I don't own a television. More accurately, I don't own the part of a television where the cable thingy plugs in. I took that out with a soldering iron. (The rest of the TV is needed to watch my Netflix DVDs. Sue me; I'm old school.) You should not conclude from such a lobotomy that I'm immune to the charms of cable TV. Quite the contrary: I'm powerless against them. When it's finals week and you find yourself watching a picture-in-picture marathon of Chefs who Taunt and Navy Crimes Patriotism Hour instead of studying, it's time for a fluxed-based intervention.
A consequence of this desperate act is that the real world penetrates my world slowly, incompletely, and often tragically distorted (think: the truck driver from Susanville). I believe there was a presidential election recently and a black fella won, correct? That was followed by a Global Economic Meltdown, which I only discovered because my morning constitutional kept getting interrupted by the NYSE raining men on the sidewalk like so many Armani-clad ripe cantaloupes. There was a war in Iraq, then another one, and then it was over, and now it's back on. Confidential to ISIS: If you want Americans to take you seriously, you can't be the name of a cartoon spy organization. Perhaps you might consider changing to "SPECTRE" or "The Alan Parsons Project."
And now, something called the "ALS icepick challenge" is all the rage, the details of which I don't understand and don't care to look up.
I also learned an unarmed teenager was gunned down in St. Louis (I was under the impression this happened in Florida). Not since Mr. Burns ran over Bart have opposing sides portrayed a victim with such irreconcilable incongruence. The authorities spin a tale of a raging bull impervious to small arms fire; the family paints a picture of an urban Hodor off to university to study unicorns. Meanwhile, the pornstar doppelgängers working the news desks keep poking the body to scare up ratings. It would be irresponsible to ask if the shooting was racially-motivated, but was the shooting racially-motivated? I suppose you can't blame them. Rioting hurts store owners and the local community, but it makes for good TV. On the plus side, many are now demanding police wear body cameras so their actions can be scrutinized should such a tragedy ever happen again. Which it did, a week later in Los Angeles.
Still, I can't help but be a little incredulous of any public outcry over the deaths of innocents given the culture of violence Television America worships. God is a bullet , indeed. The heroes of our youth are gangsters. The heroes of our olds are soldiers. A presidential candidate is not viable save he appear sometime during the campaign holding a shotgun, or riding a tank, or standing in front of a turkey grinder. Apparently violence is okay as long as nobody gets hurt. Real-life doublethink George Orwell himself would not have thought believable.
In Television America, you can walk off a gunshot wound or blunt head trauma. Plane crashes aren't about mangled corpses, they're about picturesque twisted metal. War isn't greasy grimy gopher guts, it's grainy footage of crosshairs hovering over something interesting until it blows up real good. D&D for jocks. And, I might add, an illusion easy to maintain as long as the Army is comprised of volunteers and, increasingly, paid mercenaries. Washington is no longer crossing the Delaware to fight the Hessians; the Hessians are rowing the boat. Footnote: If the DOD could conceive unpaid mercenaries it sure would free up some tax monies for luxuries like bridge repair and cancer research. (Oops, I mean: would free up monies for a tax cut. Went off-script there for a sec.) Perhaps the Pentagon might try handing out M16s engraved with Deus vult in lieu of a paycheck, our military's commitment to Country being second only to God, or so Fox News keeps telling me. And, hey, it worked for Pope Urban.
Edited for television. The DSM classification of America's cultural psychosis. Symptoms: it's possible to be offended by the language in Scarface but not by the content. Or not be offended by a serial killer recounting sordid details of the crime, but be offended if the swears aren't bleeped. I can grok "both" or "neither," but those who reside in the shadowlands between those two poles are simply beyond my ken. And reside in great numbers they do, otherwise cable executives would not offer fare to attract them and their implicit advertising dollars. Titillation sufficient to light up the Nielsen boxes, yet not so overt as to light up the switchboards, angry AARPers capable of finding the channel yet incapable of changing the channel. These are the same people who buy GTA for their grandchildren then write angry letters to Parade magazine demanding GameStop put a warning label on the box that's already there. As Charlie Sheen learned the hard way, hell is the impossibility of reason .
Which brings us to boobies.
A wanton society terrified of sex. How is that even possible? As if the nine billion humans currently residing on planet earth magically materialized in situ, the means of their production presenting as much a puzzle to Television America as a baby dropping out of Brooke Shields did to Christopher Atkins. Put this into that and shake. Eventually: baby. Speaking those eight words inside a public school will get you fired (assuming you work there. If not, the consequences are more colorful). Eight words that might defuse the Puritan chorea that decades after the Victorian era ended still imposes on us Victorian-era neuroses.
And so, along with "job creators" and "support the troops," we add "pornography" to the list of phrases you can substitute for "I don't want to discuss this rationally so stop talking." Call me old fashioned, but I believe before you are qualified to condemn a work as pornographic, you need to have actually seen pornography at some point. And trust me, if there's anything on cable you label pornography, there are things out there just beyond the breakers that will literally make your head a'splode. You want porn? I'll show you porn (um, actually I won't. Please don't write in asking for porn).
Epilogue
So what have we learned today? Not much. We learned the one uncensored f-bomb permitted on television is the closing credits, which Heutzutage spin by like slot machine fruit, the illegible word blur a giant middle finger to everyone who appears in them. One gets the impression SAG negotiated "credits must be shown" as part of the licensing agreement but failed to read the fine print.
We learned that if you, or a family member, or a friend, or a neighbor, or perhaps a more distant relative, or an acquaintance living in your building, or someone you briefly spoke to at Starbucks, or passed on the street, was killed or injured or inconvenienced by anything or anyone, then you may be owed a large cash settlement. This is the type of codex Justinian would have produced if he only had the business acumen of Henry Ford.
We learned you cannot shame the beast into submission, for not only is it lacking the capacity for self-examination, it also lacks shame.
Finally, we learned we're being dragged inexorably to Idiocracy, a state of affairs made all the more obvious when you only touch base with Television America every so often, for example when staying at a fancy hotel with free cable (something something frog in a saucepan slowly being brought to a boil). No, not universally. Not yet. The USA still produces some of the sharpest minds and strongest backs going. The Great Ship of Freedom still has a few powerful rowers on board. But far too many oars have been abandoned, the missing crew down in steerage drunk on bilge water and gnawing on the strakes. Seaharlots tempt them with pixellated immodesty, features aliens one day viewing footage of our ruined civilization may well misinterpret as true anatomy, much like the black and white newsreels of the Politburo once led some to conclude the USSR was literally monochromatic.
Meanwhile, the coxswain is rhythmically bashing himself in the head with a comically oversized clown hammer, replete with laugh track, calling the few remaining topside to pull for north as he points at the setting sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment