Volume 45, Number 9 · May 28, 1998
TV: The Mummy's Curse
By John Leonard
Made Possible By…The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States
by James Ledbetter
Verso, 280 pp., $25.00
Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film
by B.J. Bullert
Rutgers University Press, 242 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Eighty pages into his coroner's report on public broadcasting, James Ledbetter complains about the system's 'Byzantine complexity and inefficiency.' This is unfair to Constantinople. Public television is much more Egyptian. Like Ptolemaic astronomy, it's tricked up with epicycles to explain eccentric motions. Like Tutankhamen's diadem, it's half-vulture and half-cobra. Like the Temple of Luxor, it's a hodgepodge of art and politics, a dream world of obelisks, scarabs, and bulls, and a monumental mystification. Therein we find, as John Anthony West has explained in Serpent in the Sky, his meditation on the Sacred Science of the Pharaohs, 'priest-bound necrophiles …worshipping a grotesque pantheon of animal-headed gods.'
Review, 4841 words
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