THIS IS YOUR TV ON DRUGS

Insanity is a break from reality. Groundings loosen then snap. Those adrift
in madness cannot ever be sure if what they see is real or not. Insanity's
like watching TV.

Once a sort of fun house, television has become a madhouse. Enter --that is
to say, switch it on -- and all assurances are surrendered. With the click
of a button we slide down the chute into a contorted, contrived environment,
where even the news teams are in on the joke that nothing (not even they)
are real. Cynics have warned for decades about the mind-bending power of
media. But until recently, these jeremiahs were generally regarded as nuts.
It was paranoid to suspect that big business or big government -- though
certainly not both together -- were manipulating the masses through media.
Even to suggest that a corporate or political message might be tucked into
the viewing fare was to betray unhealthy suspicion. To voice such fears put
one in the class of folks trying to repel unwanted rays by wearing helmets
wrapped in aluminum foil.

Well, get out the football helmets. Unroll the aluminum foil. Or better yet,
smash that ray-thing, the remote. Television is so utterly blurring the line
we used to perceive between theater, politics, news and business that the
most reliable programming we can watch anymore is the bombastic melodrama of
wrestling. At least at the WWF, we know that when that folding chair gets
raised in the air then slammed over somebody's head, the scene was as rigged
as a "vote-the-dead" election, and the fun comes in pretending it isn't.

Nothing else on TV is so blatant, and that's the problem. It used to be that
viewers could distinguish between what was theater and what was not. Or what
was advertising and what was not. Or what was a political announcement, or
even news, and what was showmanship.

But now, the screen's gone murky. What you see is not necessarily, nor
exactly, what you're getting. It looked, for instance, like Hillary Clinton
and David Letterman were having a big old time, laughing and exchanging
quips. But anyone who thought that her appearance was the casual thing it
appeared was as naive as my mother some 60 years ago, when a boyfriend took
her on a date to see her first wrestling match.

Sitting horrified in the front row, she yelled at the brute in the ring,
"Stop! Stop!You're killing him!" The man on the bottom who had been pounding
the mat wrenched his head in her direction. "It's okay," he whispered. Then
he resumed pounding the mat.

We, of course, are supposed to be a bit sophisticated about these things. We
know that the Clinton-Letterman tete-a-tete was a choreographed affair. We
understand that these appearances are a cocktail: Mix a little campaigning,
a big audience, a few quips here and there; shake; and if everybody's lucky,
boost ratings for both the show and for the political guest.

The problem with political theater is that it's neither "Hamlet" nor
wrestling. Candidates slip into and out of their roles, with nary a change
of costume. They may employ as many writers as Letterman, and rehearse as
carefully, but, unlike Letterman, they want to be seen as statesmen, not
entertainers. They want to evoke our trust, even as they pound the mat.

The report from Salon last week that networks had submitted program scripts
to a White House office for review in exchange for government ad dollars
raised the unreality quotient. Confidence in both government and media were
appropriately shaken. It's one thing for a government to drop little
propaganda leaflets over an enemy's countryside. It's another for a
government to secretly propagandize its own citizens. And the ruse sinks to
another level when it enters homes via the entertainment industry that
customers have unwittingly trusted.

Delivering coded messages covertly to an unsuspecting audience that has
handsomely paid its own dupers -- it's brilliant. And claims that the
message not to use drugs was for everybody's good only underscore the
smugness as they underscore the deceit.

But maybe these jolts from our TVs are a good thing, after all. Maybe it's
good for us to learn, as we did after the New Year's Eve coverage from New
York City, that CBS News had broadcast a digitally altered image of Times
Square, taking a large, lighted logo for rival network ABC out of the actual
scene and inserting the logo for CBS.

Maybe, instead of ushering us into madness, these realizations will awaken
us from it. Like it or not, this is our reality. It doesn't mean that we
have to envelop ourselves in cynicism or aluminum foil. But it does mean
that we'll take government and entertainment both with our wariness function
on high.