Critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that TV’s lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a “contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to the mass market and necessarily to mass taste” 8 can be refuted by observing that their Propter Hoc isn’t even Post Hoc: by 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude” that aimed “to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.” 9 Treating television as evil is
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