![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Arlen, a long-time writer at the New Yorker, analyzed some of the consequences of this powerful new kind of television war coverage-”live” pictures-on the American psyche.Īrlen ambles over to greet visitors with a lanky boyishness that belies his 60 years. ![]() With some suddenness, the war in the Persian Gulf has invaded the lives of Americans-most powerfully through vivid TV images, particularly the scenes of Baghdad under attack on the first night of the war. shows one a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, and trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.” It seems to me that by the same process they are also made less ‘real’-diminished, in part, by the physical size of the television screen, which. “I can’t say,” he wrote, “I completely agree with people who think that when battle scenes are brought into the living room, the hazards of war are necessarily made ‘real’ to the civilian audience. Yet, Arlen was never satisfied with easy explanations of this novelty of news coverage. Vietnam was the first war in which, as Arlen put it, the “Goyaesque images” of war were thrust into the family room, the den, the lives of the average American each and every day. For the people who insisted that television was undermining the war effort, this was a revelation. He also saw clearly the fundamental paradox that the television pictures often obscured the reality of the violence and horror that was transpiring in the jungles, paddy fields and villages of Vietnam. He titled the book with the phrase he invented-”Living Room War.”Īrlen was the first to see that something profound was occurring to the people of this country. As the Vietnam War built to its crescendo, Michael Arlen wrote a series of essays exploring the effects on the American psyche of the conflict intruding itself into homes across the country each evening. ![]()
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