Small Wonder

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The advantages of raising kids without commercial TV seem obvious, and yet I know plenty of parents who express dismay as their children demand sugar-frosted sugar for breakfast, then expensive name-brand clothing, then the right to dress up as hookers not for Halloween but for school. Hello? Anyone who feels powerless against the screaming voice of materialistic youth culture should remember that power comes out of those two little holes in the wall. The plug is detachable. Human young are not born with the knowledge that wearing somebody's name in huge letters on a T-shirt is a thrilling privilege for which they should pay eighty dollars. It takes years of careful instruction to arrive at that piece of logic.

  I ask my kids, on principle, to live without wasteful and preposterous things (e.g., clothing that extorts from customers the right to wear labels on the outside), and it's a happier proposition to follow through if we don't have an extra blabbermouth in the room telling them every fourteen minutes about six brand-new wasteful, preposterous things they'll die without. It's fairly well documented that TV creates a net loss in contentment. The average household consumption of goods and services has doubled since 1957, when TV began to enter private homes, but according to a University of Chicago study, over all those years the fraction of Americans who describe themselves as "very happy" has remained steady, at about one third. The amount of money people believed they needed to buy happiness actually doubled between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, and the figure is still reaching for the sky. Think the kids would be unhappy without TV? I say pull the plug, quick, before they get more miserable. My daughters are by no means immune to peer pressure, but the kindergartner couldn't pick Tommy Hilfiger out of a lineup, and the ninth grader dresses way cool on an impressively frugal clothing budget, and they both find a hundred things to do each day that are more fun than sitting in front of a box. They agree with me about TV, once they're forced to accept the theory that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

  I can't think how anyone, child or adult, could sit still for the daily three hours and forty-six minutes that is our national TV-watching average. For my own purposes, sitting still is probably the most difficult part of the proposition. I have struggled all my life with a constitutional impatience with anything that threatens to waste what's left of my minutes here on earth. I start fidgeting at any community meeting where the first item on the agenda is to discuss and vote on the order of the other items on the agenda; I have to do discreet yoga relaxation postures in my chair to keep myself from hollering, "Yo, people, life is short!" I was born like this; I need to get a move on. I'm the kind of person who races around the kitchen so fast while cooking (with my mind on two other things), that I sometimes snag the fabric of my pants pocket on a drawer knob, and may either rip my trousers or fling the forks and spoons across the room. But reading can hold me spellbound, provided I'm the one turning the pages. And so I'm the kind of person who would rather read history (skipping over the parts I don't need) than have to sit and watch the eight-hour docudrama (baloney included). As a habitual reader I find the pace of information delivery on television noticeably sluggish. There's a perfectly good reason for this: The script for a one-hour TV documentary is only about fifteen or twenty double-spaced pages in length, whereas most any competent reader can cover three to five times that much material in an hour. Devoted as our culture is to efficiency, convenience, and DSL Internet access, I'm surprised so many Americans are content to get their up-to-the-minute news delivered in such a slow, vacuum-packed format.

  I did get a chance, recently, to watch CNN for a few minutes, and I was bedazzled by what I presume to be its post-September 11 format, in which the main story is at the top of the screen, "Coming Up Next" occupies the middle, and completely unrelated headlines run constantly across the bottom. Yikes. It looked to me like a TV trying very hard to be a newspaper, about as successfully as my five-year-old imitates her big sister's smooth teenage dance steps. Ten minutes of that visual three-ring circus gave me a headache; when I want newspaper, I'll read one.

  It's true that being a reader rather than a viewer gives me a type of naivete that amuses my friends. I'm in the dark, for instance, about what many public figures look like, at least in color rather than newsprint (for the longest time I thought Phil Donahue was blond), and in some cases I may not know quite how to pronounce their names. When people began talking about the dreadful anthrax attack on the congressional offices, I kept scratching my head and asking, "Dashell? There's a Senator Dashell?" It took me nearly a day to identify the man whose name my brain had been registering as something like "Dask-lee."

  But I don't mind being somebody's fool. I don't think I'm missing too much. Of course, every two weeks or so someone will tell me about the latest should-be-required-viewing-for-the-human-race documentary that I've missed. No problem: I know how to send off for it, usually from Annenberg CPB. Then some winter evening I'll put the tape in the machine, and if I agree it's wonderful I will see it out. Often it turns out I've long since read an article that told me exactly the same things about Muslim women or Mongolian mummies unearthed or whatever-have-you, or a book that told me more. For bringing events quickly to the world, the imaginative reporter's pad and the still photographer's snap are far more streamlined instruments than bulky video cameras and production committees. But sometimes, I won't deny it, there is a video image that stops me cold and rearranges the furniture of my heart. An African mother's gesture of resignation, the throat-singing of a Tuva shepherd, a silent pan of the untouched horizon of a Central Asian steppe--these things can carry an economy of feeling in so many unspoken words that they're pure instruction for a wordy novelist. For exactly this reason I love to watch movies, domestic and especially foreign ones, and we see lots of them at home. We do own a VCR. My kids would point out to you that it's old and somewhat antiquated; I would point out that so am I, by some standards, but we both still work just fine.

  I'm happy to use the machine; I just don't want a cable or a dish or an antenna. Having a sieve up there on the roof collecting wild beams from everywhere does seem poetic, but the image that strikes me as more realistic is that of a faucet into the house that runs about 5 percent clear water and 95 percent raw sewage. I know some people who stay on guard all the time and carefully manage this flow so their household gets a healthy intake; I know a lot more who don't. Call me a control freak, but I have this thing about my household appliances--blender, lawn mower, TV monitor--which is that I like to feel I am in charge of the machine, and not vice versa. I have gotten so accustomed to this balance of power with my VCR that I behave embarrassingly in front of real television. When I watch those stony-faced men (I swear one of them is named Stone) deliver the official news with their pursed mouths and woeful countenances, I feel compelled to mutter back at them, insolently, while my teenager puts her forearms over her face. (Now you know what I really am--more insolent than my own teenager.) "You're completely ignoring what caused this," I mumble at Ted-Peter-Dan, "and anyway who did your hair?"

  Well, honestly, who do those guys think I am? Thirteen seconds of whatever incident produced the most alarming visuals today, and I'm supposed to believe that's all I really need to know? One overturned fuel tanker in Nebraska is more important to me than, say, global warming? Television news is driven by compelling visuals, not by the intrinsic importance of the story being cast. Complicated, nonphotogenic issues requiring any considerable background information (global warming, for example) get left out of the running every time.

  Meanwhile, viewers are lured into assuming, at least subconsciously, that this "news" is a random sampling of everything that happened on planet earth that day, and so represents reality. One friend of mine argued (even though, as I say, I'm not trying to start a fight) that he felt a moral obligation to watch CNN so he could see all there was and sort out what was actually true--as if CNN were some huge window thrown wide on the whole world at once. Not true, not remotely true. The world, a much wider place than seventeen in
ches, includes songbird migration, emphysema, pollinating insects, the Krebs cycle, my neighbor who recycles knitting-factory scraps to make quilts, natural selection, the Loess Hills of Iowa, and a trillion other things outside the notice of CNN. Are they important? Everything on that list I just tossed off is life or death to somebody somewhere, half of them are life and death to you and me, and you may well agree that they're all more interesting than Monica Lewinsky. It's just a nasty, tiny subset of reality they're subsisting on there in TV land--the subset invested with some visual component likely to cause an adrenal reaction, ideally horror.

  Print news has its multitude of agendas, to be sure, but they are not all so potently biased against the deeper assessment that interests me most. The overwhelming drive toward visuals in newscasting acts as a powerful influence on which bits of information will reach us. It also influences what we will retain. We are a predominantly visual species, and that's a biological fact that will never change; our brains are carefully wired to put the most stock in what they see, rather than what they hear. If we listen to a presidential candidates' debate over the radio, for instance, we'll be apt to recall, afterward, the visual components of the room in which we were sitting while we listened; if it was a fairly boring room, we'll also remember much of what the candidates said. If we watch that same debate on television, however, we will remember everything about the candidates' appearance--who was smug, who was tense, who made a funny face--but relatively few of their words. No matter what we may think of this prioritizing, it's the biological destiny of sighted people. It makes me wonder, frankly, why certain things are televised at all. If our aim is to elect candidates on the basis of their stature, clothing, and facial expressiveness, then fine, we should look at them. But if our intention is to evaluate their ideas, we should probably just listen and not look. Give us one good gander and we'll end up electing cheerleaders instead of careful thinkers. In a modern election, Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair wouldn't have a prayer--not to mention the homely but honest Abe Lincoln.

  Still, there is this thing in us that wants to have a look, a curiosity that was quite useful to our ancestors on the savannah but is not so helpful now when it makes us rubberneck as we drive past the awful car crash. So the gods that gave us TV now bring us the awfulest car crash of the day and name it The World Tonight. This running real-time horror show provides a peculiarly unbalanced diet for the human psyche, tending to make us feel that we're living in the most dangerous time and place imaginable. When the eyes see a building explode, and then an airplane burning, and the ears hear, "Car bomb in Oklahoma City...far away from here...equipment failure...odds of this one in a million," the message stashed away by the brain goes something like, "Uh-oh, cars explode, buildings collapse, planes plunge to the ground--oh, man, better hunker down." As a person who either reads the news or hears it on the radio, I am a bit more of a stranger to this scary-world phenomenon, so I notice its impact on other people.

  The day after all the world became a ghastly stage for the terrified high school students fleeing from murder by their classmates in Littleton, Colorado, it happened that I was to give an afternoon staff writing workshop at my sixth grader's school. When we assembled, I could see that the teachers were jumpy and wanted to talk rather than write. Several confessed that they had experienced physical panic that morning at the prospect of coming to school. I sympathized with their anxiety, but since nobody ever gets shot in my house, I didn't share the visceral sense of doom that surely came from seeing a live-camera feed of bloody children just like ours racing from a school so very much like this one. I remarked that while the TV coverage might make us feel endangered, the real probability of our own kids' getting shot at school today had been lower than the odds of their being bitten by a rattlesnake while waiting for the bus. And more to the point, the chance of such horror's happening here was hardly greater than it had been two days before, when we weren't remotely worried about it. (The TV coverage apparently did increase the likelihood of other school shootings, but only faintly.) It was such a small thing to offer--merely another angle on the truth--but I was amazed to see that it helped, as these thoughtful teachers breathed deeply, looked around at the quiet campus, and reclaimed the relative kindness of their lives. Anyone inclined toward chemical sedatives might first consider, seriously, turning off the TV. I know the vulnerability of my own psyche well enough to avoid certain films that are no doubt instructive and artful but will nevertheless insert violent images into my brain that I'll regret for many years. Obviously, I read verbal accounts of violence and construct from them my own mental pictures, but for whatever reason, these self-created images rarely have the same power as external ones to invade my mind and randomly, recurrently, savage my sense of wellbeing.

  So I glean my news from many written sources and the radio, but even that isn't constant. I purposefully spend a few weeks each year avoiding national and international news altogether, and attending only to the news of my own community, since that is the only place I can actually do very much about the falling-apart-things of the moment. Some of my friends can't believe I do this, or can't understand it. One summer I was talking on the phone with a friend when she derived from our conversation that I had not yet heard about the tragic crash of the small airplane piloted by John Kennedy Jr.

  "You're kidding!" she cried, again and again. "It happened three days ago, and you haven't heard about it yet?"

  I hadn't.

  My friend was amazed and amused. "People in Turkestan already know about this," she said.

  I could have observed that everybody in the world, Turkestanis included, already knows global warming is the most important news on every possible agenda--except here in the United States, where that info has been successfully suppressed. We know so very much about the trees, and miss the forest. I was talking with a friend, though, so I told her only that I was deeply sorry for the Kennedy family, to whom this tragedy belonged, but that it would make no real difference in my life.

  It's not that I'm callous about the calamities suffered by famous people; they are heartaches, to be sure, but heartaches genuinely experienced only by their own friends and families. It seems somewhat voyeuristic, and also absurd, to expect that JFK Jr.'s death should change my life any more than a recent death in my family affected the Kennedys. The same is true of a great deal--maybe most--of the other bad news that pounds at our doors day and night. On the matter of individual tragic deaths, I believe that those in my own neighborhood are the ones I need to attend to first, by means of casseroles and whatever else I can offer. I also believe it's possible to be so overtaken and stupefied by the tragedies of the world that we don't have any time or energy left for those closer to home, the hurts we should take as our own.

  Many view this opinion as quaint. Truly, I'm in awe of the news junkies who can watch three screens at once and maintain their up-to-the-minute data without plunging into despair or cynicism. But I have a different sort of brain. For me, knowing does not replace doing. I find I sometimes need time off from the world of things I can't do anything about so I may be granted (as the famous prayer says) the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  So for the duration of every summer, when our family migrates to a farm in rural Virginia (the place whose antique wiring would short out at the very idea of TV), I gather books and read up, seeking background information on the likes of genetic engineering, biodiversity, the history of U.S. relations in the Middle East--drifts of event too large and slow to be called news. I still listen almost daily to radio news (the Kennedy crash must not have been among All the Things to be Considered), but I limit myself to one national newspaper per week, usually the Sunday edition of the Washington Post, which I can buy on Monday or Tuesday at our little town's bookstore. Here's a big secret I've discovered that I will share with you now: This strategy saves me the time of reading about the sports hero/politicia
n/movie star whose shocking assault charge/affair/heart attack was huge breaking news in the middle of last week, because by Sunday he has already confessed/apologized/died. You'd be amazed how little time it takes to catch up, not on "all the news that's fit to print," as one news organ boasts, but on all I really needed to be a responsible citizen.

  The rest of the week I try to remember to stop by the hardware store and pick up our folkloric County News, which is comprised largely of farm forecasts and obituaries. I read them and make casseroles; it's a healthy exercise. It helps me remember what death really is, and helps me feel less useless in the face of it. And I decide with fresh conviction that we just don't need anybody getting killed at our house.