Our history will be what we make of it. And if there are any historians about 50 or 100 years from now - and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks - they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information.
Our mass media reflect this.
But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.
Ah, yes, it may be that the human race is doomed, never to learn from its mistakes. We are the only animals on this globe who periodically set out to slaughter each other for the best, the noblest, the most inescapable of reasons. We know better. But we do it again and again in generation after generation. It may be that our empire, too, is doomed - like all those that have gone before it - to continue to spew and waste its best blood on foreign soil, no matter what we say or do in this place, or think, or believe, or have learned from history.
But, thank God for us.
