Tweedledum said to Alice, "You know very well you're not real."

"I am real!" said Alice, and began to cry.

"You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying," Tweedledee remarked. "There's nothing to cry about."

In preliterate societies, the separation of spirit from flesh is thought to occur in the surrealist realm of dream, art, ritual, myth. Daily life, in the field or on the hunt, is intensely sensate, with all senses alert & the spirit imprisoned in the body.

We reverse this. Our electronic workaday world divorces images from physical reality. As counterpoint, we turn physical reality into pastimes: the hippie world of sensate experience serves to balance the nonsensory spirit world of electronic media. Like natives, the young enjoy the best of both worlds, though it's hard to know which of these worlds to call "real."

On the surface, what could be more realistic than modern war, yet the Vietnam war employs more people in packaging & distributing its news than in combat. It's a media war, fought every night in our own parlors. The jungle war has been reduced to ritual only, played out by unknowing, sacrificial victims. Since we know these victims primarily as TV actors, we're puzzled & frightened when in real life they bleed & die.

It's estimated that the ratio of noncombatants to actual fighters in 1914-18 was 12 to 1, at least as high as Vietnam. What has changed is the increased number assigned to "public relations."

According to the New York Times, June 21, 1972, a convoy, sent north from Saigon to help lift the seige of Anloc, consisted of "13 tanks, followed by several military jeeps, followed by eight reporters' cars and the Associated Press van, which resembles a bakery truck."

Suppose Vietnam went unreported in the news. "News" is what is reported; what isn't reported isn't news. Unreported events don't cease to exist, of course, they simply fall into an area devoid of social responsibility & moral restraint. "News" is information regarded as suitable for public attention, even public control. The Tonkin Gulf incident, which never occurred, was news, while MyLai, which did occur, went unreported. This was "All the News That's Fit to Print."

Suppose a person, even an entire group, is ignored by the media. Until recently, America was full of "invisibles." Blacks were ignored in literature. On radio, they became Amos 'n' Andy, played by two white men. On film, they became comic servants. They were never shown as cowboys, though in real life about a third of the post-Civil War cowhands were black. Deadwood Dick was black as coal, but on film he turned pink-cheeked & blue-eyed.

Blacks made their first public appearance on TV when they turned to violence. Suddenly they were no longer invisible. For one brief moment, they could be seen on TV. At which point, they were also seen for the first time on the streets.

But that moment passed quickly. The media image soon shifted from real blacks - unemployed, uneducated, hungry - to "media blacks" - well-dressed, professionally employed, college-educated. Real blacks once more became invisible.

But the impulse to translate TV into flesh is casual, not compelling. With print, great areas of sensory experience are felt to be missing. Readers experience a necessity to translate images into flesh & statements into actions. TV, by contrast, seems complete in itself. Each TV experience seems discrete, self-sufficient, true, of value in itself, judged & motivated & understood in terms of itself alone. Concepts such as causation & purpose appear irrelevant, basic only to the thinking of the past.

This sort of apprehension of being is familiar to anthropologists. Dorothy Lee, in Freedom and Culture, writes that Trobriand Islanders assumed "that the validity of a magical spell lay, not in its results, not in proof, but in its very being; in the appropriateness of its inheritance, in its place within the patterned activity, in its being performed by the appropriate person, in its realization of its mythical basis. To seek validity through proof was foreign to their thinking."

At the Chicago riots of 1968, the demonstrators shouted, "The whole world is watching!" And the whole world was. What they were watching was first-rate TV drama & they hadn't the slightest interest in translating this into response. Public reaction came only in print.

When Tweedledee told Alice, "You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying. ...There's nothing to cry about," Alice replied, "If I wasn't real, I shouldn't be able to cry."

"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.