MAKING HO-HUM SING!

"I can't remember being bored, not once in my whole life," Harry Truman once remarked. Of course, Truman was never put to the ultimate test: he had died by the time Geraldo Rivera and certain other celebrity journalists blossomed on the national stage. Consider the following remarks, edited for brevity, that Rivera made during an autobiography-touting appearance on Donahue in September:

MR RIVERA: I was a cheater. I was a cheater. That was my drug. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. My drug was women and sex and whatever you call it. What a cheater does is to cheat. A cheater cheats. . . A cheater cheats when a cheater has the opportunity, not when it's appropriate -- [that's] when the cheater cheats . . . when you have the opportunity. . . . Back to what I said about a cheater. That's what a cheater does. That's my drug. . . . AUDIENCE MEMBER: Geraldo . . . have you ever had any death threats and, if you have, have they ever been carried out? . . . . Rivera's utterance shows that many journalists have missed the mark in depicting Geraldo (whose book brags of sexploits with sundry celebrities) as outrageously interesting. He is not. His true, and only, newsworthy talent is as a bore.

Which brings me to my theme: boringness and boredom are far too often overlooked as news subjects. Seen in the proper light, boring material can actually be quite interesting. Journalists, almost by definition, are at war with tedium. Battling to capture the interest of an increasingly fickle audience, they play up any novelty they can find in a story: the first, the biggest, the worst, the sexiest. But news has been hyped in this way for so long that I, for one, actually find certain tedious subjects refreshing by contrast.

So, it appears, does a small cadre of reporters at The Washington Post and elsewhere. In recent months, they have started carving out a kind of Boredom Beat, showing beyond doubt that dullness as a subject merits more comprehensive coverage. Consider these examples:

* Certain reporters have been taking pains to track down exceptionally tedious people for profiles. The Washington Post's Charles Trueheart weighed in with a forty-four paragraph September 23 profile of Norman Mailer, which revealed that the legendary wildman has drifted into neodullness. "He's gotten so civilized, he's boring," a Mailer friend is quoted as saying. The Post's Henry Allen went to Philadelphia last April to interview a far more tedious subject, one Camille Paglia. She is a literary theorist and social critic described in The New York Times as a "humorless, lapel-grabbing fanatic with a universal theory to hawk." After listening to her jabber nonstop for what must have seemed eternity, Allen produced a sixty-five paragraph April 15 profile of a woman who combines the two worst attributes of the bore -- extreme loquacity and an idee fixe (hers is far too boring to summarize here). The article's highlight is this admission by the subject: "I'm a maniac. I'm a maniac. I'm an absolute maniac. No, no, I'm a total maniac. I mean, I am completely intolerable, I am completely intolerable." Allen showed convincingly that Paglia's phenomenal boringness was newsworthy.

* In the September 12 Washington Post, reporter Marjorie Williams reported tellingly on the conversational style of Representative Charles Schumer, a Democrat of New York who participated in the bank scandal probe of Clark Clifford. Williams wrote: "'When you listen to Clifford and all his achievements, my heart want to believe him, but my head says it's very hard to,' [Schumer] said in a quick interview after the morning session. He rushed away to the TV microphones. . . . 'When I listen to Clifford and think about his achievement,' he said, 'my heart wants to believe him but my head says no' . . . 'After listening to your presentation,' he told Clifford in the afternoon, 'I guess I would say to you that my heart wants to believe you, but my head says no.'" This sort of recycling is widespread in Washington.

* Several dozen articles appeared in the month of September alone with the words "bore," "boring," "boredom," or "dull" in the headlines -- pieces in which the reporters tackled the subject of dullness with verve and tenacity. Here are a few sample headlines: KENCEN FALLS ON DULL TIMES . . . (Washington Times, September 15); BOREDOM THE ENEMY . . . Toronto Star, August 31); WHY ARE COLUMNISTS SO BORING? (Boston Globe, September 15); BORED TO DEATH (Associated Press, September 12); BOREDOM DRIVES VIETNAMESE TEENS TO MARRIAGE (Reuters, September 12).

My favorite of the batch was The Times of London's PRIZE BORE (September 3), which reported: "Entries for the world's worst postcard competition are now all in. . . . John Dovey, the organiser, says: 'Most entries have come from the north, where all those hideous civic buildings were put up after the war. A postcard of Preston's bus garage, for example, is a strong contender for a prize.' But Tim Austin of The Times insists the bus garage is far too interesting. 'If my entry of Barnoldswick post office does not win, there is no justice,' he says."

The journalists whose articles are highlighted above are true pioneers in dullness reportage. One can only speculate on what might develop later if the beat is nurtured, but why not dream grandly? -- an Emmy for the series "America's Most Boring"; a People magazine spinoff, Boring People, with a regular section devoted to accountants and actuaries; perhaps even a new national institution, Time's Bore of the Year: "Tom Foley -- big, bland, likable and hailing from somewhere 'up there' -- reminds one of Canada, the slumbering colossus to the north."

Wouldn't reporters volunteering for the Boredom Beat run the risk of being overshadowed, especially during developments of genuine significance like the gulf war or the Soviet crisis? Not necessarily. There is always "the story behind the story." Boredom, and the compulsion to escape from it, are arguably two of the main driving forces in human history. As Albert Camus put it, in a passage on boredom in his novel The Fall, "Something must happen -- and that explains most human commitments . . . even war." Boredom sidebars would thus be appropriate in covering almost any big story.

What sort of journalists could be tapped to cover the Boredom Beat, if it takes hold in our newsrooms? Experience with boredom -- and a willingness, if not a desire, to experience it again -- would be essential assets. A syndicated column Calvin Trillin wrote in August suggests that certain veterans of the presidential politics beat would be qualified -- that boredom, not excitement, is the drug these "politics junkies" actually crave. "The delay in campaign activity has robbed our crowd of the opportunity to register its quadrennial complaints about how the modern presidential race begins too early and lasts too long," Trillin wrote. Even more suitable for the Boredom Beat would be foreign correspondents specializing in arcane business news. One has to marvel at headlines like these: TRADING ON SINGAPORE RUBBER MARKET ENDS DULL AND FEATURELESS (Agence France-Presse, September 24); RUPIAH STEADY IN DULL JAKARTA TRADE (Reuters, September 2); SWISS BONDS END STEADY IN DULL TRADING (Reuters, September 18). I am especially taken with the phrase "dull and featureless."

The main appeal of dullness to me these days is that it is not the standard mainstream news fare, which seems to consist more and more of sensationalism aimed at wooing a restive audience (e.g., NBC's steamy Expose program, hosted by Tom Brokaw, which recently investigated whether Senator Charles Robb had had sex with model Tai Collins; The New York Time's now-infamous front-page story hyping Kitty Kelley's dubiously documented claims about Nancy Reagan's sex life). My reaciton is evidently not unusual. In fact, the new prurience does not seem to be having its desired effect, and is actually driving more viewers and readers away. Citing surveys conducted by The Times Mirror Center for People, Politics, and Press, political scientist Norman Ornstein reports that "people are not paying attention to stories like those about Barney Frank and Chuck Robb. In the case of Frank, only 6 percent . . . cared enough to follow the story closely" (Atlantic, October 1991).

Historian Daniel Boorstin put his finger on this looming problem of audience dissatisfaction nearly thirty years ago in his book The Image. He argued that twentieth-century Americans -- their desires stoked by advertising, the media, politicians -- had been conditioned to expect far too much of the world. Among other things, "we expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night." The real world was too dull to provide such things, so news and entertainment media, fed by the image-makers of politics and advertising, simply created bogus substitutes: hyped mediocrities instead of real masterpieces, press conferences instead of genuine events, celebrities whose claim to fame was simply their fame, rather than genuine heroes whose stature resulted from great deeds. Geraldo Rivera, an extreme example of many of these trends, embodies the total collapse of any distinction between celebrity and hero. Here is how Rivera, who is half Puerto Rican and half Jewish, explained on Donahue why he had chosen to be a "role model" for Hispanics, rather than Jews: "The Jewish people, for their tiny numbers, have done so superbly. I mean, they don't need me. They have Albert Einstein. They have, you know, everybody -- Maury Povich."

Audiences bombarded routinely with this sort of pap were bound ultimately to feel dissatisfied, like someone fed a steady diet of Twinkies and potato chips. It is hardly surprising that audience loyalty to many networks and other news outlets is waning today.

One way to check the viewer-reader exodus would be to recondition audiences to expect less, so that they would net feel disappointed with the news they get. The Boredom Beat might play a modest role in helping to accomplish this, reminding people that, for much of the time, the world is a pretty mundane place, after all -- a place where there is only one Albert Einstein; where oatmeal is just as bland as it tastes; and where quite a number of days and weeks are pretty damned dull and featureless.

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