It was a pep rally for public television. They led a long train of anguished liberals, who wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth at the prospect of deep budget cuts: parents distraught over the possible loss of nonviolent, educational family programming; kids in anticipatory grief over losing Barney and Shining Station; local artists staring at their shoes, wondering who else will ever want to work with them; corporate types diagramming the giant blackened crater that will soon greet us where PBS and NPR used to be.

What occasioned all this was the demands by Republicans that PBS cease to exist. Public TV is a dinosaur in the era of the infohighway. It costs money -- about a buck per citizen per year -- at a time when the government is fresh out of money. And it has a vague reputation for siding against conservative ideals. So the knives are on the whetstone, and PBS has the shivers.

The rally left me with conflicting emotions. First, I realized I have never much enjoyed public TV. I hate the British imports (the Irish in me, maybe, or maybe just the lunkhead who has seen Die Hard II four times). Though Louis Rukeyser and William F. Buckley have their charms, I don't program the VCR to tape their shows. Some of the personalities have a chilling effect on me. Hell for me would be a long lunch with Ken Burns explaining the majesty of baseball. Heaven might be, oh, watching Erik Eskola of Almanac try to talk a gang of evil skinheads into leaving him alone. (I don't wish him ill, but he seems so darn comfortable.)

Second, I realized I have conservative reasons for not wanting to see PBS driven into the desert to die. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has made considerable hay speaking of his desire to "save our civilization," by which he means the cultural heritage of our European forebears.

But where is the average citizen of our republic more likely to encounter Western Civilization than on public TV? Where else are you likely to see a documentary about Leonardo (the Florentine, not the mutant turtle)? See a biography of Bach, or Frank Lloyd Wright? A play by Shakespeare? If these things disappear from the public airwaves, they will not soon show up on Models, Inc. or Biker Mice from Mars.

So how is it that the people who claim they want to save this tradition of civilization are in such a rush to shut down the two agencies most responsible for presenting and propagating it? You can spin the radio and TV dials and push every button on the cable box, but if you want to see Aida, or A Man of the People, or Brideshead Revisited, or a documentary on the Holocaust or Thomas Jefferson or Isaac Newton, you pretty much have to find your PBS station.

Same with radio. The big boys of Western Civ don't make the Top 40 scene any more. NPR allots a disproportionate amount of its broadcast hours to such very pale, very male avatars as Schubert, Mussorgsky, and Ives.

Speaker Gingrich is a big fan of futurist Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave. Compared to most politicians, he's way ahead of the curve on issues like the infohighway. He sees 20,000-channel optic fiber radio-TV-Internet-pizza delivery headed our way, and his faith in the private sector assures him that all legitimate market needs will be addressed, and that there is no need for the government to shell out a buck per citizen meeting needs that the private sector is just aching to meet. There will be a Mahler network for lovers of Mahler, and separate bandwidths for Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. As that other great conservative, Mao Zedong put it, Let a hundred flowers blossom.

But first, we must stamp out these two offending flowers because their programming has trampled Moral Majoritarian toes. Think how Michael Kinsley must enrage the right as he fields a remark from someone he clearly believes to be the intellectual equivalent of overcooked broccoli, and makes that delighted simpering face he makes.

I am all for the superhighway, and I think it will be a cornucopia of good things one day for those of us with the cash to enjoy it.

But it is just not true that PBS and NPR can't hack it in the new day dawning, nor that private merchants are salivating over the money to be made filling the Mahler gap. If anything, it's the conservatives who should be rallying around PBS as a protector of ancient values, They should be fending off the liberals, who should be condemning PBS for its over-reliance on the aristocratic BBC. And Generation X, which seems to be having a lot more trouble dealing with Barney than any normal generation would.

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