A message about the medium
The sign survives, a spray-painted stamp of political graffiti on a stuccoed wall behind the building that houses my workplace, the Windsor Star, and several other businesses in downtown Windsor:
“The television will not be revolutionized.”
It’s a clever piece of wordsmithing, a play on the popular 1970 black protest anthem “The revolution will not be televised” by the jazz poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron and the documentary of the same name about the 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt against former president Hugo Chavez.
It’s probably not coincidental that it used to be at the back of the building once occupied by CTV News Windsor, formerly known as the A Channel and now taken over by a local credit union. It’s also ironic in that context: No one would ever expect anything revolutionary out of a television station that offered up mostly pap and PR.
So what did these graffiti artists want to tell us with their image of a television set in revolutionary red colours accompanied by the message about that medium in black type? Is it a critical statement about the state of the commercial media that are too embedded in the power structures of society to lead the revolution that is needed to free the poor and dispossessed?
Scott-Heron, in explaining the inspiration behind his original composition, said he meant people should take responsibility in being the change that they seek.
“The first change that takes places is in your mind,” he said. “You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move.”
But in stating the reverse, it seems to me that the medium of television cannot change and therefore don’t expect a revolution to come at us in HD or any other kind of TV.
I am contemplating this after watching the fascinating documentary The Best of Enemies about the televised debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal in 1968. The ABC TV debates between the two intellectual titans, broadcast to an estimated 10 million people, was indeed revolutionary for its time. It elevated the network in popularity and status too.
It was also inevitable, perhaps, that such a powerful forum would not continue. Today, television — whether delivered by the networks or anyone of a number of specialty cable channels — is so much drivel: ‘reality’ programs, superficial and highly partisan news or bad entertainment.
There’s very little revolutionary about television anymore. Perhaps Network-like rants or Jeff Daniels’ cooly delivered answer about the greatness of America. Yet those exceptions cry out for the need to confront the power structures of society and, if not create a revolution, at least restructure some of the imbalances in our world.
Providing we refuse to become couch potatoes. As Rosie Bones sings to “The Revolution Will be Televised” on Jeff Beck’s Loud Hailer album, “This shit is real”:
“The revolution will be televised,
you can choose to watch or not,
but if we all just talk from the safety of our sofas,
there won’t be much revolution to watch.”
Part of “Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs” series. Click here to see more.
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications for more than 30 years. Read more on LinkedIn, Medium.com and Twitter.
