The Impossible Question

About twenty years ago, Fred Friendly, now made famous by George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck, created a wonderful PBS program called The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. What he did was to put together a preeminent group of people: Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen, the then-president of Planned Parenthood, theologians and philosophers, etc., and to pose to them an escalating series of hypotheticals. The moderator (often it was Harvard’s Arthur Miller, no relation to the playwright) would ask a “What if?” question and ask people to respond to it, from legal, moral and ethical points of view. He would then turn up the heat. He would make the question worse. Make the hypothetical harder to bear. Pretty soon he and the panel would reach that eternally-difficult place where human logic runs smack into human emotion, and logic doesn’t always win; that place where we know what we should think, but the situation posed strikes us in such a central place that the deep, primal, damn-it-this-hurts part of us rises up and will not be denied.

In that spirit, then...

A few weeks ago I posed a hypothetical of my own. If Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, were to be paroled from prison and he ended up sitting in front of you asking for a job, would you give him one? I asked it as a lifelong rabid fan of John Lennon, whose influence on my own life has been gigantic. (Put it this way: when I am on my deathbed, my brother has standing instructions to play The Beatles.) A lively discussion ensued on Facebook, and of course what I was going after was the notion of redemption. Do we believe, do we actually believe, in the possibility of rehabilitation. And just to be clear, the question is not whether Chapman, as a specific person, can be made again into a productive, non-murderous non-whacko member of society; the question is whether those of us who love and loved John Lennon can ever find it in ourselves to believe that that man has actually reformed.

But now, let’s do the difficult thing. Let’s turn up the heat.

Mark David Chapman is your cousin. You grew up with him, you played together when you were kids, and damn it all, you loved him. You knew he had withdrawn, you knew he was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, but you still never imagined for a second that he could actually hurt anyone, let alone kill anyone, let alone John Lennon. But he did, and he’s been in prison all these years, and you’ve had to endure the stigma of being Mark David Chapman’s cousin, and now he’s out and he hopes that you can forgive him. He seems completely fine, he even seems kinda like the cousin you once knew and loved. But can you ever trust your own impressions of him ever again? Can you believe, right down to your core, that he has truly reformed?

The heat. Turning it up.

It’s not Mark David Chapman, but it’s still your cousin, and you grew up together and you loved him. But now the person he hurt wasn’t some public figure who you loved in the way we love certain public figures; now he has hurt your sister. Someone you love has done something awful, truly awful, to someone you love.

Hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s what we’re taught, and it’s right, we know it’s right. We know that it’s right. But someone you love has done something truly awful to someone you love. How can you possibly resolve this in your own soul without your mind cracking open? This question has shattered marriages and torn families apart.

Let me emphasize, right here: I have a sister, and I love her beyond description. Nothing like this has ever happened to her, and I pray that nothing like it ever, ever will, and the mere thought of something happening to her makes my mind skitter away in horror. I do not, for a moment, intend of any of what follows to diminish the hideous pain and anguish of the hypothetical awful thing described.

Because the situation can still get worse. There’s one more layer.

The something awful that was done to someone you loved, it was a sexual offense of some kind. The kind of thing that gets people listed as sexual offenders--for forever. Twenty years have passed since the horrible thing that happened, and your sister was deeply scarred by it and no one has talked to your cousin’s mother for years now. But you have somehow done the heroic, the truly heroic, thing: you’ve found a way to forgive your cousin, in your own heart. You’ve actually achieved that. Your sister doesn’t understand it, but you’ve done it.

And now your cousin has been released from prison. By every indication, prison has done the thing we supposedly create prisons for: your cousin has been chastened, he’s found religion, he is gentle and peaceful and there’s a sense of calm about him that you would have never thought possible.

But he’s on that list. And you’ve found a way to forgive him, but society hasn’t. Society has found a way to continue to punish, even after the punishment is supposed to have ended. It’s easy for them: they don’t know your cousin, they didn’t grow up with him, he’s just another guy on a list and they don’t have to consider whether or not he might be reformed. As a friend of mine put it on Facebook (I’m paraphrasing), why should we use real people as a laboratory to find out whether this guy has actually reformed? Why run the risk to innocents when we can’t ever be truly certain that someone on a list of sexual offenders is actually rehabilitated?

But you know. You know him better than anyone, and you’ve forgiven him, and you can see what he’s become now. You know he’s okay. Still: the list, and his name, and the websites that list sexual offenders in any given neighborhood. Your cousin can’t find an apartment, he can’t get a job.

He comes to you. He begs you. Put in a good word for him, or he’s gonna be out on the street. He will die, out there on the street. You’ve already done the impossible heroic thing, you’ve forgiven the unforgivable, but now he’s begging for that one thing more. Stand up in public, even in front of your sister who cannot understand any of this, and say to the world that you believe this person is okay. That we should stop punishing him. That a person, even a person who has done that truly awful thing, can in fact change. Even though some people don’t change; even though rapists are sometimes released from prison and go back to raping; even though, even though, even though. In this case, this one specific case about this one specific human being, you know reform has actually happened, but the world doesn’t and the world has a million reasons not to believe you.

Will you stand up? Can you?

And here’s where any hypothetical breaks down, because there is no general answer that can ever satisfy the question. It’s personal, and it can only be answered by you, and the answer is almost certainly one thing when it’s a hypothetical but if it actually happened that way you would get swamped by emotion and your real answer in the moment will almost certainly be fuck no.

In one direction, horrible consequences to your cousin. In the other direction, a scar on your sister’s soul is ripped open and she can’t face you anymore. You know what you know, but there are no good consequences in any conceivable direction. So. Will you?

Peas Blaze Significantly

Ignoring for the moment the other controversy surrounding the New York Times, I will note that last Sunday they published a piece asking the question "Is PBS Still Necessary?" Written by Charles McGrath, former editor of the Times's Book Review, the piece manages to mostly avoid the old conservatives-hate-PBS nonsense, and focuses instead on whether, in the cable era, PBS is still relevant. Okay, fair question. Let's look at it.

Ratings - McGrath writes,

The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets.

But what he doesn't tell us is anything about how those ratings numbers change over time. Do they show a steady decline to this 1.4 million number? Or are there peaks and valleys? It's entirely possible that he has picked the lowest number of a valley and claimed it as representative of PBS's ratings--just as it's equally possible that he picked the highest number of a peak. There's no way to tell from this article. (And of course I'm altogether too lazy to go and find out.)

So on the question of ratings, I can only look at my own experience. Yes, there was a long period when I watched very little of what was on PBS. Cable channels had indeed stolen my attention away. But the funny thing is that lately, I've been finding my way back (which is probably why I chose to write this today). It wasn't a conscious decision--it just happened on its own. I would flip through channels looking for something interesting, and more and more it would be something on PBS. Not new shows, either, so I don't think it's a result of programming changes to attract bigger audiences, I think it's just that my own tastes have brought me back to what was always there. This is why I ask what the ratings trends are, since I clearly see in my own viewing habits just the sort of valley and peak I was talking about. And as far as I'm concerned, PBS is on the uptick.

Content - After a quick survey of PBS's involvement in the culture wars, McGrath writes,

Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it’s hard to detect much of a bias toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for “Antiques Roadshow,” all the prime-time stalwarts — “The NewsHour,” “Nova,” “Nature,” “Masterpiece” — are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it.

Funny thing, though: "NewsHour" is one of the programs I've recently rediscovered. True enough, the program looks like a dinosaur in the modern visual age, with a complete absence of the sort of visual flair you can find on even mid-market local newscasts. But that's exactly why I've rediscovered it: I've been watching more news programming, what with the presidential campaign and all, and it took very little time for me to grow--well, disgusted is the only word I can use for network content. I used to be a big Peter Jennings fan but of course he's gone, and even on the best of the current crop, NBC's program with Brian Williams, the news floats by like that paper bag in American Beauty: beautiful in its strange little way, but as soon as the wind dies down it's just a scrap of trash again.

No, NewsHour, with musty old Jim Lehrer, is news for adults. It covers more in sixty minutes than CNN does in 24 hours, with no frills, just a whole lot of content. And on Fridays there is the best public-affairs program on television, Bill Moyers Journal. The other night, Moyers did an eye-opening interview with former NPR journalist Sarah Chayes on Afghanistan that would, if there was any justice at all, entirely change the conversation on what's happening over there. An overview, plus a complete transcript, can be found on the Journal's website, and is completely worth your time. Believe me: if you want to know what's actually going on in the world, Bill Moyers is your man. (Which is of course exactly why the conservatives in power hate him so much.)

McGrath also takes a potshot at what used to be called "Masterpiece Theatre" but is now simply "Masterpiece," writing that PBS is "so strapped for cash that ['Masterpiece'] has pretty much settled into an all-Jane Austen format." Which is, again, a cherry-picking of a single recent offering, a slate of Jane Austen adaptations, some new and some repeats like the fabulous Pride and Prejudice adaptation of ten years ago with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. But of course "Masterpiece" also ran, about a year ago, a brilliant BBC adaptation of Bleak House that in fact entirely undercuts McGrath's argument--because this Bleak House ran on PBS, not on its cable competitor BBC America, which you would think would be a natural conduit for BBC content such as this.

Similarly, just this past week I've been engrossed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s African American Lives 2, which is not on BET or any other cable channel, but on PBS. I'm grateful to have it on any channel--but here, once again, is PBS bringing me something incredibly enriching that I didn't even know I wanted to see till I saw it.

The glaring omissison - I can't quote what he gets most wrong, because he simply never touches on it at all, even though it remains PBS's greatest, most enduring strength: Sesame Street is simply not mentioned. Which I think speaks for itself.

On the other hand - McGrath also notes,

"...and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding."

Granted. No argument from me there.

Added, ten minutes later - Just as I finished revising this entry, my iTunes library (which has almost 9,000 tracks) randomly chose to play "The Prince of Denmark's March" by Jeremiah Clarke, which of course happens to be the music used as the intro for "Masterpiece Theatre." Weird.