Johnny Carson and the Fantasy of America

But I know this matters. I know there is something critical here we’re underestimating, and it has to do with television’s ability to make the present tense exist forever, in a way no other medium ever has. It’s not disposable, even if we want it to be.

Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.

With television bottlenecking magic’s visibility to the public, the art form seemed to be tumbling down to one of its lowest common denominators: flashy, headline-grabbing, one-off illusions only seen on a screen, the concepts for which were approved by bigwig executives focused more on ratings than the quality of the magic being created. Most impo

Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.