Cable TV and local news - 9 December 1994

After the sagebrush and the alkali deserts of Nevada, San Francisco was heaven on the half shell. I lived at the best hotel. I exhibited my clothes at the most conspicuous places. I infested the opera. About a month later I enjoyed my first earthquake. Thus, Mark Twain, in five sentences, revealed the dramatic difference between life in two parts of the country only a few hundred miles apart. Well, Nevada's alkali and sagebrush are still there and for, say, 200-mile stretches still match Balzac's definition of the desert as God with Man left out. Except that a few miles' drive from any airport in the desert and you're in a house, a hotel, a home, a room simply, and you can sit down and throw a switch and 50, 60 television programmes are there for you.

It's been a fairly common observation of these talks, in the past 20 years maybe, that while life in various parts of the United States, daily live, can obviously differ dramatically, according to the local climate mainly, the available views of the nation's political issues are much the same everywhere because of television. Every possible view on Bosnia, on the United Nations, on abortion, on legal and illegal immigration, on limited terms for legislators, on assisted suicide, on what to do with juvenile criminals, on how to reform welfare, is available at the pressure of a thumb, and not from labs in the sky or satellite, but by cable.

Off, yesterday, on my usual daily walk, I almost said jog, lord forbid. I have never forgotten my doctor's warning anecdote. The only time I ever jog, he says, is when I'm late for the funeral of a patient who jogged. I repeat, off yesterday on my daily walk, I was struck again by two things. First, the privilege of being a pedestrian in California, which is not true anywhere else I know. The very glaring awareness by motorists that pedestrians have the right of way. Come to any corner and oncoming cars may be oncoming at speed. They spot you, about to put a foot down off the sidewalk and they swiftly jam on their brakes. You need never hesitate to step smartly into a roadway. I'm talking, of course about ordinary street corners without traffic lights.

But along this walk, the sidewalks pleasantly sparking with that, what is it, sort of silver dust they use, I noticed little inset grids like manhole covers, branded with a sign in block letters – TV cable. In the sidewalks of American towns, these grids are now as common as lamp posts and what they symbolise is a far reaching fact of American life that's only about 29 years. That is that no matter how different your local daily life is from that of your brother, cousin, friend in another state, you can be sure that he's exposed to the same views of the world, as you, through the cable channels that have swamped the networks.

To go through the weekly television programme guide it takes me usually about an hour and a half. With about 30 or 40 documentaries to choose from on every conceivable social and historical problem, 100 more movies, 30 commentaries or panels, three or four of my beloved programmes on the life of the Siberian white bear or the love life of an ant, there's a weekly medical programme that I try not to miss and now a 20-hour-a-day history channel. Apart from all the outright good, bad and indifferent soaps and sitcoms and game shows and what-not.

To an old friend of mine who was much concerned about and I quote, "improving American television", I can only gasp, unable to guess what that could possibly mean. How about improving British printing. It's the same question. Television isn't an achievement, it's a medium, like printing. Printing produced the Bible, constantly, mathematics text books, the works of Dickens and Martin Amis and John Updike, also Penthouse and the abominable tabloids, Same with television. I can only say that when I stay in in the evenings, which in New York I do most of the time, it would be a very bleak evening on which I could not find at least four continuous hours of television. That's about my ration. I miss several things I'd like to see out of 72 channels but I use the word "ration" advisedly because I also like to read.

These meditations were all inspired by that sight along the sidewalks of San Francisco of the little sunken panels and the simple sign – TV cable. What it means to a commentator on America is that when he's done with national issues, he's going to have to dig deep to find a genuine regional story. Do you remember a book I talked about several years ago called, I think, The Clustering of America? The bright, original bit of research by a man who first wondered if regional tastes in American varied as much as we're always supposed. Then he travelled 50, 60 thousand miles around the country and he made a discovery, that state borders, geography, had very little to do with the defining of different types of people and their tastes. And by tastes I mean the sort of house they want to live in, car to drive, food they eat, the books they read, the brand names that appeal, the medicines they take, their political slant, the games they play, if any, the TV programmes they watch,

Looking over the mass of information he'd collected, he concluded that more accurate division of the country, so far as social habits and tastes were concerned, more accurate than regions, let alone as such vast crudities as New England Yankee or a Southerner, was to see the country divided into clusters, numbered like child's painting instruction panel, that were similar. As a prime example, I remember, he found that the same type of person, family, same cluster of tastes in leisure, food, cars, entertainment etc, could be matched between, I think it was, South Pasadena in southern California and Princeton in northern New Jersey, the university town 3,000 miles away and several latitudes.

What some of you must have sensed I was leading up to, was the difficulty these days of finding genuinely regional, local stories. Of course I'm excluding obvious great divisions, as between the recent experience of a father in Brooklyn, who sued his son for using Halloween figures, like witches, brooms, death's heads as symbols, the father said, of a pagan religion, forbidden to be practised in public by the Bill of Rights, which requires the separation of church and state. And the recent awful experience of a man here in California, not a hundred miles away from me, a father who went skiing last weekend with his family in the Sierras, 40 feet of snow and at the end of the day tried one more run of his own, got lost in a snow shower, vanished for 48 hours and has just been rescued. He stayed alive on a mountain of snow by building himself a snow house braced with pine cones and buried his hands in his armpits.

All right, then here is a genuine, original San Francisco story, which perhaps after the San Francisco initiative, will start to be repeated in other parts of the country. I introduce it first by its headline in the San Francisco evening paper, a five column story in a perfectly serious newspaper: SF Panel To Vote On Legal Rights Of Transgenders. That's right – transgenders. This is the lead sentence: San Francisco's gender-bending transsexuals, female and male impersonators, drag queens and transvestites, are poised to get City Hall's official stamp of approval and protection. A bill, put up to the town council by one of its members, which is sure to pass, they say, will explicitly concede legal rights, by way of employment, public services, non-discrimination in housing, education, healthcare, so on, same as the rest of us enjoy who are not transgenders.

Historically this bill is one of the innumerable extensions of the first bill of the sort introduced not as a state or city law but a federal, national law by Harry Truman in 1948, the Fair Employment Act. Since then, as in every other democratic country, civil legal rights have been proclaimed for citizens, irrespective of race, religion or sex or what we now confusingly call gender.

What this San Francisco bill addresses explicitly is someone who has had a surgical change of sex. The councillor who introduced it says he's out to give the usual legal protections to what are officially known here as transgender residents. The official estimate of such people in San Francisco alone is, wait for it, 6000, a figure that startles even San Franciscans, just as the figure of 120,000 declared homosexuals in this city startles the rest of the nation.

The bill was inspired by the ordeals of some such surgical patients who were harassed or demoted in their jobs or otherwise humiliated. It surely is a civilised move. But carrying out the new law, implementation of same, as the politicians love to say, is something trickier. You couldn't just appear at work in a dress and claim equal rights, you'd have to join a sex reassignment programme. I leave the proceedings of that institution to your imagination. What about rest rooms, bathrooms, gyms, dressing rooms? The human rights commissioner had not shrunk from thinking that one through. He said, "If there's nudity involved, like a gym or dressing room, then it will be pretty much OK to match the person's genitals with the appropriate facility."

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