Will & Grace & God

I understand completely the urge to deify television, this is a communications school. I just can't really understand the form that this all-encompassing love takes. Colleges are an interesting sort of artistic context to take in. Statues are expected and are often too numerous to count. Interesting and radical architectural innovations go in to creating the buildings, and often artwork from alum or famous contributors (parents of alum, in many cases) to the school hang on walls. I can't think of a university or major college that has an aversion to proudly displaying its corner of the artistic market (its artistic street cred, if you will). So, how then do we react when this need to display takes on more intriguing and vulgar forms. If H.P. Lovecraft was a graduate of your university, and a sculptor was commissioned to do a life-size bronze form of Cthulu or Yog-Sothoth, the kind of thing that might give people nightmares, is it that universities right to keep it on display in its English lecture hall? Will & Grace is good television, it was funny, topical, and a little more frankly sexual than television likes to get; say what you will, it was important. Granted I like to judge importance based on the size of the whiplash-inducing tantrum that right wing ideologues get themselves worked into, but, it was an important step for recognizing homosexual behavior alongside the sort of boring exploits of Friends or the by-the-books precedural of Law & Order. It showed that, despite it's heavy-handed nature, homosexuality is normal, just as plain and ordinary an occurrence as heterosexual relationships or the everyday routine of a plainclothes cop. I couldn't be happier about the impact of the show, and I'm ecstatic that strides are being made by the gay community in the wake of Will & Grace (I'm also not so secretly pleased it got so many conservatives in bad moods). What then, do we make of the set standing in the middle of our library like the Elephant Man, on display in a glass case.

A communications school is bound to take itself seriously, but to treat the set of a television show, no matter how grand its social significance, as a museum piece, something that needs displaying, is simply ludicrous. Television is a medium dominated by the most vulgar abandonment of humanity yet discovered (granted Viral Videos and Pornography come fairly close, but they have nothing like the audience of Television). I get that this the reality of our situation (that we, as people, but specifically as disciples of the communications field, such as it is, live in an incredible, unrivaled post-modern condition), but it just seems as though we're covering ourselves in artifacts as if to give legitimation to something that is otherwise (often rightly) regarded by the rest of the world as frivolous (the flip side, the American Idol consuming masses, would disagree in a fantastic way, but more or less proves my point. It gets people into a frenzy of defense and offense, and it's been the subject of more debate in congress than the war in Iraq). So, do we give in, and treat the Fonz's jacket as a treasured artifact, or do we wise up, and try to forget that we as a culture have been watching badly scripted, completely fictitious accounts of lives not different enough from our own to be called interesting in any other medium? I know people fairly well and I'm willing to bet on the former. How about you?