new stage.

The 'mass media' as bourgeois television, radio and the press are so patronizingly and accurately called, can't do the job of holding the ring.

They're either not making the kind of profits they need, or else the government cannot find sufficient resources. They're doing their best, but it's not going to turn out good enough. The force that's endured it is now rapidly entering a period when it's also going to sweep it all away.

You can't tell lies without preparing the ground for truth. You can't tell half-truths without revealing the half-lie that is also its other side.

A crisis delayed is a crisis deepened; after a bit of "liberalism' , the latest clampdown comes even sharper into focus.

That hour of American television has many of the strands in it. Billions of dollars (and therefore resources) poured into the grandiose, dangerous and unrewarding manned space programme, millions into advertising, millions more into perpetuating the myths of the society; but equally if you're watching it from a rat-infested gonE slum or after a day in the fields of California or the factories of Detroit after pitched battles with National Guardsmen brought in to break your strike, it's clearly not like they say.

So how is it and how shall we change it? In the answer to those questions lies the the socialist revolution.