Feeling lonely?

Otherwise, move to North Dakota (for reasons I won't go into, although Putnam does at length, North Dakota is a social-capital exception to the sullen rule of Malaisia) and wait for a revival of something like the Progressive movement that saved us from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age almost exactly a century ago. (E-mail and Web bulletin boards could help if they encouraged us to meet face to face with like-minded strangers and raise some political hell.)

Rather touchingly, Putnam suggests that the goals of such a revival would be campaign finance reform and citizens who voted as if they were fans; reduction of the criminal discrepancy between rich and poor; a more family-friendly and community-congenial workplace; fewer cars and more pedestrians in our neighborhoods and public spaces; less television in our wired caves and more singalongs, theater festivals and break dancing in our streets. While he's at it, I would like my Volkswagen bug back, the one with the daisies on it.

Thus ends the synopsis. Now begins the rant.

Let me say this about crybaby boomers. The reason they weep is that all that they wanted in the idealistic '60s was social justice, racial harmony, peaceable kingdoms, multiple orgasms and Joan Baez. What they got, besides assassinations and the tantrums of the cadres, was Richard Nixon and AIDS.

Let me say this about television. Yes, the same people who own it also own everything else. And they commune with their mystical parts by the medium of ad agencies whose hypnotherapeutic practice is, as Barbara Ehrenreich once explained, to sell us cars by promising adventure and to sell us beer by promising friendship. And it is obviously not in the best commercial interests of such ownership to devote a lot of time to bad-news programs about declining cities, the race war, foreign-policy adventurism, indeterminate sexuality, corporate predation or anything else that readers of Putnam or Salon can be counted on to care about.

But the surprise is, if you actually watch television, it's not as bad as it ought to be, and certainly not as bad as people like Putnam say it is. I'm not just talking about the remedial seriousness of public-television series like "Frontline" and "P.O.V.," Bill Moyers on Iran-contra, Frederick Wiseman on public housing, Ofra Bickel on the satanic ritual abuse hysteria, "Tongues Untied" and "Eyes on the Prize." Nor do I speak of C-Span's pair of citizen bands, its basilisk eye on Congress and its book-chat programs. Nor Discovery's remarkable miniseries on the CIA, David Halberstam's History Channel account of the 1950s, Neal Gabler's A&E meditation on Jews, movies and the American Dream, John Frankenheimer's films for HBO and TNT on Attica and George Wallace, the development on premium cable of documentary units like HBO's "America Uncovered" (capital punishment and homophobia) and Cinemax's "Reel Life" (war crimes against Muslim women in Bosnia and the rape of Ecuador's rain forest by American oil companies) and not even our very good fortune that distributorless movies like Anjelica Huston's "Bastard Out of Carolina" and Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" show up on Showtime.

Never mind any of this, and the Lifetime Women's Film Festival, and Bravo's exposis of journalists on junkets, and cable movies that take the risky sort of chances from which networks and public TV flinch. The fact remains that, in spite of Jerry Springer, commercial television, in its movies, its dramatic series and even its sitcoms, has more to tell us about common decency, civil discourse and social justice than big-screen Hollywood, big-time magazine journalism and most book publishers.

Seeking to please or distract as many people as possible, to assemble and divert multitudes, TV is famously inclusive, with a huge stake in consensus. Of course, brokering social and political gridlock, it softens lines and edges to make a prettier picture. But it is also weirdly democratic, multicultural, Utopian, quixotic and rather more welcoming of difference and diversity than the audience watching it. It has been overwhelmingly pro-gun control and anti-death penalty; sympathetic to the homeless and the ecosystem; alert to alcoholism, child abuse, spouse battering, sexual discrimination and harassment, date rape and medical malpractice. It was worried about AIDS as early as 1983 in an episode of "St. Elsewhere," 10 years before Tom Hanks appeared in "Philadelphia." And television -- where the ad cult meets the melting pot to stipulate a colorblind consumer -- may be the only American institution outside of the public schools to still believe in and celebrate integration of the races.

Until Harvard can explain why the nation got so mean while TV was telling us to be nicer to women, children, minorities, immigrants, poor people, sick people, old people, odd people and strangers, one of its professors shouldn't say that "prevailing television coverage of problems such as poverty leads viewers to attribute those problems to individual rather than societal failings and thus to shirk our own responsibility for helping to solve them" -- because it isn't true.

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