Shh! Don't tell Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the gang about this, or they'll go after poor old Ben Franklin

Even before the advent of "reality" TV, I was fascinated by the public's peculiarly ambivalent relationship with reality. Let me try to explain.

I think we're all familiar with the old-style disdain for reality in the world of entertainment. As far back as I can remember, the common wisdom was that people watching TV or going to the movies wanted to escape reality. And believe me, I understand the impulse, as a card-carrying 9-to-5 drudge. When I leave my desk every day, whew, do I want to escape.

But gradually I came to understand that the craving for escape isn't the whole story. The concept of reality still exerts some kind of pull. It's amazing how many folks seem to crave the "stamp" of reality--some kind of seal, or certification, or label, or sticker, or imprimatur that says, "THIS IS REAL."

The hitch is that those folks don't seem to demand, or necessarily even want, the actual reality that lurks beneath that precious seal of reality.

An anecdote:

Awhile back, a coworker and friend told this story drawn from his real life as a would-be writer for TV and/or the movies. He had pitched an idea that seemed tailor-made for a TV movie. Which is to say that it was built around a health issue--something to do with midwives, as I recall (as you'll see, it really doesn't matter)--and the story lent itself to good guys vs. bad guys (presumably those nasty bureaucrats). My friend's idea had attracted enough interest to move several rungs up the TV world's notoriously rickety Ladder of Development. He was just a rung away from raking in what for him would have been significant money. Of course, considering that he had gone from being a struggling actor to a struggling writer, what qualfied as significant money in his life probably wouldn't cover lunch for a TV mogul.

The deal looked all set, until one day a panic-laden phone call came. Some network bigwig, or at any rate a honcho higher up on the corporate food chain, was having a hissy fit, demanding to know: WAS THIS STORY REAL? And you have to trust that what mattered to Mr. Bigwig wasn't the substance of the story. Clearly what mattered was that the network be able to slap on the precious label "based upon a true story." (Notice how they like to say "based upon" rather than "based on," which is what you or I would say? Presumably this is meant to show that they're really, really serious about this based-uponness.)

My friend was made to understand that Mr. Bigwig's concern was in fact so important that it constituted a deal-breaker. Luckily, he was able to allay the panic with the assurance that the story was 100-percent Grade A true.

Unluckily, the fortess-against-thought that is Hollywood is protected by a veritable minefield of deal-breakers. There were still plenty of other ways for the project to be derailed, as it was soon enough.

Now the irony here, in case you haven't worked it out for yourself, is that if the movie had actually been made, we know that not the slightest millisecond would ever have been wasted over so utterly inconsequential an issue as the "truth" of the story. You'll note that none of these TV movies that come certified as "based upon" reality are ever promoted as BEING "a true story." I imagine that anyone who says at any point in the development or production of such a project, "But that's not the way it happend," is assumed to be either (a) joking or (b) out of his friggin' mind.

And yet, and yet. . . . Isn't it fascinating that the powers that be would spare no effort to make sure that the damned story of their TV movie, despite having ultimately been distorted and falsified in every way imaginable, at some point was true?

What I detect here is an undercurrent in American life that has hardly been noticed, except by people like Karl Rove who use it for evil. I'm not so naive as to suggest that the American people have an unnoticed passion for truth. C'mon, take a glance around us! But people do still seem to need the trappings of reality, just without any of the inconvenient things that tend to come with it. Real reality has a nasty way of being complex, ambiguous, untidy, uncontrollable, not conventionally dramatic, and often (and this may be the most unforgivable) downright depressing.

What they seem to want is some kind of "reality substitute," a reality that's better than the real thing. And no one gave them a clearer vision of what they could have than our beloved President Ronald Reagan. Reagan after all lived his last several decades in a private reality of surpassing pleasantness. Being rich and having many still-richer friends can do that for a person. And Reagan wanted everyone to share this pleasantness--by sharing, not the riches, but the crucial concept that every American has the right to believe in whatever reality makes him/her feel best. If that happens to be hatred and bigotry, then not only should you do it, but there's no reason why you should feel bad about it.

For years I was proud of my discovery of the sway of "reality substitute," and thought I should do something with it. I just couldn't think what. Beyond identifying it, what was there to say or do about it?

Nobody really seemed to care. Especially when "reality" TV descended on us. Of course it should always have been called "unreality" TV, since it was devoted to offering only the veneer and never the substance of reality. But what else would you expect in an era when the media, emphatically including the mainstream news media, had so open-heartedly embraced reality substitute?

And even more especially when control of the White House was seized by our first full-fledged reality-substitute president. The crowning moment in the flight from reality came when that unnamed philosopher-functionary in Bushworld, while paying tribute to intrepid trailblazer George W. Bush, who was creating visionary new realities out of . . . well, it was never clear what he was making them out of, contrasted his hero with the surly malcontents who remained outside the neoncon fantasy world. He referred to those fringe elements derisively as "the reality-based community."

I can't imagine that any DownWithTyranny reader needs chapter-and-verse documentation of the Bush administration's assault on reality. Perhaps nobody has captured the spirit better than Air America Radio's "Morning Sedition," which every Wednesday has been serving up the latest dispatches from "The War on Brains."

In its most brazen form, the War on Brains has set its sights on science.

Now science isn't and shouldn't be immune from criticism. For example, there is a corporatized commodity we might call Big Science which could benefit from some stiff knocks. But that of course isn't what the thugs of the Right have gone after. No, they've sought to marginzalize if not actually dismantle the very concept of science, which is to say the struggle that mankind has been waging since the dawn of the species to achieve some understanding of the physical universe around us.

Of course the administration's indispensable allies in this central battlefront in the War on Brains have been the massed, itchin'-fer-a-fight forces of organized junk religion.

None of this is news. I guess I've been inspired to bring up the subject by a couple of recent rays of hope. First there was the election-day defeat of that pack of school-board know-nothings in Dover, Pennsylvania. Then, in part inspired by that event, there was an op-ed piece in Saturday's New York Times by Scott M. Liell, "the author of the forthcoming 'Founding Faith,' about the religious beliefs of the founders."

Liell was commemorating the 250th anniversary of an earthquake centered at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, north of Boston--"the most destructive earthquake ever recorded in the eastern United States."

This cataclysm, Liell notes, produced two very different kinds of responses:

* On the one hand, there were people like John Adams who responded to this awesome display of nature's power with curiosity, taking it as an opportunity to try to gain some knowledge and understanding of natural phenomena.

* And then there were the people who retreated behind the power and wrath of mumbo-jumbo, notably the dark forces of religion as practiced in colonial Massachusetts. To this fire-and-brimstone set, the earthquake was God's punishment for . . . well, fill in the blank.

No one filled in the blank more creatively than the Rev. Thomas Prince of Boston's South Church. Prince sermonized that the earthquake was God's punishment for a sinful invention by none other than . . . Benjamin Franklin!

Liell reminds us that Franklin was already world-famous for his invention of the lightning rod. With all that famous kite-flying, he had learned enough about lightning and electricity to figure out that lightning rods could protect buildings by harmlessly redirecting lightning bolts, which since time immemorial had been frying any structure that came in their path, to ground.

To the Reverend Prince this was mucking about in God's domain. Lightning, after all, was God's basic tool for expressing displeasure. Now this dastardly Franklin had deprived God of His favorite tool! Was it any surprise that He had visited an earthquake upon the northern colonies?

Now, I don't want this to smack of a homework assignment, and so I'm refraining from posting the whole piece here. But I hope your appetite has been whetted enough to want to read it if you haven't already, and therefore, in particular for the benefit of those who haven't coughed up the NYT's ransom payment for its now-under-wraps opinion writers, I'm going to try to post it in a comment. (No guarantees here, but I'll give it a shot.)

However, the point I want to get to is the conclusion Liell offers us about the nature of the battle that raged in the colonial America of 1755, and how it relates to the battle beteween science and faith that is promoted so vehemently, and often violently, by the junk religionists of 2005:

"At the end of the day, it was never faith per se that stood in opposition to science; Franklin was ultimately as much a believer as Thomas Prince. Many people of faith--Unitarians, Quakers and those who, like most of the founding fathers, were deists--were prominent members of the scientific community. Rather, it was (and is) a specific type of belief that consistently finds itself at odds with science, one that is not found merely in America and is not limited to Christianity. It is the specific brand of faith that devalues reason and confers the mantle of infallible, absolute authority upon a leader or a book. It is only the priests of these sects, as Jefferson said, who 'dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.' . . .

"For Franklin and his like-minded contemporaries, scientific pursuit was the ultimate act of faith; faith that there was an order to be discovered and faith in our ability to discover it."