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The new "People's Court" is, you see, interactive: Visitors to the show's Web site can watch video webcasts and vote on the cases at hand before they're aired on national television. Koch has replaced his legendary catch phrase "How'm I doing?" with the more contemporary, if less catchy, "How'm I downloading?" The producers of "The People's Court," of course, are not the first Americans to have suggested that democracy needs an upgrade -- a technical fix. Back in 1940, Buckminster Fuller suggested that democracy had to be "electrified" in order to survive. "Democracy has potential within it for the satisfaction of every individual's need," he wrote. "But Democracy must be structurally modernized, must be mechanically implemented ... Devise a mechanical means for nationwide voting daily and secretly by each adult citizen of Uncle Sam's family: Then -- I assure you -- will Democracy 'be saved,' indeed exist, for the first time in history ..." Bucky's utopian solution involved voting by phone; these days our putative populists have higher tech hobbyhorses. Ross Perot, back in those surrealistic days in which he was considered a visionary, chattered on and on about his notion of the Electronic Town Hall, which he seems to have envisioned as functioning like a Larry King show writ large. And more recently we have been treated to Jon Katz's endless bloviations on the seemingly inexhaustible virtues of the wired populace. It's a good guess that no one in the world is fully satisfied with democracy in its current American incarnation -- except perhaps the writers of Jay Leno's monologues, who specialize in a broad, brainless style of political farce that befits the broad, brainless foibles of our politicians better than the slightly more sophisticated styles of satire adopted by Leno's late-night peers. But the "electrified" democracy of the new "People's Court" isn't really an improvement. There are a few little technical problems that have to be worked out before this new program of democracy makes it out of the beta stage. For one thing, the show's webcasts are accessible only to those who happen to own a late-model PC with enough power (and enough bandwidth) to keep up with the show's video feed. (My own computer, alas, can't handle the video software -- and so I find myself one of the electronically disenfranchised.) Still, in some ways my position is preferable to those who take the trouble to express their opinions on the show's Web site. The producers of the new "People's Court" do make quite a fuss about their peculiar brand of populism, dutifully collecting and reporting the opinions of the handful of "Netizens" who happen to be tuned in to the show's live video webcasts -- and the opinions of those who gather in front of the cameras outside the studio at the newly rechristened "People's Corner" (known to New Yorkers previously as Herald Square). But the show's pseudo-democratic trappings can't quite disguise the gentle authoritarianism of the law. Koch, you see, pays absolutely no attention to any opinions but those in his own head (and in the law books) in rendering his decisions, which often depart quite radically from the "street justice" demanded by the People gathered outside and online. "My decisions are final," Koch practically shouts in the show's promos -- and indeed they are. This is a "People's Court" in name only; indeed, the show is notably less democratic than even the execrable "America's Funniest Home Videos," which at least allows its studio audience to vote on the day's best clip. Meanwhile, like "Seinfeld," the new "People's Court" relies for its energy and humor not on its main character but on its supporting cast, an ever-changing collection of floridly neurotic litigants obsessed with seemingly petty injustices. Koch, like Seinfeld, plays the straight man in a world gone mad. And, also like Seinfeld, he seems to have a little trouble paying attention: His style of justice is not so much disinterested as simply uninterested. One imagines he spends most of his time on the "People's Court" bench thinking about newspaper columns, movie schedules, lunch. It's quite a contrast to the courtside manner of Judge Judy, a talkative, testy sort who's as interested in handing out moral lessons as she is in deciding the cases at hand. In one recent case on Koch's "People's Court," a woman accused her dry cleaner of ruining the white dress she had planned to wear to a funeral. Koch listened patiently to her complaint, but his mind, it seems, had scampered away from the legal issues at hand. "Who wears white to a funeral?" he wondered aloud. "You know," he finally concluded, "they do that in Korea." Even though his mind tends to wander, I'd rather have Koch dealing out justice than entrust the job to the People -- or at least that portion of the people polled by the show's producers. In the wrap-around studio segments of the show, anchored by Carol Martin, a former New York newscaster, one sees endless updates on how the various cases are playing with the People. The People are almost invariably, well, wrong -- rushing to judgment with unseemly haste, basing their decisions on legal principles that cannot be discerned, allowing themselves to be swayed too easily by emotion or by some pet peeve of their own. In the case of the "controversial dress" (as Martin called the dry-cleaning case in an attempt to fluff up its dramatic impact), Koch ruled for the plaintiff -- since it was pretty much evident that the dry cleaner had indeed wrecked her dress. But one passerby on the "People's Corner" adamantly demanded a retrial. So what if her dress was ruined on its second washing? She, not the cleaner, was to blame. After all, this purveyor of street justice explained, his top-quality name-brand clothes never changed their colors in the wash. "Stop buying cheap clothes!" he bellowed. The future of American democracy? I can only hope that this little experiment in "electrified voting" (as Bucky would put it) helps to convince a lot of people that certain kinds of cyberpopulism are destined for disaster. Democracy's fatal flaw -- one of its fatal flaws, in any case -- is that the people most interested in expressing their opinions are generally the last people you'd ever want to have a say over your life. I've never been much of a fan of Ed Koch, but I'd trust his judgment over that of an electronically amplified mob any day. And that opinion is final.
David Futrelle does not vote, so he has no right to complain. |
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