Reading Compreh...

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.

Ridiculing television, and warning about its inherent evils, is nothing new. It has been that way since the medium was invented, and television hasn't exactly been lavished with respect as the decades have passed. I suspect, though, that a lot of the fear and loathing directed at television comes out of a time-honored, reflexive overreaction to the dominant medium of the moment. For the past several decades, television has been blamed for corrupting our youth and exciting our adults, distorting reality, and basically being a big, perhaps dangerous, waste of time. Before TV, radio and film were accused of the same things. And long before that in fact, some 2,500 years earlier philosophers were arguing that poetry and drama should be excluded from any ideal city on much the same grounds.
In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato (428-348 B.C.) attacks epic poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.) and the tragedians on several grounds, all of which have a familiar ring. Their productions are appearances and not realities, he gripes. Drawing, and in fact all imitation . . . [is] quite removed from the truth. The audience, as well as the art form, troubled Plato, whose remarks are colored by an implied disdain for the popularity of public performances. The common people, as Plato so charitably calls them, are drawn to peevish and diverse characters such as Odysseus and other heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey who (to Plato, anyway) engage in such questionable displays of emotion as spinning out a long melancholy lamentation or disfiguring themselves in grief. To Plato, baring such intimate sorrows is not to be condoned. (Clearly, he would have given thumbs down to the central characters of Shakespeares Hamlet and Macbeth.) If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse1 of song and epic, Plato warns, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city, instead of law. Finally, Plato sums up his anti-arts argument with the cold, sweeping pronouncement that poetry is not to be taken seriously.
One academic who has studied and written extensively about both Plato and television suggests that Plato, rather than being anti-arts, was merely an elitist. Plato wanted to ban poetry readings and live theater, the argument goes, because, being free and accessible and raucous and extremely popular, they were the mass entertainment of that era. If, instead of tragedy and poetry, and Homer and Aeschylus,$$^{2}$$ you read mass entertainment or popular media, you'll recognize Plato's arguments as the ancestor of all the reasons we have today for being suspicious of television. To wit: poetry, by which Plato means drama, confuses us between appearance and reality. The action it presents is too extreme and violent. Most important, its a corrupting influence, perverting its audience by bombarding it with inferior characters and vulgar subjects and constituting, in Plato's own words, a harm to the mind of its audience.
If Plato's Republic had become reality, it would have been a republic with a lot of empty libraries, theaters, and museums if, indeed, those repositories of the arts would have survived at all. Plato's personal utopia never came to pass but throughout the centuries, wherever and when ever a new medium of artistic expression attracted a lot of people, someone has been ready, waiting, and eager to attack its content and fear its impact.
$$^1$$ The Muses inspired poetry and song in Greek mythology.
$$^2$$ Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist.