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Review by Gerard Martin
This is surely the decade when the great unifying vision of the national "melting pot" gives way to more the pluralistic social metaphor of tossed salad. Small surprise that Americans begin to find themselves caught in the cross-hairs of an escalating domestic conflict over competing ethics, values, and basic cultural identity. In these multicultural, multigenerational times, veteran news analyst and media critic Jon Katz pulls no punches in his enthusiastic rebuttal for a future that supports the revolutionary values upon which this country was founded.
One early figure from American history is Thomas Paine, the eighteenth century British expatriate author of a great classic work of political writing entitled Common Sense. So prominently does Paine feature in the telling of the story of our country that Katz considers him a "foresaken" father of news reporting, and questions why there are few if any statues to him in the groves of journalism's academe.
Katz brings discourse and dissent into a spirited discussion of the way life has changed or not changed throughout his lifetime. He provides rare insight into the early days of "broadcast" news reporting and how different the news of the day becomes when we pick not only our own time slot -- any hour of the night or day on CNN -- but also our own definition of news. He notes how there are thousands of Internet "newsgroups" and millions of "web pages" of information online for the asking. This overwhelming degree of choice means that we are able to "hear what everybody is saying online" all without quite knowing "what to make of it."
The one issue that concerns Katz with enough passion to butt heads with Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster, 1993) anthologist William Bennett is the refusal on the part of an older generation of Americans to recognize change for the better in our society. If culture is a universal language -- and media the means of attaining this modern literacy -- then those who fail to embrace change risk preparing their children for a world that no longer exists.
In what has become an intense three-ring circus of dispute over American values and national identity, Virtuous Reality promotes a unifying vision of unveiled defiance that celebrates the principles that are the foundation of America's rich cultural life and identity.
Gerard Martin is a freelance writer in Lafayette, Louisiana.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.