Farewell, Larry King, Vampire Referee of America's Cultural Values

by Mike Barthel

Talk show hosts: grr! We hate them! They are so inauthentic and trashy! They are poisoning our culture and so on! But now here it is 2011 and we are sorta-kinda mourning the retirement/evolution of two of the biggest: Oprah and Larry King. Larry aired his farewell on New Year’s Eve, counting down the 25 most important moments in his show’s history, which at first seems to validate all those old criticisms. Seeing Deep Throat next to Bette Davis and Marlon Brando next to Obama’s inauguration sure does make it look like talk shows have no sense of importance. Larry is making serious things less serious, and America is still anxious enough about its own cultural importance that we dislike this. But maybe all of these things are equally serious. And maybe talk shows have become a kind of vital democratic institution.

In furtherance of all this, I could point out how the list includes some important political events from the 90s (Ross Perot! NAFTA!). But to focus on these as a way of validating Larry is to just fall back into the seriousness trap. It’s like talking about Murrow’s McCarthy takedown as a noble deviation from his celebrity interviews rather than as simply another kind of celebrity piece, a first draft of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” It’s like only paying attention to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck’s political stuff while ignoring the jokes, like pretending John Ziegler’s anti-Arab tirades have nothing to do with his OJ fascination. It is to pretend that politics, as the vast majority of us interact with it, is in a separate realm from culture, rather than fundamentally intertwined with it. It is to flatter ourselves that we get different things out of talking about Michael Jackson and than we do from discussing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is to miss the very important thing talk shows’ success has shown us.

Intellectuals are repulsed by talk shows because they flatten the serious and the frivolous, making Important Things base and blowing up personal issues into communal dramas. But this early distaste has turned out to be on the wrong side of history. Talk shows have moved beyond their roots as trash to become entirely respectable. Oprah’s endorsement of Obama was a big deal, and for better or for worse, talk shows are where political news gets made now. Anderson Cooper, former host of “The Mole,” has become an arbiter of national grace, and our Walter Lippmann is probably Jon Stewart, not Paul Krugman. Maybe you want to view this development as a sure sign we’re going to hell in a handbasket, but this seems awfully self-centered. We all like to think we live in important times, even if those times are disastrous. I tend to think, rather, that the success of Oprah, Larry and their ilk at becoming respectable displays how well the TV talk show format was able to model the way we think about politics.

We want, for some reason, to think of talk show hosts as journalists (or male talk show hosts, at least; the ladies are just klatching up a storm, I guess, GAB GAB GAB, you know women, when aren’t they talking), tasked with pursuing the public interest through research and careful questioning. But that doesn’t seem particularly helpful to me. If you want to include all the things talk show hosts do, rather than just the respectable bits, we could think of them less as journalists and more as referees of our collective values. Citizens of a democratic society (that’s us!) have to make our values FITE every once in a while, because we believe in tolerance and a multiplicity of views but ultimately have to have shared standards to judge how we’re going to proceed in our collective pursuits, blah blah blah.

And that’s the purpose talk shows really serve. That’s the thing that unites Karla Faye Tucker and Deep Throat, or Johnny Cash and Ross Perot: they are important less because of what they did and more because what they did gives us an opportunity to debate what’s important and what’s praiseworthy, and what’s not. This embodiment of a particular value position is what makes the discussion of culture more than an idle pursuit, and what makes discussion of politics far more idle than we prefer to think. There’s no real reason for people who don’t work in fairly high-level government positions or who don’t devote their time to political activism to pay attention to political news on a regular basis. We do so anyway not because we are particularly noble, but because we believe that the actions of our government are indicators of what we as a society believe. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was important for lots and lots of people who would never have any interest in serving in the military because the existence of the policy indicated all sorts of bad things about how we as a society view homosexuals, and being able to overturn it indicates that the tide has turned significantly enough that our representatives are willing to stand up and say that it is not true that having openly gay servicemembers will be bad for morale. That was great, but the political system has a limited capacity. On a day-to-day basis, we need to turn to the smaller-scale democratic mechanism of talk shows to enact these debates in a public space.

With that in mind, here are the collective cultural values I think Larry King was affirming in some of his top 25 moments:

• Death of President Reagan, 2004. Despite the disagreements we may have had with Reagan, we can now see he was a decent person who tried to do the right thing.
• Marlon Brando, 1994. Excessive self-regard leads a man to become foolish.
• Rabin, Hussein and Arafat, 1995. While other cultures are immoderate and irrational, we are reasonable people only interested in peace.
• Johnny Cash, 2002. Despite the divisive nature of some country artists, traditional values can be expressed in a way that they are agreeable to everyone, especially if they are expressed by old people.
• Ross Perot talks presidency, 1992. Anyone can run for president, and the mass media has an interest in giving reasonable candidates a fair chance.

You will note that not all of these values are ones I would agree with, or are even true. But that is the thing with cultural values: they are ideas that some large group says they agree on, not ideas we act on. The point is not so much to discover the truth as it is to do a little dance that stitches together the disparate scraps of reality in a way that flatters our self-regard. And this can only be done convincingly by someone who seems neutral. The entertainment business’s relentless market orientation makes it a perfect venue for this dance because it doesn’t seem to have any interests beyond pleasing the audience.

In some cases, this setup might result in more of a debate, a confrontation between clashing values that affords some sense of resolution. But that wasn’t Larry’s mandate. He was more of an affirmer, the kind of guy that let guests come through in all their glory rather than challenging them. He left that up to us, because he knew us. He knew what we would think well enough that he didn’t have to nudge us in the ribs with excessive value cues.

When he interviewed someone, it was simply to give wide recognition to something we all already believed anyway. By seeing it said publicly, we might feel a little less alone. By knowing that other people agree with us, we might feel assured enough to go forward with a particular line of thinking. By constituting the public, Larry King made our opinions concrete enough to have a force in the world. That’s what talk shows can do, and whether they do it with celebrities or politicians is immaterial. The formation of a democratic public is like a minyan: for the rite to be effective does not require a certain consecrated location or a certain sanctified officiant, but simply a minimum number of people. We just need enough witnesses to make it real.

Mike Barthel isn’t afraid to talk about it with you.