My storytelling has been remiss! Just as I might have moved up the little matter of China and Russia taking over the world, I should have mentioned that earlier that spring, Emory was poached by CNN. Although in the interest of our enduring comity I’d continued to duck her pontifications—sorry, not the kindest of nouns—that avoidance was becoming more challenging. Any number of people knew we were friends (Emory’s implicit imprimatur gave me cover in the English department that I could sorely use), so colleagues would bring up this or that opener or forceful interview even if I’d managed to miss it. Because YouTube remembered previous searches for Emory Ruth, the site was always pushing recommendations of her latest appearances up in my face without having been asked. And those appearances weren’t restricted to CNN. Emory was everywhere. Podcasts, conferences, panels, speeches, you name it. Numerous times I would browse the cable channels only to accidentally trip across my best friend holding forth.
As far as I could ascertain, she was making a name for herself as the intelligent face of idiocy. The formula seemed to be not form following content but form clashing wildly with content. She was smooth, alluring, and sexy, but most of all she came across as blatantly bright. Thus she flattered her viewers, who, if everyone was as smart as everyone else, were also as smart as this silver-tongued broadcaster. Although after being upbraided for using “biddable” Emory had toned down her highfalutin lexicon, she never lowered the tone to nearly the degree that many of her media rivals did. This was shrewd. She didn’t appear to talk down to her audience, and while the point she was making was often anti-intellectual, her syntax and delivery were sophisticated. Stylistically, then, she reassured beleaguered members of the roundly deposed intelligentsia—whose reservations about the culture’s direction of travel had become unsayable—that the country had not been entirely lost to barbarians. I wasn’t eager to form the thought explicitly, but Emory met all the requirements for a successful populist demagogue.
For example, when I switched on the TV one Sunday morning to see who was on Face the Nation, surprise, the set was tuned to a dialogue between Emory and some stuffy academic at Columbia. Although I’d never have sought out this appearance, I simply couldn’t change the channel right away.
While the show’s format was supposedly oppositional, by this point no one, but no one, went on television and threw cold water on Mental Parity as a theory or called for the restoration of standards in hiring, education, and the arts. To the contrary, even talking heads explicitly invited for being “controversial” routinely wasted a portion of the program allaying any fears the audience might harbor that they were even slightly interested in returning to the bad old days of cruel cognitive apartheid. Predictably, then, when I started watching this bearded fiftyish fellow Dr. Arden Hughes was midway through his obligatory hedge: “There’s no question that in the past we sidelined far too many folks whose rich but differently expressed perceptions and perhaps less than obvious talents were therefore lost. As a society, we’ve been impoverished by that dismissal. There’s no question, either, that the science on MP is settled . . .” Typically, then, this guy wasn’t really on the other side, but to fill the hour he’d niggle over how many people of precisely the same intelligence could dance on the head of a pin. It’s worth remembering that in those days there was no other side. You were either thrilled by Mental Parity or ecstatically thrilled.
As it happens, this video is still online, so I can give you a flavor of the discussion word for word.
“But arguably,” Dr. Hughes said, once he at last got around to the topic at hand, “Lieutenant Columbo is a natural MP hero. He’s an archetype of the chronically underestimated character who’s mistaken by his would-be superiors as unsmart. The joke is always on the so-called intelligent characters, who are hanged by their own condescension. These slick, self-impressed murderers make mistakes and give their guilt away because they hold a detective with perceived cognitive inferiority in contempt. Every episode is an MP morality play. The . . . if you will, the D-word, if you’ll excuse the crudity, always triumphs, and the aloof, patronizing ‘experts’ end up in jail. The show may go back to 1968, but its themes are ultra-contemporary. Banning the reruns would be a pity. Justifiably, the program might now garner a large new following.”
This was the first I’d heard that Columbo was on the chopping block.
“What do you think, Emory?” the host asked. The older woman’s physical orientation toward Emory even while Hughes was talking suggested an eagerness to ingratiate herself with CNN’s rising star. “Maybe we shouldn’t merely allow Peter Falk to remain in the back of Nick at Nite’s closet, but should restore the detective to prime time.”
“Well, I think we’d find that for modern audiences the production values are too low, and the premise is too formulaic,” Emory said. Flowing white robes gave her an angelic air; the garb hit harmonics with Jean Simmons’s revivalist scenes in Elmer Gantry. “But that’s not why I’d bury that show six feet under. Columbo still embraces the whole disreputable smart-slash-not-smart paradigm. While I can see why you might mistake the program for forward-thinking, Dr. Hughes, it’s anything but. I worry your error here is to confuse a class issue with a cognitive one. Lieutenant Columbo is blue-collar; the accent, the shambling manner, and the crumpled trench coat are all signifiers. His prey is reliably wealthy. But the show still casts the characters in accordance with a conventional and now conclusively debunked hierarchy of intelligence. If in disguise, Columbo is the smart character. Also in disguise, the murderers are cognitively inferior. The producers have turned the class stereotype on its head. But the old brutality—the violent separating of wheat from chaff, the fetishistic distinguishing of who’s cleverer than whom—well, it remains perfectly in place. Prejudice is embedded in the very concept of the program. But the fact that this bigotry isn’t immediately apparent—it’s insidious—is one of the main reasons I wouldn’t want children to be raised with access to it.”
“But even if the show does adhere to a dated ‘paradigm,’ as you say,” Dr. Hughes said, “isn’t there a place, an important place, for preserving examples of our bygone and discredited way of thinking? ‘Here, this is a drama in which some characters are portrayed as smart, and others are demonized as not; this is the way we used to categorize people, and wasn’t it ugly?’ Maybe we need to save these artifacts as a jumping-off place for teaching children not only what to think but what not to think.” It was the same zero-impact point I’d made with Dean Poot.
“But Dr. Hughes—” The emphasis was sly. Titles now cast you as suspect.
“Please. Arden.”
“According to that reasoning,” Emory went on—she was so fluid, never missing a beat—“we would logically preserve all the hateful cultural content of times past as precious examples of hateful cultural content—the better to have a ‘jumping-off place’ for teaching children what not to think. If we’re intent on presenting the anti-example, the same reasoning would also have us sponsoring all manner of bigots to spew their poison in forums like this one—not that I’m referring to yourself, of course.”
“Of course,” Arden said curtly.
“The debate about Columbo is highly reminiscent of the tiff over Get Smart,” the host got in edgewise.
“Which was mindlessly proscribed just because of the title.” Arden’s cross interjection sounded dangerously spontaneous.
“Maybe,” Emory conceded. “But the series employs the same transposition. Maxwell ‘Smart’ is anything but smart. He can’t work CONTROL’s gadgetry. ‘Agent Smart’ is an ironic designation, because he’s a figure of fun, whom the scriptwriters, and therefore the audience, sneer at and feel superior to. There’s no laughing with; it’s all laughing at. His partner, Agent 99, is the real ‘smart’ character. The film and the Get Smart remake follow the same template, so taking the lot off streaming platforms was a good move. All the program’s comedy is at the expense of the mentally stigmatized.”
“The same argument tarnished the Pink Panther movies,” the host noted.
“Which I was also relieved to see go,” Emory said. “Film audiences were encouraged to be callously collusive with the writers and producers and even with Peter Sellers himself: Inspector Clouseau is, well, take your pick of the slurs. Ha-ha-ha.”
Transcribing this is tedious and depressing, so I think that taster will suffice.