She ran across the boardwalk, down the steps to the powdery sand, rushing toward the lights of the passing cars, and the dark Atlantic beyond. I stayed two more days, but I didn’t see her again.
NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATED SALES CORP.,
September 8, 1978
CRACK AND THE BOX
One sad rainy morning last winter, I talked to a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine. She was twenty-two, stiletto-thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with Johns in parked cars to pay for the dope. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn’t really answer beyond “makes me feel good.” While we talked and she told her tale of squalor, the children ignored us. They were watching television.
Walking back to my office in the rain, I brooded about the woman, her zombielike children, and my own callous indifference. I’d heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never wrote them anymore; the sons of similar women, glimpsed a dozen years ago, are now in Dannemora or Soledad or Joliet; in a hundred cities, their daughters are moving into the same loveless rooms. As I walked, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies. Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing. They were additional casualties of our time of plague, demoralized reminders that although this country holds only 2 percent of the world’s population, it consumes 65 percent of the world’s supply of hard drugs.
Why, for God’s sake? Why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives stupefied? I’ve talked to hundreds of addicts over the years; some were my friends. But none could give sensible answers. They stutter about the pain of the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in a society empty of both. But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful. But almost nobody in power asks, Why? Least of all, George Bush and his drug warriors.
William Bennett talks vaguely about the heritage of ’60s permissiveness, the collapse of Traditional Values, and all that. But he and Bush offer the traditional American excuse: It Is Somebody Else’s Fault. This posture set the stage for the self-righteous invasion of Panama; Bush even accused Manuel Noriega of “poisoning our children.” But he never asked why so many Americans demand the poison.
And then, on that rainy morning in New York, I saw another one of those ragged men staring out at the rain from a doorway. I suddenly remembered the inert postures of the children in that welfare hotel, and I thought: television.
Ah, no, I muttered to myself: too simple. Something as complicated as drug addiction can’t be blamed on television. Come on.…But I remembered all those desperate places I’d visited as a reporter, where there were no books and a TV set was always playing and the older kids had gone off somewhere to shoot smack, except for the kid who was at the mortuary in a coffin. I also remembered when I was a boy in the ’40s and early ’50s, and drugs were a minor sideshow, a kind of dark little rumor. And there was one major difference between that time and this: television.
We had unemployment then; illiteracy, poor living conditions, racism, governmental stupidity, a gap between rich and poor. We didn’t have the all-consuming presence of television in our lives. Now two generations of Americans have grown up with television from their earliest moments of consciousness. Those same American generations are afflicted by the pox of drug addiction.
Only thirty-five years ago, drug addiction was not a major problem in this country. Yes: There were drug addicts. We had some at the end of the nineteenth century, too, hooked on the cocaine in patent medicines. During the placid ’50s, Commissioner Harry An-slinger pumped up the budget of the old Bureau of Narcotics with fantasies of reefer madness. Heroin was sold and used in most major American cities, while the bebop generation of jazz musicians got jammed up with horse.
But until the early ’60s, narcotics were still marginal to American life; they weren’t the $12O-billion market they make up today. If anything, those years have an eerie innocence. In 1955 there were 31,700,000 TV sets in use in the country (the number is now past 184 million). But the majority of the audience had grown up without the dazzling new medium. They embraced it, were diverted by it, perhaps even loved it, but they weren’t formed by it. That year, the New York police made a mere 1,234 felony drug arrests; in 1988 it was 43,901. They confiscated ninety-seven ounces of cocaine for the entire year; last year it was hundreds of pounds. During each year of the ’50s in New York, there were only about a hundred narcotics-related deaths. But by the end of the ’60s, when the first generation of children formed by television had come to maturity (and thus to the marketplace), the number of such deaths had risen to 1,200. The same phenomenon was true in every major American city.
In the last Nielsen survey of American viewers, the average family was watching television seven hours a day. This has never happened before in history. No people has ever been entertained for seven hours a day. The Elizabethans didn’t go to the theater seven hours a day. The pre-TV generation did not go to the movies seven hours a day. Common sense tells us that this all-pervasive diet of instant imagery, sustained now for forty years, must have changed us in profound ways.
Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts. And though some lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users. Viewers can’t work or play while watching television; they can’t read; they can’t be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial. So are drug addicts.
One Michigan State University study in the early ’80s offered a group of four- and five-year-olds the choice of giving up television or giving up their fathers. Fully one third said they would give up Daddy. Given a similar choice (between cocaine or heroin and father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, children, job), almost every stone junkie would do the same.
There are other disturbing similarities. Television itself is a consciousness-altering instrument. With the touch of a button, it takes you out of the “real” world in which you reside and can place you at a basketball game, the back alleys of Miami, the streets of Bucharest, or the cartoony living rooms of Sitcom Land. Each move from channel to channel alters mood, usually with music or a laugh track. On any given evening, you can laugh, be frightened, feel tension, thump with excitement. You can even tune in MacNeil/Lehrer and feel sober.
But none of these abrupt shifts in mood is earned. They are attained as easily as popping a pill. Getting news from television, for example, is simply not the same experience as reading it in a newspaper. Reading is active. The reader must decode little symbols called words, then create images or ideas and make them connect; at its most basic level, reading is an act of the imagination. But the television viewer doesn’t go through that process. The words are spoken to him by Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings. There isn’t much decoding to do when watching television, no time to think or ponder before the next set of images and spoken words appears to displace the present one. The reader, being active, works at his or her own pace; the viewer, being passive, proceeds at a pace determined by the show. Except at the highest levels, television never demands that its audience take part in an act of imagination. Reading always does.