"When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right"
About this Quote
Phil Ochs fuses gallows humor with media criticism, sketching a scene where catastrophe becomes something to watch and review. The desire to look out over Los Angeles as society crumbles while the same event plays on color TV captures how modern life turns public trauma into entertainment. Color television, the bright new medium of the mid-1960s, promised more vivid truth even as it framed wars, riots, and assassinations as consumable spectacle. Ochs wants to compare the broadcast with the view, to test the glow of the screen against the smoke on the horizon.
Los Angeles is not a random backdrop. It is the city of Hollywood and network studios, the factory that scripts the nations fantasies. It is also a real place marked by unrest and inequality, from the Watts uprising to clashes with a famously militarized police force. By choosing that perch, Ochs points to the pipeline between reality and representation and to the moral risk of confusing one for the other. The barb is not only aimed at television news; it is aimed at the audience who might prefer the curated angle, the neat narration, the color-corrected end of the world.
The line also reflects Ochs’s own split identity as a protest singer who grew wary of the limits of earnestness. After the murders of 1968 and the spectacle of the Chicago convention, he leaned into showbiz irony, donning a gold lamé suit and satirizing the way dissent itself could be packaged and sold. He understood he was implicated in the spectacle he mocked. Make sure they get it right carries a bitter irony: there may be no right way to televise destruction, because the act of televising already flattens it.
What remains is a demand for witness. If collapse is coming, he insists on seeing it unmediated, to measure the broadcast against the truth outside the window and refuse the anesthesia of the screen.
Los Angeles is not a random backdrop. It is the city of Hollywood and network studios, the factory that scripts the nations fantasies. It is also a real place marked by unrest and inequality, from the Watts uprising to clashes with a famously militarized police force. By choosing that perch, Ochs points to the pipeline between reality and representation and to the moral risk of confusing one for the other. The barb is not only aimed at television news; it is aimed at the audience who might prefer the curated angle, the neat narration, the color-corrected end of the world.
The line also reflects Ochs’s own split identity as a protest singer who grew wary of the limits of earnestness. After the murders of 1968 and the spectacle of the Chicago convention, he leaned into showbiz irony, donning a gold lamé suit and satirizing the way dissent itself could be packaged and sold. He understood he was implicated in the spectacle he mocked. Make sure they get it right carries a bitter irony: there may be no right way to televise destruction, because the act of televising already flattens it.
What remains is a demand for witness. If collapse is coming, he insists on seeing it unmediated, to measure the broadcast against the truth outside the window and refuse the anesthesia of the screen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
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