What do we want to see and hear and read about—really?

If we decide we want a better grounding in literal reality, and in the kinds of practical facts that we need to participate more effectively in the public life of a democracy, we can certainly have it.   We just need to be prepared for more informative and less iconically charged reporting, often on subjects as mundane as the local sewer bond issue.

Maybe we’ll pay attention to this;  maybe not.

To what extent do we actually demand that our media entertain us as they do with their tales of a distant, quasi-mythical world?

It may be that our need for larger-than-life iconic figures inhabiting a bigger world on the other side of the screen reflects too fundamental a human yearning to ever be completely overcome.

For the same reasons that certain primitive agricultural societies choose to populate a seemingly blank landscape with "spirits of wind and water" and the ancient Greeks needed to conjure up the fallibly anthropomorphic Zeus and Hera and the rest, we of a more scientifically advanced age may need the likes of Liz and O.J. and a perhaps-not-fully-dead Elvis inhabiting an enchanted realm of media.